Dirty Little Secrets

Sliding one finger under the envelope flap, I allowed myself a spark of excitement. There might be enough in here to really make a difference. I could get the car fixed and get my license so I wouldn’t have to rely on other people to get everywhere. Maybe I’d buy a new car instead—one that didn’t remind me of Mom every time I sat in the driver’s seat. One that would take me as far as I wanted to go.

I ripped the envelope all the way open and took out the papers that were inside. Ever since I started earning my own money, I’d been getting bank statements, so I knew one when I saw one. And this wasn’t one. It was from a credit card company. There were pages and pages of charges, and on the first page in big black letters was one of the largest numbers I’d seen in real life. I looked up at the date in the corner of the page. This statement was from six months ago, but even then Mom owed $48,562 to this credit card. With all of the Christmas stuff she’d bought last month, I was sure the total was now a lot higher. I frantically pawed through the envelopes from all the other banks. The next bill I opened was newer and had another huge number in the corner. The next showed a balance of only $9,867. In the space of just a few seconds, $9,867 had started to feel like “only.”

The handle of her purse was sticking up beside the recliner. Mom always kept it in the same spot so it wouldn’t get swallowed up in the tide of garbage. The panic was rising as I reached into it and pulled out her wallet. It was the same worn brown leather wallet she’d carried since I could remember, bulging at the sides, with scraps of paper receipts sticking out the top. Carefully, I opened the snap and looked inside. The slots were filled with credit cards—some were grocery cards or insurance cards, and one was a library card, but most of them were credit cards. As I pulled them out, I examined the expiration dates—it would be just like Mom to carry around a lifetime’s worth of expired credit cards—but all of these were current.

There were two cards with airplanes on the front, one with a panda bear, a Macy’s, a Target, and one from a store I’d never even heard of. When her wallet was empty, there were twelve credit cards sitting in front of me. All of a sudden, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

The mountains of stuff seemed to vibrate as I shifted my glance from one pile to the next. I thought about the ice-skating lessons I wasn’t allowed to take because they were too expensive, and the week at the lake that turned into three days at a Motel 6 in Modesto because it was a lot cheaper. The scholarships and grants I was chasing because there wasn’t enough money to go to a good university without a lot of help. And this is where it had all ended up. Not in trips to the beach, or a remodeled kitchen. It had ended in late-night home-shopping bargains on stuff we’d never use and gifts for people she would never give. That pile of plastic had fueled this pile of worthless garbage. Instead of seeing just piles of clothes and junk, I realized for the first time how much money must have been involved in amassing this much stuff. How much had she spent on things, only to have them sit in a pile for months and years? Whenever I bought a new book, Mom would remind me that there was a library in town, and libraries were free. Thank God I had Dad’s money, because Mom’s was only for stuff that was important to her. Apparently, that included useless countertop mixers, but did not include me.

My stomach was in knots as I thought of having to pay it all back. What if being dead meant that you weren’t off the hook? It would take years—decades, probably—to pay back all the money she owed. There was no way I could afford to go to a good school now. If I was lucky, I might have time for junior college between jobs, if I had to help pay all that money back. Josh and Kaylie would go off to freshman year at UC Berkeley or Stanford and I’d be . . . where exactly? Where would I be?

I grabbed each stack of credit card bills and flung them across the room, as if getting rid of the evidence would make the problem go away. My jaw clenched as I reached for an armload of newspapers and threw them into the middle of the room, only to have them settle on the piles like a small dusting of snow on a glacier. A scream rose from the back of my throat as I lunged toward a stack of books and newspapers next to her chair and brought them crashing down with a vibration so strong the walls shook. I grabbed anything I could reach, enjoying the thud as whatever it was hit the wall and bounced back into the room. The sharp sound of the vase breaking against the brick fireplace was still ringing in my ears when I noticed a small trickle of blood from a tiny gash in the side of my hand. Staring at the smear of red that ran from the cut, I wiped it with my other hand until it started to sting. The pain had a weird calming effect and I doubled over, breathing heavily like I’d been sprinting.