Claudia said. She leaned forward, gripping the polished edge of the desk. “We paid that off this spring, when I sold the movie.”
“Well, all that matters is the score they give us, sorry.”
“OK,” Jeremy said, growing impatient. “Well, what about applying for a home equity loan, then.”
Tamra laughed, a damp little snort of surprise. “Let me get this straight. You want me to lend you money to pay back the money we already lent you?” She shook her head. “Let’s be realistic here. You have no savings of note, no investments that I am aware of, and no retirement accounts. You appear to be living month-to-month, yes?” She looked up and took their stoic silence as an affirmation. “Do you own anything of value other than the house?”
Claudia looked at Jeremy. “The painting, maybe. What do you think it’s worth, twenty thousand?”
Jeremy shrank back in his seat, dodging her suggestion. “No way,” he said, answering not Claudia’s actual question but the implicit one she hadn’t spoken out loud— Would you be willing to sell it?
“Well, that wouldn’t help much anyway,” said Tamra. “You need a long-term solution. I gather from the tax returns you have here that Jeremy is the only one of you with a salaried income. Jeremy, is this a career in which you can be expecting more financial upside in the short term?”
Jeremy felt his face redden, acutely aware that he didn’t really have a proper career to be at the beginning of. It wasn’t like there was a corporate ladder in T-shirt design that he was going to be climbing: There were only six employees at BeTee—the three Hondurans who did the screen printing and shipping, the woman who handled sales, him, and Edgar, and Edgar owned the place. In the last three years Jeremy had managed two raises, so that now he was making fifty-two thousand a year instead of forty, and his title had changed from Designer to Graphics Guru, but that was more of an in-joke between him and Edgar than a real promotion. As a day job it was bearable—and he certainly appreciated how easy it was—but it definitely was not something he considered a career. The career was his music, although the band was still stuck on song seven of their album, Daniel hadn’t written new lyrics in a month, and Jeremy was starting to get concerned about the effect that their drummer’s cocaine habit was having on their practice schedule.
“Not exactly, no,” he said. He hated Tamra, his own age but somehow not his peer at all, with her expensive shoes and her computer spreadsheets and her long-term asset management plans. He hated that they had to sit here at all, at this woman’s mercy. How had he ended up here?
Really, if you wanted to get nitpicky about it, the house had never been his idea in the first place. When Claudia first proposed the idea, a week after their wedding, he was horrified by the thought of mortgage payments and home repair and insurance. He had never really considered it— real estate —before; it had never seemed like something that fit his life. The places he’d lived when he was growing up had felt less like permanently fixed positions than temporary landing pads from which he and Jillian could launch a fresh assault on the world. There had been ashram stays in India and artists’ retreats in San Miguel de Allende and New Age therapy conferences in Taos and a two-year stint in a student apartment in Davis while his mother finished her PhD in psychology, but there hadn’t been anything resembling a long-term living situation until they settled into a rental bungalow in Venice during Jeremy’s high school years (Jillian’s only concession to “normalcy” for her son). And even that bungalow always felt uninhabited, with packing boxes that remained piled in the corners for years after they moved in. A house wasn’t a value for Jillian; it was, simply, a necessity. Shelter, pure and simple.
Jeremy—a perpetual renter and couch surfer—had
“Well, all that matters is the score they give us, sorry.”
“OK,” Jeremy said, growing impatient. “Well, what about applying for a home equity loan, then.”
Tamra laughed, a damp little snort of surprise. “Let me get this straight. You want me to lend you money to pay back the money we already lent you?” She shook her head. “Let’s be realistic here. You have no savings of note, no investments that I am aware of, and no retirement accounts. You appear to be living month-to-month, yes?” She looked up and took their stoic silence as an affirmation. “Do you own anything of value other than the house?”
Claudia looked at Jeremy. “The painting, maybe. What do you think it’s worth, twenty thousand?”
Jeremy shrank back in his seat, dodging her suggestion. “No way,” he said, answering not Claudia’s actual question but the implicit one she hadn’t spoken out loud— Would you be willing to sell it?
“Well, that wouldn’t help much anyway,” said Tamra. “You need a long-term solution. I gather from the tax returns you have here that Jeremy is the only one of you with a salaried income. Jeremy, is this a career in which you can be expecting more financial upside in the short term?”
Jeremy felt his face redden, acutely aware that he didn’t really have a proper career to be at the beginning of. It wasn’t like there was a corporate ladder in T-shirt design that he was going to be climbing: There were only six employees at BeTee—the three Hondurans who did the screen printing and shipping, the woman who handled sales, him, and Edgar, and Edgar owned the place. In the last three years Jeremy had managed two raises, so that now he was making fifty-two thousand a year instead of forty, and his title had changed from Designer to Graphics Guru, but that was more of an in-joke between him and Edgar than a real promotion. As a day job it was bearable—and he certainly appreciated how easy it was—but it definitely was not something he considered a career. The career was his music, although the band was still stuck on song seven of their album, Daniel hadn’t written new lyrics in a month, and Jeremy was starting to get concerned about the effect that their drummer’s cocaine habit was having on their practice schedule.
“Not exactly, no,” he said. He hated Tamra, his own age but somehow not his peer at all, with her expensive shoes and her computer spreadsheets and her long-term asset management plans. He hated that they had to sit here at all, at this woman’s mercy. How had he ended up here?
Really, if you wanted to get nitpicky about it, the house had never been his idea in the first place. When Claudia first proposed the idea, a week after their wedding, he was horrified by the thought of mortgage payments and home repair and insurance. He had never really considered it— real estate —before; it had never seemed like something that fit his life. The places he’d lived when he was growing up had felt less like permanently fixed positions than temporary landing pads from which he and Jillian could launch a fresh assault on the world. There had been ashram stays in India and artists’ retreats in San Miguel de Allende and New Age therapy conferences in Taos and a two-year stint in a student apartment in Davis while his mother finished her PhD in psychology, but there hadn’t been anything resembling a long-term living situation until they settled into a rental bungalow in Venice during Jeremy’s high school years (Jillian’s only concession to “normalcy” for her son). And even that bungalow always felt uninhabited, with packing boxes that remained piled in the corners for years after they moved in. A house wasn’t a value for Jillian; it was, simply, a necessity. Shelter, pure and simple.
Jeremy—a perpetual renter and couch surfer—had
Similar Books
