Just a pale pink slip of paper. A form printed in the millions, bearing the barely legible scrawl of a busy mail carrier, who probably had to fill it out while balancing a bundle of mail.
Yet so coldly frightening.
"I know what it is," says Virginia Javras. She puts it down on her kitchen table and won't look at it. "I can't bring myself to bring it back to the post office."
To the window where certified letters with bad news are handed out.
"I mean it's stupid. I know. I can't go on forever avoiding this. Someone will show up at the door with a summons or something and it will happen."
What will happen is that the mortgage company will begin foreclosure and Javras, 53 and single, will slide even farther into the foreign and hostile territory she has trouble accepting as her own, a place she never believed she would need to visit.
Poverty.
"These things happen to other people," says Javras. "Not to me. Not to people in my family."
The border between poverty and comfort, between independence and reliance on well-meaning but rule-bound strangers in cubicles, is thin. As thin as a notice of certified mail from the mortgage company that, she concedes, has been patient. It has tried to work with her. Tolerated her late payments.
"I know they have to be paid but I just don't have the money right now."
And she doesn't know when she will get the more than $1,000 for the current payment, and arrears of $6,000, plus late fees, she owes on the little house in Lake Hiawatha she has owned, or thought she owned, for six years.
What pushed Javras across the line from the middle class into implacable debt was unexpected unemployment and the cost of health care. She had a job making about $50,000 a year as an office manager for a small engineering firm. A job with benefits.
The benefits, especially medical insurance, were important because Javras suffers from cardiac problems. She's had four heart attacks and bypass surgery. She also has hypertension and diabetes.
"I figured it would only be a matter of time before I'd get another job, but I was desperate about those benefits. I needed them."
So she worked out an arrangement with her employer. She would contribute to a medical benefits plan -- about $400 a month -- and would continue to get her costs covered. Every month, she'd send a check and get her meds and her visits paid.
Then, she remembers, a night in December, 2003, when the white-coated young pharmacist behind the high counter punched the keys of a computer, looked puzzled, then came back to say to Javras: "The carrier is declining payment."
A mistake, Javras thought. But it was more than that. Her employer had subscribed only to a year-long plan and it had expired.
"I panicked. I needed those prescriptions."
Javras got them, eventually, by signing up for Medicaid. She also received $210 a month in emergency assistance -- what's left of welfare -- because her unemployment benefits also had expired before she was able to get another job.
But she already had incurred more than $2,000 in medical bills, beyond prescriptions. Javras sued her employer and, before the case went to court, she settled.
"The judge spoke to me on the phone. She said it was the best deal I could get. If it went to trial, she said maybe I wouldn't get anything. This settlement would at least get me back on my feet."
The settlement -- $12,000.
More than $2,000 would go to the medical bills, $4,000 would go to her lawyer, $5,500 would go to Medicaid for reimbursement.
Nothing would go to her.
"There was nothing left," says Javras, who still hasn't found a job.
In a way, less than nothing. The county social services office sent her a standard form letter to remind her that, if she receives any more money in a court settlement or an inheritance or even at a casino gambling table, she will owes $7,000 for the emergency assistance.
"I thought public assistance was something you got when you needed it to tide you over," she says. "But once you get into the system, you can't get out, can you?"
Sometimes, no. Sometimes, for many people, it is a way to live.
For those who grew up in poverty, who now live regularly in it, all this will come as little surprise. For others, like Javras, who often think just those other people are poor, it can be as strange and fearful as an unexpected notice of a certified letter.
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