The Rent Bill In Howard’s House
The note on the counter
On Thursday afternoon, I called Rita Dawson. I told her I needed a place for a few weeks. I told her why, in about six sentences, and I listened to her go silent on the other end of the line.
“Rita, I need you to listen. I don’t want Lloyd going over there. I don’t want him talking to Stan or Sheila or anybody. This one is mine to carry. If anyone fights this fight for me, they’ll say I couldn’t do it myself.”
She breathed out slowly. “He won’t like it.”
“I know. Ask him anyway.”
On Friday night, after Stan and Sheila went out to a restaurant in Lima with her mother, Judy, I got to work. I packed my clothes. I packed Howard’s Bible, my mother’s cedar chest, the six quilts I had made over thirty years of winter evenings.
I did take the old drip coffee maker, from the cabinet over the refrigerator, with the step stool and everything.
Then I wrote the note. I wrote it at the table, on a clean sheet of paper, with the same ballpoint pen. I kept it short.
Stan and Sheila. Per your Household Contribution Agreement, I am giving notice that I will not be renewing it. Enclosed are the written confirmations that I have removed my name from the homeowner’s insurance, the propane account, the water account, the internet, and the telephone, effective the first of next month. I have also redirected the property tax mailing address to the house. These are your responsibilities as owners. The enclosed list shows every bill I paid for fourteen months, which comes to $14,860. I am not asking to be repaid. I am asking you to understand what you were standing on. I wish you both well. Marlene.
I clipped the confirmations behind the note with a binder clip. I placed the folded rent bill on top, the original, the one on the good paper. I set my house key on that.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and left.
What they did with the note
I heard about the next three weeks in pieces, like a story told in the back pew. Sheila read my note and laughed, Stan told me later, and said I would be back by Sunday. I was not. In the third week, the temperature dropped. The first hard frost of October came on a Wednesday, and by Thursday the furnace was running day and night, burning through the quarter tank I had told them about. On Friday, the furnace made a noise like a man clearing his throat, and then it stopped.
Sheila called Ernie. Ernie told her, politely, that the account was Stan’s now, that it had no payment on file, and that he would be glad to bring out a delivery as soon as she gave him a card. The minimum was three hundred gallons. At this year’s price, that came to a little over seven hundred dollars.
They did not have seven hundred dollars. I know because Sheila told Judy, and Judy told her minister, and her minister told Rita in the church kitchen, with the coffee urn going, and Rita told me over a plate of pound cake in the same sentence she told me she would never in her life repeat gossip.