B-movie closing

I am sitting in my chair waiting for two people to arrive at my offices. I have tried to contact the two people by telephone without success so far. Since I don't know if these people have been contacted by anyone concerning this closing and I have been unable to contact them myself, the possibility of my sitting here for another thirty minutes for no reason other than the possibility of their advent is looming in the air above my head.

The last person, other than myself, has now left the building. I am all alone. It is so sad. I want to be with my wife, eating supper. I would like to drink a beer. I cannot do this until the last thirty minutes of this hour tick away and I leave sufficient time to allow my potential borrowers to arrive late (say, fifteen minutes or so past seven).

This is stupid. There is something hovering in the back of my mind which tells me that most attorneys would not wait this late on a Monday evening for the possibility that someone might show up for a closing.

Desperation makes fools of us all.

I could just as easily be the caveman who hits a tiny little creature, scraping a bit of sustenance from a creature too small for satisfactory food-value, thus leaving the hunter and the prey dissatisfied. Of course, the prey would be dead. That would end its dissatisfaction.

There is also a thought that tells me that the borrowers are expecting me to be at their house. They are staying a bit late at an after work party, to try to drink that one last cocktail before they head home, in a near-drunken stupor, to open their castle door for their steward, myself, to try to explain the terms of their new indebtedness. They are glancing at the people around the room, wondering if this is the time when they say, "to hell with it," and leave their spouse in the restroom of the bar where the party is being held, and go off with the attractive young thing at the other end of the bar, with whom they have shared just a glimpse of recognition, across the room, and the end result of which will be an unexpected trip to a motel on an exit off I-75 in Jonesboro, the smell of perfume on someone's collar, a certain lazy air of strange satisfaction on the face, a trip to a lawyer's office, the investment of several thousand dollars worth of high-priced divorce lawyer, several months of litigation, uncertainty, loss of a house to foreclosure when the two individuals neither have the wherewithal or desire to pay the first and second mortgages, living in a box under I-285 near the airport, eating peanut butter and jelly in a soup kitchen in Downtown Atlanta, until it gets cold and he moves to Florida and lives in the last bit of undeveloped land on the west coast of Florida, until a coral snake, whose colors he can't keep straight, but the snake knows, seeks a place of warmth in the night and, when he rolls over in his sleeping bag, bites him on the calf, and he ends up in a dirty, little clinic, where the anti-venom is too late and a he finds a pauper's gravesite near the trailpark fifteen miles from the beach for the rest of his bones.

The loan might have resolved these issues. Might have fixed the roof. Might have paid for the last year of college for the kid. Might have bought that car the wife needed. Might not have brought them happiness, but maybe it would have held off the wolf at the door for a couple years. Postponed the inevitable. If only he had come to my office first.

Too late.

But I do understand. I see John Garfield in the part of the husband. Maybe Barbara Stanwick as the wife. I don't know who would play the snake.