She told me what the dispute process generally required: documentation of my identity, a statement that I was disputing the account as unauthorized, and information that might help them investigate — any inconsistencies I had found, any evidence that someone else had opened the account. She also told me that this kind of situation sometimes involved filing a report with the FTC and potentially with local law enforcement, and that those reports were often part of the documentation package, though she was specific that a report did not guarantee any particular outcome and that the investigation was the lender’s separate process.
I took notes on everything she said. I asked her to repeat things I hadn’t caught. I thanked her and hung up.
And then I sat in my apartment, in the quiet, and I let myself think the thing I had been not quite thinking since I pulled that credit report.
The address. The old address. The identifying information that a stranger would not have had but that someone with access to old household records would. The payment history — not abandoned, not smashed-and-grabbed, but maintained. Maintained by someone who was in a position to maintain it, who was trying to avoid the account showing up as in default, because a default would trigger alerts that the slow build of on-time payments was specifically designed to prevent.
I thought about who had access to the house I grew up in. Who still lived there. Who kept files.
I thought about my mother, Denise Vale, who is fifty-nine years old and who has been financially disorganized for as long as I can remember, and who has also, for as long as I can remember, been the person most committed in our family to making sure nothing looked wrong from the outside.