MARIETTA - Bernadette Bodziak of east Cobb is among more than 13,000 Cobb property owners who received foreclosure notices last year.

For her, the American Dream has become a living nightmare as she has been fighting her mortgage lender since August to keep her east Cobb home off the auction block.

Although she doesn't deny falling behind on some payments, she insists she has adhered to a repayment agreement signed with the lender and yet is still threatened with foreclosure.

Bodziak, 43, is a Delta flight attendant and a single mother of two teenage daughters. In June of 1999, she bought her ranch-style home in east Cobb for $105,000. She put 20 percent down, borrowed $85,000 from Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Inc, and said she still owes about $70,000.

Bodziak said she never had problems paying her mortgage until last year, when health issues caused her to miss work. She fell about three months behind on her $750 per month house payment. When she returned to work, she picked up extra shifts to catch up on her bills.

After receiving a letter from Wells Fargo that the house was in foreclosure, she called the lender and agreed to a repayment plan that included a $1,750 upfront payment with about $1,000 per month due until September 2010.

"I knew I had been behind on those payments, so I was just so thankful to have an option and, even though the fee was a lot of money, I didn't want to lose my home," Bodziak said.

She made the payments, on time, in September, October and November, as the repayment agreement dictated.

But her November payment was returned with a letter from Wells Fargo stating: "Enclosed are the following negotiable items which are being returned as the funds do not represent the total amount due to reinstate the account. As of this date, there are no written arrangements agreeing to accept the enclosed funds."

"It really got me panicked because the agreement says if they don't receive a payment, they can foreclose on my house," Bodziak said.

And that's exactly what began to happen.

She called the lender but got transferred around to employee after employee. One customer service representative told her that her house was, in fact, in foreclosure and was set to be auctioned on Jan. 5.

"I kept telling her, I have a signed contract that says as long as I pay what I agreed to pay each month and on time, which I have, then my home would not go into foreclosure. So then she told me, 'let's do a repayment agreement' and I just got so frustrated," Bodziak said.

After several calls and no resolution, Bodziak sought help from attorney Jennifer Jordan of Pate and Brody LLP in Atlanta.

Jordan agreed that something was not right. "Who sends back a mortgage payment to a homeowner with a signed repayment agreement and puts them in foreclosure? It's one thing if someone isn't paying after six months, but she was honoring her contract, so I knew something was wrong," Jordan said. "I see a lot of people where it's clear they're trying to get out of paying something. But (Bodziak) had solid records that showed she was doing everything she was told and yet was still facing foreclosure."

But Wells Fargo Home Mortgage spokeswoman Teri Schrettenbrunner said the company has done all that it can for Bodziak and that legal requirements forced the company into foreclosure proceedings.

"We have been working with this customer since 2008 to find solutions to assist her, as is Wells Fargo's practice," Schrettenbrunner said.

"The circumstances are very complex," Schrettenbrunner said. "We have gone through several options with Ms. Bodziak and have worked with her attorney to keep it from being foreclosed on in January, but there is a whole slew of things that have happened since she signed the repayment agreement."

"There are other circumstances that came into play that she did not pay," the spokeswoman said, though she declined to say what any those circumstances are.

Jordan insisted that her client is doing everything outlined in the repayment agreement.

"We have both called repeatedly to find out how much these fees are and what they are for, and we continuously get different answers for the amount and no answers for what the fees are going towards," Jordan said.

She won a temporary restaining order in December to halt the foreclosure for 30 days, and has also filed a civil suit againt Wells Fargo Home Mortgage for attorney fees, bad faith and intentional infliction of emotional distress. A hearing has not been set.

"I can't tell you how unnerving it is to live each day in fear that any minute the sheriff could come knocking on my door and we're out of our home," Bodziak said. "I even took a side job doing people's laundry just to have some sort of money to give my girls a Christmas, but all of that went to these fees that nobody will even tell me what they're for." Her daughters' Christmas gifts were lip gloss, a book and a T-shirt, Bodziak said.

Should Bodziak lose her suit, she said she will likely have to pay thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo to cover the company's attorney fees.

"But I have no choice other than to stand up for what I know is right because I have documentation that I have done everything I am supposed to, and would not be surprised if other people are dealing with this same thing," she said. "It's a nightmare. An absolute nightmare."