“I’m hungry,” she announced to the room.
One of the nurses picked up the telephone; the other got suddenly busy with paperwork. Steve flipped a page in the chart as if he hadn’t heard.
“Oh, come on, just a dollar for some chips,” she said. “I promise I’ll pay you back.”
“If that was true, I’d be a rich man,” Steve said.
“You’ll be a rich man soon enough,” Maya said. “Then we’ll marry, and every night you’ll come home to a freshly ordered-in meal.”
“Quick reminder that I’m gay. Also, I’m not supporting your junkie habit.”
She pouted in an obvious way, but he was immune.
He put the chart down, walked over, leaned against the wall, scrunching his shoulders to minimize the height gap. A patient was being rolled by. He waited until they passed, pushed his bangs back. “How’d it go at the bank?”
“Oh, fantastic.” She pulled a lip balm out of her back pocket and applied it. “An absolute party.”
In truth, her meeting with the loan officer had been more uncomfortable than she’d expected. Despite having an appointment, she’d had to wait in the lobby for half an hour watching a nature show play silently on the flat-screen, a hermit crab vulnerable without its shell scuttling across the exposure of beach toward some elusive shelter. She’d wrapped her arms around her stomach, smiled at the woman next to her. “They should serve cocktails and play a movie. If this was a flight, we’d be halfway to Los Angeles by now.”
The woman didn’t respond, and suddenly Maya wished she’d brought someone with her, someone more competent who could speak on her behalf, or at the very least make her laugh while she waited. She remembered that time Hannah had accompanied her on her first trip to the gynecologist when they were both sixteen. That was right around the age Maya started having sex, and Hannah suggested the appointment, then invited herself along. It was what her friends did. They occupied the space where a parent would be. It was never talked about, it just was—ever since the day Maya’s mother had called her a good-for-nothing piece of garbage in front of her friends because she’d accidentally tracked mud onto the kitchen floor. Maya hadn’t even flinched at the words, inadvertently telegraphing how often she heard them. That was when her friends knew how alone Maya really was.
There was so much a girl didn’t know about the world when she didn’t have a mother to teach her. How had her friends, so young themselves then, intuited this? Perhaps because they, too, were motherless in their own ways. All of them helping one another to fill the gaps. She wondered if that had been the original draw between them. Had they subconsciously sussed out one another’s orphan needs? You find what you know—isn’t that the theory? Either way, Hannah had taken Maya to Dr. Sheridan, the two of them giggling so hard at the absurdity of the stirrups and the cold cruelty of the clamp that she forgot to feel the pain.
How much she’d taken those friendships for granted. No one told her how much harder it was in adulthood to build a family out of nothing. How unmoored a person could be without those connections. But then, who would have?
It wasn’t that Maya didn’t have friends—she had plenty of them. But not like those ones. Not people who’d been the building blocks of her entire personality, who shaped her heart, made themselves her home. Not friends who would drop everything if she needed them, would accompany her to an icky appointment, be the grown-up when she didn’t know how to be. They used to be her net. Now, in adulthood, with both Hannah and Blue in different cities and Renee who knows where, she was being asked to be her own net. It sucked.
Maya had considered mentioning this to the random lady sitting next to her at the bank when a man in a suit introduced himself as Donald and summoned her into an office.
“So,” he said, taking a seat behind his large desk. “How can I help you?”
Maya stammered, tried to be charming, to find warmth in the person sitting across from her. If she couldn’t get this loan, she would lose her house. And though she never liked it much—a dinky one-bedroom shack in a less-than-safe New Jersey neighborhood—it was also the only security she’d ever been given by her mother. Her mother had left her with no life lessons, no wisdom, no basic tools of living, but she’d left her enough money to buy that place, and she needed to keep it. It was the only stability she had.
The problem was she couldn’t keep up with the property taxes. She hadn’t even bothered to open the bills after the first one. Somehow she’d convinced herself no one would notice. What else could she do? She didn’t have the money. That was another thing that screwed you when your parents sucked—no one taught you things like money management. And when you don’t get taught money management or self-soothing, well...it could be a bad combination for your bank account. She knew it was a problem, but once in a financial hole, fixing it was a whole other level of difficulty.
The loan manager had nodded patiently, then smiled that well-practiced, placating smile. “Let me pull up your account,” he said.
He tapped at his keyboard, peered at his screen, leaving her to stare at the bone-colored walls, a set of framed awards, a series of pamphlets about credit cards and business accounts and money markets. The minutes swelled into tiny lifetimes. The room felt refrigerated and she, pink and raw inside it, a chilled shrimp.
“So, I’m looking at your credit score, and it’s just... It’s going to be hard to get you approved. Is there someone who can cosign? A parent? Or relative?”
Maya shook her head, swallowed on something hard.
“Okay. See, normally I would suggest a home equity loan, but I have to be honest... With your FICO score that’s going to be tough. My advice really would be to try to clean up your credit. You have a lot of credit cards, a lot of credit card debt... If you bring that down, pay some of that off, you can—”
“Wait, how can I pay off debts if I... I mean, that’s the whole reason for the loan. If I could pay off the old debts, I wouldn’t need to—”
“Or you can develop a history of on-time payments. We just have to get your score up, because—”
Maya pushed against the threat of tears. “But I don’t... I need this money now! Like right now. I don’t have time to...to...to develop a history. I’ll lose my house! Do you understand?” Her voice was rising, her grip on calm slipping.
“I do. I do understand. I’m sorry, but I can’t just... See, we have rules for...”
A wide abyss blossomed inside her, a dark internal bleed.
“I have a job now,” she heard herself say. “I’ll probably be getting a raise very soon.” A lie, but whatever. “All of the bad credit was from before. Look, I just need a few months. I need to keep this house. I... I don’t have anywhere to go.”