Chapter 83: Four Hundred And Seventy-Five Dollars
I had $61. Sixty-one dollars in a credit union account that charged me three dollars a month for being under the minimum balance.
I want to lay the arithmetic out, because people who have never been poor think this part is a montage.
My pay at Marisol's was $13.10 an hour.
Thirty-two hours a week. That is $419.20 gross and $351 and change after withholding.
The halfway house took $110 a week for the room.
That is not rent. It is program fees. It is not negotiable, and you pay it whether or not you are working.
Parole supervision was $35 a month. The bus pass was $52 a month.
Court financial obligations — restitution, fees, a victim assessment — came out at $75 a month, automatic.
They had eleven years left to run.
I asked once whether the restitution could be reduced while I was paying program fees.
The answer was a form with a sixty-day processing time and a filing fee. I did not file it.
What was left was about $34 a week, and out of that I ate.
Thirty-four dollars is four dollars and eighty-five cents a day.
I had put aside $61 over nineteen weeks. That is three dollars and twenty-one cents a week.
Four hundred and seventy-five dollars was fifteen more weeks.
That is not counting the technician's mileage, which she said would be $0.62 a mile, and it is ninety-four miles each way.
Call it $591.
Five hundred and ninety-one dollars is seventeen weeks at thirty-four, if I ate nothing at all.
I did the sum four times on four different days and got the same answer, which is that I would have the money in early August.
August was four months away. The man in Wheeler's Gap was seventy-one years old and had a field he might sell.
I told Marisol on a Wednesday, standing at the scanner.
I did it standing up because I have never been able to sit down and ask anybody for anything.
She listened to the whole thing without a single question, which is not like her.
Then she said, “No.”
I went back to the feeder.
About forty minutes later she came out and put a piece of paper on top of the machine.
It was an advance-of-wages agreement.
She writes them for her own staff and for clients' families.
Four hundred dollars. Repaid at fifty dollars a week for eight weeks, zero interest, and a line at the bottom about what happens if I quit.
“That's not no,” I said.
“The no was to you asking me for a favour,” she said. “This isn't a favour.”
“What is it.”
“It's a loan with a term sheet. If you miss two payments I take it out of your check, and I will.”
“Why.”
Marisol has a way of answering a question by answering a different one.
“I've written bonds for nineteen years,” she said. “You know what I've never once seen?”
“No.”
“Somebody get out and go looking for the file. They go looking for the person. They go looking for a drink. Nobody goes looking for the file.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the one you're getting.”
She went back into her office and did not shut the door, which is not like her either.
I signed the advance-of-wages agreement.
Then I sat with the pen in my hand for a second longer than necessary.
I had not put my signature on a document with somebody else's name at the top of it in six years, and the last time I did, it cost me everything.
The remaining $191 came from three places.
Fifty from Theo, in an envelope he left on the counter while I was in the back, and never mentioned.
It was the kind of envelope you get from a bank. Two twenties and a ten.
Ninety-six from the only thing I own, which is a paralegal certificate's worth of usefulness.
I typed and formatted two pro se filings for men at the brother facility, at $48 each. That is legal as long as you do not advise. I did not advise.
Forty-five from the fact that I stopped taking the bus and walked.
Six weeks. Fifty-two minutes each way. In six weeks of walking I was not once late for check-in.
On the ninth of June I had $612 in the credit union.
I called Anneke Sirko from the payphone outside the pharmacy, because I did not want the office number on her caller ID.
She answered on the second ring and said her own name.
I told her I had the money and that I did not have the consent form yet.
There was a pause, and then she said the thing that told me she had done this before.
“Get the consent first,” she said. “Money's easy. People change their minds about signing.”