Falling for June: A Novel (2 page)

The way I saw it, I was helping people. And it wasn’t just win-win, either, it was triple-win all the way: the banks didn’t have to go to court to foreclose, the homeowners walked away with a little dough, and most importantly, I got paid. Before long my closing ratio was the highest in the company, my payout average the lowest, and I was training new foreclosure counselors and cherry-picking my own cases. Things were good for me, even though I was still a long way from Miami.

The housing crisis dragged on longer than anyone could have imagined, and business was booming because of it. I moved into a nicer apartment, bought better suits, and taped that old condo clipping from the glossy pages of
Penthouses in Paradise
magazine to my shaving mirror.

By the eve of my thirty-third birthday, my dream was about to become a reality. I had a mortgage preapproval in hand; I had a promise of a job from my employer’s sister company in Florida; and I had a Realtor in Miami scouring South Beach foreclosures for just the right condo. It was a good day to be turning thirty-three. It also just happened to be the day that David Hadley’s letter landed on my desk.

I only opened it myself on account of the stamps. It was addressed to Mr. Ralph Spitzer, as was all the mail that made it to my department, and it was posted with forty-nine carefully placed one-cent stamps. I had no idea they even offered those still. But maybe they don’t; they could have been old, now that I think about it. Anyway, the stamps had bright red birds on them, and an entire flock stared at me from both sides of the envelope. There was hardly any room at all for the address and it was so heavy with all those stamps I was surprised it even got delivered without more postage, although there would have been nowhere to put the additional stamps.

I opened the envelope and withdrew a single sheet of ruled yellow paper, neatly folded and covered on both sides with shaky handwritten script. I’ll spare you the struggle of reading it by retyping the letter here:

Dear Mr. Ralph Spitzer:

Your name reminds me of a man on CNN. I hope it isn’t you. Sometimes I watch cable news and I think if there is a God, He or She should tip this whole world like a dinner plate and send us tumbling off of it like so many
useless crumbs into space. I just don’t see the point. But then I think about my wife, June, and I remember her saying that maybe there is no point to anything except falling pointlessly in love. Of course, she said it just before she jumped off of a
seventy-six-story building, which at the time had me questioning her sanity. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t right.

My name is David Hadley, although you probably know me as Case Number 524-331, or perhaps as 772½ Whispering Willow Lane, Darrington, WA 98241. I never have been quite sure where the ½ in the address comes from—especially since the property is just north of forty-two acres—but the postman never seems able to find us without it so I always make sure to point it out. Actually, I should probably get used to saying postwoman now, since our new one is a lady. But that’s neither here nor there, and then the address doesn’t tell you much about this place anyway. What’s important for you to know is that less than two hours’ drive northeast from Seattle, in a valley at the base of Whitehorse Mountain, 772 and ½ are the numbers on the mailbox at the entrance to Echo Glen. Now, I’ll admit the mailbox is rusted, and the wooden gate it’s attached to is half-rotted and leaning worse than the house or even the barns, but I swear to you and to postwomen everywhere that you ought to be able to send mail here simply by addressing it to the Center of the Universe, which it is. Or at least it was for June and still is for me.

I’m writing to take you up on your offer to discuss my options before you foreclose. Please come by anytime. But don’t come before
Good Morning America
is over in the morning. And don’t come after
Jeopardy!
starts at four. Maybe come late morning if you can. I seem to have
more energy then anyway. And besides, there’s nothing on television at that time except cable news.

Sincerely,

David Hadley

After reading the letter, I looked up Mr. Hadley’s loan in our system, but there was nothing unique about it. Plus, to tell you the truth, being that far out in the country, it wasn’t a huge loan by Seattle standards and the potential commission wasn’t enough to get me excited—especially not on the eve of my birthday.

I keyed the correspondence into the computer, stamped the letter
RECEIVED
, and tossed it in the bin to be assigned to a more junior foreclosure counselor. Done and done, on to other things. My intention was to never think of it again. But, as I’ve since found, sometimes fate has plans of its own.

