Chapter 9: The Block

By Wednesday night there were twenty-two people in my father's kitchen.

I had a card table, a legal pad and six folders.

Each folder held one household's note, its payment record, and the page where Lyle Brockway's fees had stopped matching his own paragraph nine.

"Here's how this works," I said.

"Nobody speaks for anybody else. You tell me your number, and I tell you what the paper says."

"What if it says we owe him?" asked a man in a SEPTA jacket.

"Then you owe him that, and not a penny of the rest."

I went down the table.

The family across the street had been charged compound interest on a simple note.

A widow on the corner had paid a "processing fee" four times for one payment.

A young couple at the end had signed a paper with a blank in it, and Brockway had filled the blank with the garage.

Every number was wrong, and every one was wrong in the same direction.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"That son of a bitch," said the woman from next door, softly.

Someone else started to cry.

My father stood behind me, hands on the back of my chair.

He didn't say a word, but I could feel him there.

Sebastian stood at the back of the room by the stove, in his coat, with a plate of my father's cookies he hadn't touched.

I had asked him not to speak.

"If you pay it," I had said, in the car, "he wins twice."

"They'll thank you instead of the people who did the work. He'll say a rich man bought us off."

"I know."

"So don't."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were holding your checkbook."

"I was holding a pen," he'd said. "It's different."

He hadn't said anything since.

He only watched, and when my voice got hoarse, he handed my father a glass of water to pass to me.

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