Once I rode in the passenger seat of a boy’s car out on Vinland Street in Oshkosh. He wanted me to see the speedometer tick past one hundred miles per hour, and it did. Another time, on the way home from my freshman year at the University of Colorado, driving across Nebraska late at night, I began to weave across the centerline. A friendly police officer issued me a ticket for reckless driving. As I recall, it was cheap to pay off, something like thirty-seven dollars, but, of course, a child wasn’t paralyzed with fear in my back seat as her caretaker yanked on my leg from shotgun, screaming, “Stop, please God, stop the car!”
Ryan and I found our refuge, across town, in a new school district, a stone’s throw from my childhood home, a house with four official bedrooms and plenty of space to bunk. As Ryan and I meandered through the house separately, we were speaking in synchronicity. The end of summer was upon us.
“This is it,” I said.
“We’re making an offer,” he said.
Old maple trees and wild buckthorn circled the lot, a protective barrier, Mother Nature’s blinders. “The only kinds of criminals out here,” our realtor said, “are the ones living in your own house,” which we took to mean skeletons in closets—things like drug addiction and abuse, middle-class secrets—rarely if ever sprung loose or publicly vetted in courts of law. Bourgeois crime was just as ugly but less visible, we realized, so many of us retreating to houses in the suburbs with plenty of room to hide. At least when we moved, we’d leave the scenery behind: the Carriage House, hot spot for “domestics” and infested with cocaine; the BP, where confidential informants orchestrated drug deals; the condemned houses, among them Tina Last’s, where porches sagged like old, rotten jowls; and the police strobes and sirens, ever present, like bombs threatening explosion, suspended from the sky. We made an offer on the new house, and the offer was accepted. In a series of phone calls and a tension-riddled meeting with the superintendent of Oshkosh Area School District, we secured approval for our children to attend new schools until we officially moved.
The only roadblock we failed to anticipate was our mortgage broker’s incompetency. For reasons we’d never fathom, he missed appraisal deadlines and failed to submit paperwork to the appraisal management company. With his broken ankle, Ryan was gaining weight again. We’d spent every penny to pump up our credit score, depleted after a full decade of just scraping by, to secure the loan, and now Ryan found he’d entrusted himself to the hands of a charlatan.
A few nights before the move—our belongings boxed up, kids sleeping on the floor, as we’d dismantled their beds—I floated in and out of dreams, skimming the surface of rest. Our old house rocked and swayed in bad weather, and I wondered if the wind had whistled me awake. The sonorous whimpering was almost melodic, like an old lady humming, but I could faintly discern that somebody was weeping. I rolled from bed, accustomed to children calling from distant, nightmarish places. Standing near the top of the steps, I followed the noise downstairs. I plodded slowly, unsure, afraid of what—or whom—I’d find, even though I wanted to be heroic. We say the heart breaks, and mine did. Ryan was sobbing from his bowels, strewn across the sofa, beyond comfort, awash in his own saltwater.
“How could I be so stupid?” The act of cradling a lover twice your size is physically hopeless, but I think I rocked him anyway, desperate to be mother and wife in the same soothing motions. “We’re going to end up homeless,” he wept over and over, his voice stuck inside the grooves of this mournful refrain. He was petrified.
“He promised we were approved,” Ryan said. Every assurance was part of the mortgage broker’s ruse. Although I tried to reassure Ryan, his premonitions were confirmed the following day. It was the Tuesday before Halloween. Our broker waltzed into Ryan’s office, as he too worked in the First National Bank Building, and said, “It’s just not going to happen, buddy. You’re not going to close on Friday.” He didn’t know when—or if—things would work out, never mind the family of four scheduled to replace us on Hazel Street in three days.
“What do you want me to tell my family?” Ryan yelled at him, and therein began just another upheaval of our lives. Ryan and I camped out in his office, calling around the world for solutions. We had relied on our broker’s promises, his seemingly genuine representations of professionalism, and his pledge of loyalty.
We moved our five children, and our stuff, temporarily into Ryan’s parents’ basement, grateful but shocked by their invitation, as paid babysitters—college students, poor like us—almost exclusively comprised our support network. Ryan and I amended our offer to purchase, requesting another thirty days and a shot at securing the new loan. Fortunately, the sellers agreed. With the help of a community bank, we ultimately managed to save the deal after weeks of uncertainty and precariousness. The kids cried a lot, worried they’d be ripped from their current schools midstream. The pressure to afford a bigger house, after the patchwork effort to pay off debt and make a down payment—with newly earned and borrowed monies—was colossal, added to the weight of the broker’s ineptitude.
The loan was on a five-year adjustable rate mortgage, followed by a balloon payment. Basically, this was what Ryan called a “prove yourself loan,” or a PYL. We’d need to demonstrate financial stability. We reasoned, with only one child still in childcare, and that financial burden being lifted for the first time in thirteen years when Gustav started kindergarten, we might, maybe, be able to pull it off.
