“She said you’d handle it,” Brent said.

He turned and walked back down the hall to his room, knocking his knuckles twice on his bedroom door frame before he went in.

I stood by myself in the hallway under the dim yellow light.

Back in August, my credit card had been taken off the municipal billing portal without my consent and replaced with paper bills mailed to the house.

My mother had deliberately canceled the automatic credit card payments three months earlier, pulled my cash transfers out over the bank counter every week, and let the paper notices pile up until the shutoff warnings came.