2

B
ECAUSE I SPENT
most days out in the field making pre-foreclosure house calls, or “sits,” as we called them in the biz, it was my habit to catch up on paperwork by spending evenings in the office. Most nights I stayed until the janitors showed up. Then I’d head to the corner bar near my apartment. The bar is called Finnegans, with no apostrophe, although I never knew why. It isn’t even an Irish place at all. Estrella thinks it was named for the writer James Joyce. But I haven’t told you about her yet, have I?

This particular night, I sat at the bar dividing my attention between the television and the clock on the wall beside it. As soon as the clock struck midnight, I waved Estrella over and asked her for a glass of their best cabernet. She spells her name with an R and two Ls, but it’s pronounced es-TRAY-yah. It’s a cool name. It means “star of heaven” or something in Spanish. She didn’t tell me all that; I looked it up.

“I need to see your ID,” she said.

“
Really
?
” I asked her. I’m italicizing it because I said it really cheekily. “I only come in here for dinner all the time.”

“Yeah, so what?” she said, flashing me an equally cheeky smile. “You always drink club soda and lime.”

She was just messing with me, I knew she was, but I could
tell that she wasn’t going to let up so I pulled out my wallet.

“You’re probably just trying to get my address,” I said.

She took my license but she didn’t look at it right away. Instead, she kind of held it for ransom against my attention and hooked a hand on her hip and smirked at me. She did it cutely, of course, but it was still a smirk.

“You wish, mister,” she said.

She’s younger than I am, but not by enough to be calling me mister.

“But I am wondering why you haven’t asked me out yet,” she added, getting suddenly shy, or at least pretending to. I know she blushed for sure; I saw it. Anyway, then she looked down at the bar and coyly said, “You’ve been coming in here for almost a year, and it can’t be for the food.”

“I like the atmosphere,” I replied, making a big show of shrugging nonchalantly as I looked all around the bar. It really did have a good vibe, this place. But I knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear, and it wasn’t really the truth either. I was just stringing her along a little. “And I like you too,” I added after what felt like a long enough pause. “I like you a lot.”

“You do? Then why haven’t you asked me out?”

I knew she wouldn’t understand this next part, but it was true. “Because I only ask out girls I don’t like,” I said.

When she heard that she let her hand fall off her hip in a cute but defeated gesture, and she bit her lower lip a little. She was always doing that, biting her lower lip. Usually when she was carrying a tray or something. Sometimes, after serving my meal, she’d linger awhile and watch the baseball game on TV with me, maybe just for a few minutes, but she’d bite her lip then too. And if our team was at bat, she had this nervous way of twisting up a strand of her hair in her fingers as she watched. It really was cute.

“So, you only ask out the girls you don’t like,” she said.
“Well, that doesn’t make one ounce of sense, even for a man, does it?”

I’ve noticed that women are always saying things that sound like questions even though they’re not questions at all. Why is that? I suspect it’s because they know they’re right but don’t want to hit us men over the head with it, since it happens so often.

But anyway, in this case she was wrong.

“It makes plenty of sense,” I said. “And I’ll tell you why. Love is fun at the beginning, but it always bites you in the end.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I must not have known that you were such an expert about the immutable nature of love.”

“
Immutable
?
” I asked, raising a brow.

“It was the word of the day on my vocabulary app.”

“Well, my point is if I asked you out we’d have a great time, I’m sure of it. For a while anyway. Then we’d get bored with one another, and one of us, most likely you, would move on. And then I’d be all tore up and brokenhearted and where would I go for my dinner? I couldn’t come here any longer after that. And as I said, I really like this place.”

I couldn’t tell if she looked disappointed or just amused.

“There are only like three other bars that serve food on this block,” she said.

I didn’t dare tell her, of course, that I couldn’t eat in most of those bars for the very reason I had just spelled out. I didn’t tell her because while I might have taken to heart my father’s sage warnings about love, I also remembered his stern advice about being a gentleman and all. Plus, the declining state of my local dining options wasn’t really the point, because although I did like the place a lot, I liked her a lot more.

