These Dreams of You

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Viv’s photography career has never recovered. The family’s income plummeted as Sheba arrived with new realities of $3,000 dental work, for which health insurance reimbursed $700. Viv and Zan have kept themselves afloat on credit cards in order to make the payments on their eccentric house; then the monthly mortgage went from $2,800 to $6,000 as the house’s value fell by a third.

It’s the perfect shitstorm of bad financial turns. Soon the front page of the newspaper and its running daily accounts of a nation imploding with debt and foreclosures read like the Nordhocs’ personal diary. Zan filed with the bank an application to rewrite the home loan, which was turned down because the family was current in its payments; a second application was turned down a week before the bank was taken over by another bank. The Nordhocs fell behind in the payments, offering partial sums that they subsequently learned weren’t applied to the balance on the house but rather put in a separate escrow so the bank could continue to charge delinquency fees and push the family toward foreclosure. A third application was turned down as being “incomplete,” though over the course of five months and many phone calls no one from the bank ever said the application was amiss; Zan filed a fourth application that was approved — at a monthly payment of $6,500. No one at the bank could or would explain how this figure was arrived at or why the bank offered a payment that was more than what led the Nordhocs to file the application in the first place.