Chapter 15: The Co-Signature

I was at the bank when it opened Monday.

I'd found the papers at two in the morning, in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet.

Buckley Marina refinance. Seven years old. Dad's signature, Mom's, and mine underneath in the careful hand I had at twenty-two.

Dad had cried in the car.

He said the bank wanted somebody young with clean credit. It was only on paper. He'd take me off in a year.

Two years later he told me it was done.

I never checked.

I'd checked everything else in my life. Every shell, every invoice, every receipt since I was eighteen.

Not that.

The loan officer was a woman about my age with a cardigan over her shoulders and a framed photo of a golden retriever.

"You're still on it," she said, turning her screen toward me. "Full guarantor. The whole note."

"How much is the whole note?"

"It was a hundred and forty thousand at the refinance. In June your parents drew sixty thousand on the equity line."

"In June."

"June ninth."

Three days after my party.

"What happens if they stop paying?"

"Then the bank looks to the guarantor. You."

My house. My shop lot. My truck. Everything I'd put my name on that wasn't theirs.

"How do I get off it?"

"Normally? You don't. Not unless it's paid off or refinanced without you."

She clicked through something.

"But if the balance came down to what the marina supports alone, I could take a release to my manager."

"How far down?"

She told me.

Thirty-five thousand dollars.

It was almost all of my savings. The money I'd been putting away four years for a second firing barge.

"If I pay it, I'm off? Completely?"

"Completely. And the line closes. Nobody draws on it again."

"Do it."

"I'll need the borrowers to sign the release too."

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