Sunday, 9/26/99

A few of you have written to ask why I changed the name of this page in August. It's because that's what we did, and I'm done hiding it. Also Pam said every book has a chapter seven and nobody quits reading there.

Where things stand. Mr. Lindley says the discharge should come in the mail around the middle of November. That's the paper that says the debts are gone. It'll be on our credit report for up to ten years. Megan will be thirty. Luke will be twenty-five. I'll be fifty-eight and I'll pay cash for things, like my dad.

We put a twenty in the offering plate this morning, the first since Christmas. It was my turn to carry the plate down the aisle, so I put it in myself on the way. Stan saw me do it from across the church and didn't make a face, which is a thing Stan is good at.

Tonight the phone rang during supper and I flinched so hard I spilled my iced tea. It was Megan, calling to tell her mother about a patient. It's going to take me a while to stop flinching.

I'm still ashamed some days. Less. It's like when a cast comes off. The arm is pale and skinny and it doesn't look like yours, but it is yours, and you can move it.

Pam's out on the front step right now with a cup of decaf and the rust-colored mum Luke bought her. I'm going to go sit with her. Nobody died. The sun came up. See you next week.

— Gary

Friday, 9/17/99

Yesterday was the meeting of creditors. Mr. Lindley calls it the 341 meeting, after the section of the law. I didn't sleep the night before. Pam did. Pam always sleeps.

It's downtown in the federal building, in a room with rows of chairs like the license branch. There were thirty or so of us waiting. A young couple with a baby in a carrier. An old man in a Colts jacket. A man in a nice suit who looked more ashamed than anybody. A woman in nurse's scrubs, which I thought about for a long time.

The trustee was a gray-haired lady lawyer at a table in front with a tape recorder and a stack of folders. She called us up by case, a few at a time, and swore us in, and asked the questions. Is this your signature. Did you list everything you own. Everything you owe. Have you sold or given away anything in the last year.

I said the boat. My heart about stopped. She asked what I got for it and where the money went. I said eighteen hundred dollars, last August, and all of it went to the Discover card. She wrote something down and said, "Fine." Then: any tax refunds coming, any inheritance, any lawsuits? No, ma'am.

Then she looked out at the room and asked if any creditors were present for the Lutzes. Nobody stood up. Not Visa, not the hospital, not the man from Ohio. Nobody. The whole thing took about seven minutes.

Out in the hall Mr. Lindley shook our hands and said, "That's it. You're keeping the house." Pam wanted pie, so we went to a diner a couple of blocks over, at eleven in the morning, and she had cherry and I had coconut cream and neither of us talked much. We didn't need to.

Tuesday, 9/7/99

Luke started tenth grade today. He's taller than me now. When did that happen? I was looking right at him. I think I said that about two years ago too.

Megan went back last week for her junior year. She starts her clinicals this fall, in a real hospital, in real scrubs. She called Sunday night to tell us she'd been assigned to the oncology floor for her first rotation. Pam got quiet on the phone and then said, "Good. You know what they need."

Thursday we signed the papers to keep the truck. It's with the credit union, and we're current, so we sign a paper promising to keep paying it even after the discharge, and they let us keep it. Mr. Lindley went over it twice to make sure we understood. I understood. I need the truck to get to work.

About the mum. Remember Luke's coffee can? He never did take his lawn money back. Last week he rode his bike up to the garden center and spent it on a big rust-colored mum for his mother, in a pot, and carried it home on the handlebars. It's on the front step. Pam waters it like it's a baby.

Sunday, 8/29/99

I want to write about Pam, because most of this page is me feeling sorry for myself and she's the reason there's a page at all.

She's the one who said "lawyer" first. She made the calls I couldn't. She took the collectors all spring while I was at work, eight hours a day of it, and never once told me what they said to her unless I asked. She put every bill in a folder by color. She sat in that strip mall office with the grocery sack in her lap like she was waiting for a haircut.

Friday night I was sitting at the kitchen table feeling low, and I said something like, "Twenty-three years and this is where I got us." And she put her coffee cup down hard, which she never does, and said, "Gary. I'm alive. That's what the money bought. I'd spend it again and so would you, so quit it."

She walks two miles every morning now before work. Her hair is long enough to tuck behind her ears, and it's still curly, and it's still gray, and she won't color it. She says she earned every one.

