Mama Said There’d Be Days Like These

Yesterday at 3:00pm I learned that I would not be closing on my new house at 4:00pm. My buyer’s bank had screwed the pooch on her paperwork, thus she had not yet bought my old house, therefore I did not have the 10% that I needed to put down on my new place.

Fantastic.

This, after I agreed to pay twenty-eight hundred bucks for her closing costs. This, after I replaced the water heater and the sub floor that the leak had rotted through for over a grand. Then the $985 termite treatment and the mold guy who came and said, “Well, I don’t see any mold, but I’ll spray the stuff they probably think is mold.” For $125. And after that, when I, like an asshole, put a kitchen chair cushion in my washing machine, and it shredded it to bits and blocked up the pump. That’ll be 80 bucks for a service call, thanks.

This, after packing up all my shit over the past month and renting a truck and getting my crew to schlep it out on a 100-degree day last weekend. This, after living out of a suitcase at my lovely friend Erika’s house for four days.

They think they’ve got her loan package redone, and they think we can close tomorrow.

They better think that shit into existence because I don’t know how much more I can take.

And as if I wasn’t stressed enough…Erika and her girlfriend left for the beach this afternoon, and when I came home, I accidentally set off their house alarm. Christ Almighty, it was like I was peeing on an electric fence while someone smashed wine bottles in my ear canals. Like, it actually physically hurt.

I called Erika in a panic and somehow finally got it shut off. Right then, E’s friend came to the front door with her dog. My dogs were going buck-wild so I stepped onto the stoop. And the door shut, thipp. Locked. My key—the spare key—was inside. My phone was inside. My wallet was inside. Most disturbingly, my dogs were inside…with all of Erika’s lovely things. Things they could shred in a hot second.

I fucking lost it. I sat on the steps and sobbed into my hands.

One of E’s neighbors was lovely enough to look up a locksmith’s number and let me use her phone. The dude said he’d be twenty minutes. I called my sister and asked if she’d come sit with me to wait, and she left her 8-year-old and her 5-year-old and her 9-month-old at 9:00 on a weeknight to come listen to me boo-hoo and rub my back and say Shhhh.

The lock man arrived. Sixty bucks and three minutes later—two of which I think he was just pantomiming so it didn’t look like he was getting paid sixty dollars a minute—I was back inside. And the only thing Redford had eaten was my sneaker.

Well, hell, what’s another fifty bucks on new Nikes?