The first letter came on a Tuesday, wedged between a grocery flyer and the gas bill, and I almost threw it out with the junk mail.
I was thirty years old, standing at the kitchen counter of the little rented house Ruben and I had in a small heartland city where the winters bite and the summers smell like cut grass. I had a mug of coffee going cold in my hand and a load of laundry thumping in the dryer behind me. I remember all of it, the ordinary shape of that afternoon, because it was the last ordinary afternoon I would have for a long time.
The envelope had a plastic window and a return address for a company called Meridian Recovery Partners. Inside was a single page that said I owed eight thousand and forty-one dollars for services rendered at St. Alcuin Regional Medical Center. There was an account number, a date of service from four months earlier, and a line item that read, in cold little letters, “surgical procedure, appendectomy, inpatient.”
I read it three times. Then I laughed, actually laughed out loud in my empty kitchen, because it was so obviously wrong that it had to be a mistake somebody would fix in five minutes.
I had never had an appendectomy. I still had my appendix, thank you very much. I had never been to St. Alcuin Regional Medical Center. I had never even been to the part of the state where St. Alcuin sits, a good four hours away, across two rivers and most of a mountain range, in a city I had driven past exactly never. On the date they claimed I had been lying on an operating table having my appendix removed, I had been at my job at the county extension office, sitting at my desk answering phones about soil testing, with a whole office full of people who could tell you I was there.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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