I quit it. For the night, anyway.

Sunday, 8/22/99

Stan warned me they print the bankruptcies in the paper. They did, Wednesday, in the business section, in small type in a list with a lot of other names. Lutz, Gary W. and Pamela J. I read it standing up in the break room and put the paper back on the table the way I found it.

Church this morning. I didn't want to go. Pam said we're going. Nobody said a word about it, and I don't know if that's because nobody saw it or because everybody did.

But here's what happened Monday. There was a casserole dish on our front step when I got home, with a note taped on it: "Chicken and noodles. Some things don't change. — The Circle." That's the women's group at church, the same ones who fed us every other night in 1997. I stood on the step and read the note about five times.

And after service today Pastor Dietrich asked me if I'd be on the usher schedule for October. I said, "Pastor, you know I'm not putting anything in the plate." He said, "Gary, you're carrying it. That's the job."

Wednesday, 8/11/99

Yesterday morning Mr. Lindley's office filed our case at the federal courthouse downtown. We have a case number now. I'm not putting it on here.

He explained that the minute it's filed there's something called the automatic stay. It means the creditors have to stop. No calls, no letters, no suing. If anybody calls, you give them the case number and the lawyer's name.

Last night the phone didn't ring. Not once. We had supper, meatloaf, and nobody got up from the table. Luke said, "It's weird." Pam said, "It's supper."

This morning on the news they showed the eclipse of the sun over in Europe, the whole sky going dark in the middle of the day and the people cheering, and then the light coming back around the edge. I'm not going to make anything out of that. I'm just saying I watched it twice.

Sunday, 8/1/99

Paid Mr. Lindley the last $250 on Friday. That's the $750, all of it, cash, in three envelopes.

Thursday night we went over the papers with Joanne, his secretary. Thirty-eight pages. There's a schedule for everything. What we own, down to the lawn mower and the TV and what they'd bring used. (The TV: fifty dollars. I said it was worth more. Pam kicked me under the table.) What we owe and to who. Fourteen creditors: eight cards, the hospital, the cancer center, two labs, the radiologist and the anesthesiologist from the biopsy two years ago. Total: $54,300. What I make, what Pam makes, what we spend on groceries and gas and the electric.

We signed at the bottom that it's all true, under penalty of perjury. I read every page before I signed it. Joanne said most people don't. I said most people aren't pressmen. You proof it before you run it.

Filing is a week from Tuesday.

Sunday, 7/18/99

Mr. Lindley gave us a list of what he needs: two years of tax returns, recent pay stubs, the last statement from every creditor, the deed, the truck title, the bank statements. Pam bought a box of colored folders at the drugstore and now the dining room table looks like an office. Green for cards, red for medical, blue for the house.

He also said stop using the cards, completely, and don't pay back anybody in the family for anything right now, and don't move money around. So there's no more juggling. The last juggle was in June, two thousand dollars from one card to another, and that was the end of the legal pad. I threw it away Tuesday. I thought I'd feel something. I mostly felt like I needed a new legal pad for something else.

The hardest part was writing all the creditors down on one sheet, one line each. It felt like confession. It also felt like getting a splinter out, the part right after it stops hurting.

When a collector calls now, Pam says, "We're represented by an attorney," and gives them his name and number, and most of them say "Thank you, ma'am" and hang up. Pam says it works like garlic on a vampire.

Hot week. It was over a hundred in the pressroom Thursday. The ink doesn't like it and neither do I.

Saturday, 7/3/99

We decided. I called Mr. Lindley on Monday and dropped off the first $250 on the way home.

We told the kids at supper Wednesday. Megan's home for the summer, working at the nursing home. She listened, and then she said, "Dad, half the families at the home have done this. It's the hospitals. It's always the hospitals." She sounded older than me.

Luke didn't say anything. He went to his room and came back with the coffee can he keeps his lawn money in and put it on the table in front of me. A hundred and forty dollars in ones and fives. He's fifteen.

I had to go out to the garage for a while.

When I came back in, Pam had put the can back on his dresser. She told me later she put a five of her own in it first.

Tomorrow's the Fourth. We'll grill hot dogs and watch the fireworks from the school parking lot like always. That doesn't cost anything, and it's still the best show in town.