The Veritas Conflict (33 page)

“And then, a coworker of Mom’s convinced her to play the Lotto. At first it was no big deal; she’d buy tickets on a lark whenever those huge jackpots got built up. But somewhere along the way she got hooked. She started playing every day on her way home from work and didn’t tell my dad. She started spending a dollar a day—just one ticket a day. But soon it was five, then ten.”

She glanced at Brad and Claire. They looked back at her soberly. “Fifty dollars—sometimes a
hundred
dollars—would just vanish into thin air
each week
. Dad started having trouble paying the bills but didn’t know why. He didn’t know that Mom was drawing down our savings account.”

Teresa fiddled with her fork, her self-assurance vanishing. “And then she started going to casinos. Sometimes when she was supposed to be at work, she’d take a day trip on the free bus out there. These casino companies make it so easy, so seductive. Mom was always convinced that the next dollar—the next one—would finally win back all the money she’d lost.

“Before we knew it, she … she ended up gambling away our life savings and getting us deep into debt. She knew it was wrong, knew it would devastate us, but she was like a junkie or something. She was willing to do anything to win that money back and not
have to face us with the truth. To tell us that all of Dad’s hard work …”

Claire reached sideways and took her friend’s hand in hers. Teresa’s eyes grew red, and she looked hard at the table, her jaw muscle working. A teardrop wound its way down Teresa’s cheek. She brushed it away and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. After a moment, she looked back up.

“My mom was terrified about losing all our money, and she had nothing left to gamble away to try to get it back. So she … she decided to take some of the banks money and gamble with that. They found out of course and convicted her of theft and embezzlement. She served some time in prison and will be on parole practically forever.”

Claire squeezed Teresa’s hand. Her eyes were bleak as she looked for a long moment at her friend. “What is your mother doing now?”

Teresa smiled sadly. “Oh, she’s been out a few years, and she’s doing her court-mandated community service. She can’t ever get another good job, not with a felony conviction. She realizes how much she screwed up her life—and ours—and she’s living under a lot of guilt. She’s going to Gamblers Anonymous and living with her parents in Detroit. I really believe it will be okay in time, but right now it’s a long road back. Real life doesn’t work like the nice, neat movie endings.”

Brad shook his head. “Teresa, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. We’re honored that you took us into your confidence. Thank you for sharing all of that.”

“How’s your father handling all of this?” Claire asked.

“Oh, he’s … he’s doing okay. God has always been so faithful, and Dad knows how to lean on Him. Better than the rest of us, sometimes.”

“Teresa,” Claire leaned forward. “What are you not telling us? There’s something else. Isn’t there?”

Her friend’s eyes filled again. “It’s just that Dad lost his health insurance when Mom lost her job. The doctors …” she bit her lip, struggling to keep her emotions in check, “The doctors still need to watch his heart, but now he can’t afford the visits, and I
know
he skips his heart medicine to pay for things the kids need. I keep telling him to take his medicine and not to worry about us, but he’s so stubborn where we’re concerned.”

When Teresa fell silent again, Claire said, “Thank you for telling us that story. You should mention this to the HCF prayer team, too.”

Teresa let out a long breath and smiled at the concerned expressions on the faces of her two friends. “Maybe I’ll do that. Thanks for listening.” She straightened in her seat and glanced at her watch. “Wow, we’ve been forever. I’ve got to run a book back to the library before nine o’clock. Brad, would you mind waiting a few minutes before starting up on stats again?”

“No problem. I’ll walk Claire back and meet you there.”

Teresa grabbed a takeout box and neatly transferred the untouched cheesecake into it. She held it out to Claire. “Why don’t you take this back to Sherry?”

Claire smiled her thanks and began shrugging into her parka as Teresa dashed out the door.

With a satisfying thump, Sherry closed the massive history textbook. She eyed the clock, then the next set of materials on her desk. Her fingers drummed a beat on the words
Generally Accepted Auditing Standards
on the cover of a slim workbook.

She stood and stretched and noticed the rumpled comforter on Claire’s bed. She restretched the heavy blanket over the pillow and righted the ragged Eyeore doll. Claire was so attached to that pitiful thing.

