CHEQUES & BALANCES

I dread looking at any sort of statement. I have this sort of Karmic method of accounting; a mental ledger of how much I’m spending, a little like guessing the time. Bills are usually left un-open until I’ve made a payment on them. I go for weeks without looking at my bank balance – avoid ATM slips, procrastinate accessing my account online. I don’t need to look; I already know what they have to say. You’re broke.
This was the first month in over a year I paid my rent without going into over-draft protection. I still managed to spend some of that over-draft protection nonetheless. The eve of rent, I went online to see just how much over I had gone and was pleasantly surprised by not only my finances, but also my line of credit. The powers that be, the bank, Visa … The Man, had given me another thousand dollars on my credit card. I thought I was hallucinating, as I always do whenever good things happen. I called the bank this afternoon and sure enough, it was real – I could spend a thousand dollars if I so chose.
To a poor sap like me, a thousand bucks is a big deal. Things you want and need suddenly do the Can-Can across your eyes: DVDs, CDs, stereos, computer upgrades, Ikea, clothes, porn, books, visits to the vet, current I.D., socks and underwear. And then you remember you can barely afford a credit card payment as it is. There are things that can wait, that I can still afford to pay for with cash, if I remember to do it. And then there are those things that can’t wait.
If I’m not agonizing over my finances, I’m agonizing over going home to visit my mother. It’s been over a year since my last visit, a short one with a wedding in the middle of it. My mother has been hounding me to come back since. “Any time you want to come home, the door is always open,” she’ll say in her broken English, while I nod, unbeknownst to her.
“I’ll come home as soon as I can afford it,” I’ll tell her, knowing full well she’ll front the fare. All I would have to do is ask, but I can’t – couldn’t. She would have to offer. Not out of piety, but propriety. She paid for my last visit home, and I was sworn to secrecy by the power of attorney – my sister, Olive. My mother’s finances are carefully guarded; if I get a plane ticket, everyone will want one, or so our father led us to believe. Those extra thousand bucks is my plane ticket home. All the same, I was willing to put the trip off until the New Year.
The thing about the Karmic method of accounting is that when the balances are in your favour, you are presented with something you’ve been putting off, something that needs to be addressed. That is why not long after I confirmed the extended line of credit, I got an email from my sister telling me my mother had consented to going into a retirement home and the house I grew up in was going to be sold, as soon as December.
This is something I’ve had plenty of time to prepare for. My last visit home Olive said it was time. Olive doesn’t smoke, but she has the intensity of some who does.” There just aren’t enough hands to do the job,” she explained on the way to Pizza Hut. “Mom needs the kind of twenty-four hour care only a health-care professional can offer. As it is now she’s constantly being bussed around town to get fed, bathed, and sleep. She hates all the running around and she’s afraid to be in the house alone. But she drives out anyone who tries living with her in the house.”
“So what’s stopping you?”
“Hoss,” Olive grunted.
Hoss is my oldest brother. Since my father passed away five years ago, he’s been acting like the family patriarch. His attempts have been met with stone faces and clenched fists. The house is, and always has been a bone of contention with my brother. He feels he deserves it. Since Dad died, he’s been using the garage as storage space for all his unfinished “Projects.” Our father’s once pristine garage, with row upon row of garden tool, shovels, and lawns chairs is crammed so tight with twisted metal objects and broken engines, you can’t even get a car in it.
“He won’t let go of that house,” Olive explained. “The house is falling apart. It’s crying out for a young family to move in and fix it up. It needs a new life, like the one we started when we moved there from Portugal.”
Like my bills, I thought I had more time. Hoss and my sisters have been at a stalemate for months over my mother – it had the potential to go on for years or at least until she died, which is probably what Hoss was counting on. My sister Laura’s email threw me for a loop. “We put our foot down,” she wrote. “And he crumbled.”
I scoured my mental chequebook. When was the soonest I could possibly go? Was there time to come home for Christmas? Maybe we could have one last cathartic Christmas dinner in the house we grew up in, like the Thanksgiving dinner we had before my father died. I called Laura to bounce my ideas off her.
“Olive says she might be able to get her into a home by the twentieth of this month,” she said.
“Wow!”
“This has been in the works for a while now.”
“I know. I just wanted to see the old house – be inside the old house – one more time.”
“The estate says that as long as mom isn’t living there, the house and everything in it goes up for sale. You know Dad, a Libra until the end; he didn’t want anyone getting that house but mom.”
“That house won’t last a minute on the market.”
“There’s still escrow to consider. We’ll put in a few conditions. Don’t worry, there’s still time.”
Money and time: Between the two I don’t know which I hate more and have less of.


GarpinBC