"It wasn't a compliment." Ruth rocked a little. "My mother came and stayed with me after Erik was born. She was a hard woman. She criticized everything I did. And she got up with him every night for three months so I could sleep." She paused. "I never thanked her properly. I thought I'd have time."
Nora did not know what to say to that, so she made coffee, and they drank it together in silence while the sky over Wisconsin went from black to gray to the thin cold pink of a February morning, and that was the closest they came, that winter, to being friends.
* * *
She found the letters in March.
She had not been looking. She had been looking for the baby's birth certificate, because the pediatrician's office needed a copy for some form, and Daniel had said vaguely that it was in the desk in the back room, the one Tessa used to call the office and that had become, over the winter, a place where things went to be forgotten. The desk drawers were jammed with envelopes. Most of them had not been opened.
The first one she opened by accident, because it was stuck to the birth certificate folder. It was from the mortgage servicer, a company in Texas with a name like a cough syrup, and the top of it said NOTICE OF DEFAULT in letters a quarter of an inch high.
She sat down on the floor of the back room and opened the rest.
There were eleven of them. They went back to the previous November, the month Tessa went into the hospital. The early ones were friendly, almost cheerful: We noticed your payment hasn't arrived. Is everything all right? The later ones were not. There was a letter about late fees. There was a letter about the loan being referred to the servicer's loss mitigation department. There was a long, dense letter with a state seal in the corner and a heading that said HELP FOR HOMEOWNERS IN FORECLOSURE, which explained, in the careful, toothless language of consumer protection law, that under Minnesota statute the lender was permitted to foreclose by advertisement, that a notice of sale would be published in a legal newspaper for six consecutive weeks, that the property would then be sold at a sheriff's sale, and that the homeowners would have a redemption period, typically six months, after which they would be required to vacate.
And there was a final letter, dated nine days earlier, which said that unless the account was brought current, in the amount of ten thousand four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents, by the fifteenth of April, the matter would be referred to the servicer's attorneys to commence foreclosure proceedings.
Both names were on every envelope. DANIEL J HALVORSEN. TESSA M HALVORSEN.