This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown Page B

matters; he knew that much.
    Tamra raised her hands and faced her palms to them, halting the torrent of abuse in its tracks. Her hands were soft and pink and plump. “I’m not gloating. I know you want to blame me, as the face of this institution, but it’s nothing I can control. It’s not that I’m unwilling—I would help if I could. But my hands are tied. I feed the numbers into the computer, and it tells me what I can and can’t do.” She looked tired, all of a sudden, and Jeremy could see ghostly traces of puffiness under her eyes, not quite masked by a layer of flesh-tone makeup. “It’s just the reality of the mortgage industry right now. It’s not like it used to be. Money is tight.”
    Claudia fell back in her seat, the anger dissipating as quickly as it came. She folded her arms tightly against her chest. “OK. Well, this is our reality,” she said, in a voice of glum resignation. “We don’t have enough cash on hand to cover the mortgage this month. Or next month. Not to mention the two back payments we already owe. So what happens next?”
    “What happens next is foreclosure proceedings, Mrs. Munger.” Tamra snapped her binder shut with a brisk finality. It was beginning to dawn on Jeremy that their situation was fairly simple after all: They needed more money, and they didn’t have any. Unless Tamra miraculously decided to write them a personal check, he couldn’t see how this meeting could ever have had have a positive outcome. They should never have come.
    He gripped Claudia’s knee harder, keeping her pressed against her seat. He could feel her straining under his hand with the impulse to flee this place as quickly as possible. But he wanted to give it one last shot, his best effort at being the family problem solver, the savior, the husband.
    “Tamra,” he began, putting every ounce of sincerity and solemnity he could muster into those two syllables. He fixed his eyes on the banker’s with mute promise—of what, he wasn’t sure. “Tamra, is there anything we can do in this situation? Anything at all?”
    Tamra stood up, smoothing the black skirt down over her hips. She glanced at the bank’s sign-in area, where a collection of sullen couples was seated on red vinyl divans, awaiting their turn with her. She proffered a stiff hand toward them, let it hang there in the air, unclaimed, as Jeremy and Claudia obediently rose from their seats. “My suggestion?” she said. “Get a better job.”
    They drove home in silence, Jeremy behind the wheel of the Jetta, Claudia sitting stiffly beside him, flipping back and forth through her notebook. She made little strangling noises under her breath, noises that Jeremy suspected were intended as an opening for him to ask what she was thinking. He glanced over to see her staring at her little apocalyptic jottings— stable income! —and flipped on the radio, as if this might somehow ward off the horror of those two words. The station was in the middle of a subscriber drive, and the DJs swapped banal platitudes about the joys of supporting public radio; but even this was preferable to the painful conversation that he feared would otherwise fill the void.
    As they pulled onto the highway, he had the thought that sometimes struck him on occasions like this: What Would Aoki Think? Aoki, his own personal Jesus, an omniscient and certainly vengeful God, was always in the wings waiting to smite Jeremy with her unsolicited opinion. Even now, as he tried to dispel the memory of Tamra’s lecture about the necessity of income management and a long-term savings plan, he could envision Aoki’s disembodied moon face, her asymmetrical black bob whipping across her cheeks, getting stuck in her fuchsia lipstick, as she shook her head in dismay. No no no no . He hadn’t actually seen Aoki in nearly four years, not since the day he went to retrieve his guitar from her studio and found she’d hacked it into twenty pieces, painted it Pepto-Bismol pink, and then