She found a jacket that needed to be replaced on it’s hanger, shirts and pants to be stored in their drawers, jumbled papers that needed sorting.

Finally she crossed the room again and stared down at her desk. The screen saver on her computer flickered to a new cartoon picture: Snoopy checking his e-mail.

I should check to see if the TA sent something about the test
.

In a moment she was on her Harvard e-mail account. Nothing from the TA but three e-mails from friends back home and two from Stefan. One was a joke about paper cuts. She smiled as she pressed reply and started typing.

Rap, rap, rap!

“Come in!” Sherry called, her fingers busy on the keyboard.

The door swung open, and Mercedes popped her head in. “Hey.”

“Hey. Two seconds.” Sherry hit
send
and swung around. “What’s up?”

“Well, since we just missed dinner at Annenburg, some of us were going to grab something at Au Bon Pain in the Square. Want a study break?”

Sherry squinted at the clock across the room. “Oh my gosh. Is it nine o’clock already?”

“A few minutes after.”

Sherry smacked her head. “I can’t believe I was on the computer that long!”

“You’ve been studying way too much. Come take a study break before you fry your brain.”

“Um … I should probably get to accounting. I’ve got the midterm tomorrow—”

“Well then, you will definitely need a caffeine fix.” She jerked her head toward the hallway. “Come on.”

Slowly, Sherry rose from her chair, eyeing the stack of notes she needed to wade through. Her stomach growled a little. “Well … I haven’t had dinner yet …”

“Perfect, then.”

“But I haven’t started accounting.”

“Oh!” Mercedes snapped her fingers. “I meant to tell you … hold on.” She disappeared from the doorway, and Sherry could hear her banging a few file drawers in her room. She walked back in, holding out a thin, stapled sheaf of papers.

“Here you go. Someone in my finance class gave me a copy of this, since I’m probably taking Parkinson next semester.”

Sherry just stared as Mercedes strode across the room and pulled out the bottom drawer of her desk.

“I’ll just stick it here, and if you want it you know where it is.” Mercedes turned around, her smile bright. “Ready to go?”

THIRTY-ONE

B
RAD SEEMED DEEP IN THOUGHT
as he and Claire left the warmth of the dining room and hurried across the dark stretch of grass in front of Memorial Hall. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.

“Do you mind if I ask you something, Claire?”

“No, go ahead.”

“What was that all about back there? Most of the folks here—like me—can’t really relate to Teresa’s background, no matter how empathetic we want to be. But you … you seemed to know a lot about what Teresa was saying.”

“We had something similar happen in our family, Brad.” Her voice was short. “That’s why.”

Brad stopped walking, and she could feel his penetrating gaze. She stopped beside him and looked down.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Brad said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s okay. Like Teresa, I’d kinda like someone here to know. Although I don’t want everyone—”

“You don’t need to worry, Claire. If you want to tell me something, that’s fine. If you don’t, that’s fine. It won’t go any further.”

“Compared to what Teresa has gone through, it’s nothing.” She took a breath, then plunged ahead. “When I was in junior high, my family declared bankruptcy.”

Brad made a short sound of surprise, and Claire smiled wryly. “See, my dad had gotten hooked on credit cards. It sounds stupid, but it seems a lot like Teresa’s mom and her gambling addiction. These credit card companies were
throwing
themselves at him, sending preapproved cards with limits of thousands of dollars. He started using the cards for convenience but ended up spending way more than we made. I don’t know all the details, you know, but it became a stretch just to pay the minimums each month, and eventually we couldn’t even afford those. And the more he got himself in debt, the more the card companies seemed to like him.”

Her smile turned sour. “Isn’t that crazy? Now that I’m older I understand that the card companies make more money off of people who get themselves in too deep. It just seems so irresponsible of them.”