“And besides,” she added, “your little hypothetical scenario assumes I’d say yes if you did ask me out.”

We had kind of flirted before, but nothing this direct. Now
she was biting her lip, which drove me crazy, and coiling her hair, which made me feel like I was one of those ballplayers up at bat.

“Wouldn’t you?” I tossed out—meaning
Say yes
, of course. And as I asked it, I laid on her what I considered to be my most charming smile yet.

It was dim in the bar, but I swore I saw her blush again.

“Maybe,” she said, holding my stare for a beat. Then just like that the moment passed and she released her lower lip and let her hair fall. “But then you’re moving to Miami anyway. At least that’s what you keep saying.”

“See,” I said, “love is already turning on us.”

“Hey, it’s your birthday!” she exclaimed, finally looking at my license. “Why didn’t you say so? No one should drink alone on his birthday.”

What is it about people and birthdays, anyway? It’s just another day, really. But she had hardly handed me back my license and she was gone. She came back with the glass of wine I had asked for and two shots of Jack Daniel’s, one for each of us. But I don’t ever touch liquor, so I had to let her down as easy as I could on the shot. Besides, even though it was technically my birthday, I wasn’t really celebrating. And I wasn’t drinking alone either. I was paying my respects to my father the only way I knew how.

It had been our tradition to have a glass of wine together on my birthday. It started when I was just three, with a finger of cabernet sauvignon in my bottle to quiet my crying when my mother didn’t come home, and it continued until he died. And now I allow myself one glass of cabernet every birthday, just to remember him by. My old man, the sommelier of Belfair. So if I’m counting right, and I’m pretty good with figures so I think I am, that makes thirty-one drinks in my entire life, one for every birthday since I was three, but not one sip of alcohol on any of
the days in between. And I’ll tell you straight up, if you could see how white my teeth are, you’d know I was telling the truth.

Estrella was a good sport about the shot, of course—she seemed to be pretty easygoing most of the time—calling over the busboy and giving it to him so the three of us could toast my birthday. Then she left me to attend to her other customers and I sat watching the TV while the cabernet worked its way from my belly to my head. And then something happened that seemed simple enough at the time, even though it would forever change my life.

What happened was one of those commercials for antidepressants came on. You know, the one where the cloud is following the lady around. But then she takes this pill and of course the sun comes out and the grass gets suddenly green and this little red bird flies down and lands on her head and starts singing. Perched right there on her head, I swear. Silly as hell, even for an antidepressant commercial. And that red bird got me thinking about those stamps, and the stamps got me thinking about David Hadley’s letter.

Hadn’t he written something about God tipping the world like a dinner plate? Wouldn’t that be something to see? I was pretty sure he’d also written that his wife had jumped off of a building. And now he was being foreclosed on. Talk about tough luck. Something in the tone of his letter had come across as endearing, though, and it made me curious about him.

And that’s all it took—that sappy pill commercial and a little lousy curiosity—because the next thought I had was that maybe I would swing by the office in the morning to get his file and go out and meet with him myself after all. I sure wouldn’t mind seeing the Center of the Universe, I thought, and a drive into the country sounded like a much better way to spend a birthday than cooped up in the office waiting for some clown to show up with a cake.

Just about the time I had made up my mind to go, Estrella reappeared with a huge cupcake, crowned with a candle. She was singing “Happy Birthday,” and the busboy and then the rest of the bar joined in. It could have been from my once-a-year glass of cabernet, but I felt my cheeks flush. I know, embarrassing, right? People really do insist on making a big deal out of birthdays.

Estrella wouldn’t let me blow the candle out until I made a birthday wish, even though I reminded her I was turning thirty-three, not three. But she insisted, so I did, and since I liked her so much I didn’t even fake it. I closed my eyes and made a real wish. It was easier than I thought, too, because it was the same wish I had made back in Belfair when I was just a boy, the same wish I had made nearly every day since.