Her landlord filed the eviction paperwork on a Monday, citing the commercial lease’s clause about professional standing, and the court date was set for six weeks out.
Kristin did not fight the eviction, because fighting costs money, and she hired two day laborers to move her desks into a storage unit.
The desks had been cherry veneer and had looked expensive in the brochures, and in the storage unit they looked like what they were, which was furniture.
She kept one filing cabinet in her apartment, and the apartment was a studio, and the cabinet took up half the kitchen wall.
The local business journal ran a follow-up piece, and this one did not ask for comment, because there was nothing left to comment on.
It listed her among three preparers sanctioned that quarter, and her name sat in the middle of the paragraph like a stone.
Her car lease went back to the dealer with two payments missed, and the dealer’s lot attendant did not look at her face.
She applied for office jobs and got three interviews, and each one ended when the interviewer searched her name on a phone.
One interviewer, a kind-eyed man at an insurance agency, actually said the words out loud, which was worse than silence.
“We loved your resume,” he said, “but the board suspension came up, and we can’t take the risk.”
She thanked him and cried in the parking lot, and the parking lot was hot, and her auburn hair stuck to her neck.
By the end of the quarter, the numbers were final in the way numbers always are, which is merciless.
Sixty-one clients had become zero.
A six-year practice had become a storage unit and a filing cabinet in a kitchen.
Her savings, which had once been a down payment fund, was a number she checked every morning with dread.
She took the only job that did not search her name, which was the night shift at a warehouse, scanning barcodes under lights that never dimmed.
The work started at eleven and ended at seven, and the pay was barely above minimum, and her feet swelled in the steel-toed boots.
Her coworkers were kind in the way tired people are kind, which is briefly and without questions.
She told them she used to do taxes, and they nodded, and one of them asked if she could help with his W-2, and she said no.
She said no because the suspension order was still taped inside her kitchen cabinet, and she read it every morning like a warning label.
The warehouse supervisor noticed she was good with numbers and offered her the inventory desk, and the raise was two dollars an hour.
She took it, and the desk faced a cinderblock wall, and the wall had a calendar from a bank, and she stared at the calendar during breaks.
The calendar showed the months turning, and the hearing date her lawyer had mentioned was circled in red on her copy at home.
She kept the red circle, because it was the only appointment she had left, and it was not one she wanted to keep.
Meanwhile, the stucco building where her office had been got a new tenant, a notary with a neon sign, and the neon buzzed at night.
Kristin drove past it once on her way to the warehouse, and the neon reflected in her windshield, and she did not slow down.
She told herself she was rebuilding, and the words sounded hollow in the car, and the car was old now, bought cash from a lot with plastic flags.
The quarter closed on the last day of the month, and her accountant, the irony unnoticed, filed her final business return at a loss.
The loss was total, and it was documented, and it was hers.
On the first morning of the new quarter, she woke at ten, after the night shift, and found an envelope slipped under her apartment door.
It was from her lawyer, and it was thin, and thin envelopes from lawyers are never good news.
Inside was a single page, and the page said the ethics panel had moved her hearing date up by three weeks.
The hearing was now twenty-one days away, and the panel wanted her response in ten.
She sat on the edge of her bed in her warehouse uniform, and the page shook in her hand, and the red circle on her calendar was suddenly much closer.
CHAPTER 6 — THE FLOOD OF WILLING HANDS
While Kristin’s practice was dying by the numbers, my pro-bono tax clinic was coming alive by them, and I had the video to thank for the strangest harvest of my life.
