I’d like to tell you it all ended in that conference room. It didn’t. Things like this rarely do. What came after was a long, hard, necessary year.
My money came back that same evening. I was on the couch with Owen asleep against my side when my phone buzzed at 6:42 p.m. Incoming wire: Alston & Greer IOLTA Trust Account. $94,000.00.
I stared at that number for a very long time. Then I moved it into a new savings account with a new account number, at a different branch, with a password nobody in my family had ever heard me say.
The seller of the house on Dogwood Court put it back on the market. Because the loan had fallen through under the financing contingency, the seller’s attorney released the $4,000 earnest money deposit back to my mother. It was the only money in the whole deal that had actually been hers. She told me later she’d been saving it for two years in a coffee can.
My mother couldn’t take back her notice on the Smyrna apartment. The landlord had already rented it out. So she moved in with her sister, my Aunt Darlene, in Kennesaw, into a spare room with a flowered bedspread.
Darlene told me later that my mother cried every night for a month. Then one night she stopped.
She got a job at a church daycare for thirteen dollars an hour. She called me in a thin, surprised voice to tell me the toddlers liked her. “They don’t care what I drive,” she said. “They just want somebody to read to them.”
Her credit score fell from 668 to 590 when I removed her as an authorized user. She cried about that too. Then she sat down with Marguerite Okafor at the nonprofit credit counseling agency, and they pulled her credit report line by line.
Marguerite found two collection accounts she’d never told anyone about: a $2,340 medical bill from a 2019 emergency room visit, and a $612 phone bill from an old carrier. Marguerite helped her set up payment plans with both collection agencies. She helped her open a secured credit card with a $300 deposit, a card in her own name, tied to her own money.
I wasn’t in the room for those sessions. I’m told they were hard. I’m told that at the third session, my mother brought a shoebox full of receipts and wept for twenty minutes before she could open it.
By December she had a budget. She had a little green ledger, written in her own round handwriting, with every dollar accounted for.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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