Brad didn’t say anything for a moment. “Well, it might have been irresponsible of
the card companies, of course, but why was your dad—”

“Look, I’m not defending what he did. He was wrong, and our family has been paying for it ever since. I cried my heart out when some men came to take away our stuff and loaded my bike on their truck. And even now I’ll probably never get a student loan because of the bankruptcy. So I’m not saying they made him spend the money. I’m just saying that it seems stupid and heartless of the credit card companies to send four or five applications each
week
to someone who already has ten credit cards! it’s like they know they’re enticing someone who already has a problem, and that’s just where they want them. It makes me shiver just thinking about it again.”

She resumed walking, and Brad matched her stride. “Thanks for telling me. So if you don’t have student loans …”

“I’ve had to bust my tail looking for scholarships.” Claire grinned suddenly. “And since Harvard gives hardly any scholarships, figuring out how to afford this school has been really interesting! My mom and dad did have a small college savings account that was enough for freshman room and board, but my main source of tuition right now is from a private foundation.”

“Thank God” Brad shook his head. “What a shame if you couldn’t have found a way.”

“I know, Just think of all the people I would never have met. Like you.” Claire was glad the night was too dark for Brad to see the blush that filled her face.

He looked over at her with a brief smile and continued walking.

“What about you? Do you have a scholarship? Loans?”

“Nope. My mother lives in a penthouse suite overlooking Central Park in New York City. She’s paying for school.”

“Wow.”

“She’s a master at making deals. She said she’d pay for school
if
I went to Harvard or Yale rather than some Christian college like Wheaton.”

Claire laughed aloud. “My dad said the exact opposite. He thought if I went to Wheaton maybe I’d be protected from the world and have the moral education to avoid the kinds of decisions he made.”

“Different perspectives. My mother doesn’t have much use for Christianity. She would get so irritated when I’d invite her to church.”

“What about your father?”

“I’ve never had a real relationship with my father. My parents divorced when I was a baby. He was never particularly interested in us, I guess.”

O Lord God, You have spared me from so much pain that others face…

“And since my father’s family were prim and proper churchgoers—one of those gothic churches on Madison Avenue—Mother refused to have anything to do with that stuff. Even after God transformed my life.”

The front of Claire’s dorm rose tall in the darkness before them, and Brad slowed his step. “Mother was definitely not happy about my YWAM mission year, I’ll tell you that.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know? Yeah, I did a year with Youth With A Mission between high school and college.”

“No kidding! That must’ve been interesting.”

“It was. I was in a small team that actually spent the year in San Francisco instead of Nepal or El Salvador or somewhere.” He laughed at Claire’s raised eyebrows. “Hey, San Fran is a major mission field with a lot of unhappy intellectuals searching for anything to give them contentment.”

“Not to mention a city with a pretty difficult homosexual agenda, right?”

“That’s true.” Brad looked away for a moment, distracted by something. His voice was distant. “But mostly just a lot of tortured people searching for meaning in life. A lot of New Age junk. I learned a lot about thinking on my feet in the middle of a challenging crowd.”

“So
that’s
why you always seem able to handle yourself in philosophy!”

“That, and sitting under my pastor’s teaching every Sunday in New York. He was a great apologist. Also, I’ve had a few more years of practice here than you have. It takes a while, but it just sort of clicks eventually. You’ll see.”

“Just thinking about it makes me queasy.”

The double doors to her building banged open, and light spilled out along with five chattering students, heavy backpacks hefted over their shoulders.

“Well,” Claire stepped back a pace, “I should get back to midterms. And I need to get this cheesecake to Sherry before it freezes.”

The small lamp cast a pool of light over the book and papers on the desk, but Sherry could see little beyond it. She could hear the sounds of Claire’s breathing and see the blankets curled up in a pile on the side of the bed. She was sure Claire was in there somewhere.

The digital clock beside her clicked smoothly over. 1:30
A.M.
Ugh
. And she still had two more sections to go over in the accounting book. One was easy, but the other … there was no way she’d be able to figure out this accrual accounting thing before nine o’clock in the morning.

Before she knew it, her hand was reaching down to the bottom drawer. Maybe she would just peek at
that
part of the test. She lifted the stapled pages to the desktop, then stopped for a second, wavering. It was almost as if voices were ringing in her head, her brain telling her to stop.