The rain made her sleepy and she drifted into a long nap.

3.

Footsteps awakened her. At 3:00 p.m., like clockwork, the postman rumbled across her creaky porch and left her mail in the small box next to her front door. She waited a moment until he was gone, then retrieved the daily delivery, always a dismal collection of junk and bills. She flung the junk onto a coffee table and opened a letter from UNC. It was from the chair of the English department and, despite pleasant and verbose wordage, informed her, officially, that her position was gone. She had been a “valuable asset” to the staff, a “gifted teacher” who had been “admired by her colleagues” and “adored by her students,” and so on. The “entire department” wanted her to stay and viewed her as a “great addition,” but, sadly, there was simply no room in the budget. He offered her his best wishes and left the door open with the slight hope of “another position” should next year’s appropriation “return to normal levels of funding.”

Most of the letter was true. The chairman had been an ally, at times even a mentor, and Mercer had managed to survive the minefield of academia by keeping her mouth shut and avoiding, as much as possible, the tenured faculty.

But she was a writer, not a teacher, and it was time to move on. To where, she wasn’t certain, but after three years in the classroom she longed for the freedom of facing each day with nothing to do but write her novels and stories.

The second envelope contained her credit card statement. It showed a balance that reflected her frugal lifestyle and daily efforts to cut all corners. This allowed her to pay off each monthly balance and avoid the usurious rates the bank was eager to heap onto the carryovers. Her salary barely covered these balances, along with rent, auto insurance, auto repairs, and a bare-bones health insurance policy, one that she considered dropping each month when she wrote the check. She would have been financially stable, and with a little spare cash to buy a better wardrobe and perhaps have some fun, but for the contents in the third envelope.

It was from the National Student Loan Corporation, a wretched outfit that had been hounding her for the past eight years. Her father had managed to cover the first year of her private education at Sewanee, but his sudden bankruptcy and emotional crack-up had left her high and dry. Mercer had managed to squeak through her last three years with student loans, grants, jobs, and a modest inheritance from Tessa’s estate. She used the small advances from October Rain and The Music of Waves to pay down the interest on her student loans but hardly touched the principal.

Between jobs, she had refinanced and restructured her loans, and with each new scheme the horrendous balances grew even as she worked two and three jobs to stay current. The truth was, and she had told no one the truth, she found it impossible to express herself creatively while straining under a mountain of debt. Each morning, each blank page held not the promise of another chapter in a great novel, but rather another lame effort to produce something that might satisfy her creditors.