The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict

I looked at that notice a while longer before I answered her. I want to explain why I did not, because I know some of you reading this would have had a lawyer on retainer before the tape was even dry, and I respect that instinct, I really do. But a lawyer in this county runs you 200 dollars an hour just to read a letter back to you in different words, and I have 1,400 dollars to my name after Bernard’s funeral flowers and the casserole dishes I have been sending out all spring. A lawyer was never going to be the thing that saved me. And more than the money, this was never going to be a fight that got won on paper. Paper is exactly how Mr. Dace wanted this to go. I was not going to hand him the only kind of fight he knew how to win.

“No,” I told Sabrina. “I’m going to call the three people in this town who still remember why I’m here.”

She did not ask who I meant. She already knew. She followed me into the kitchen and put the kettle on herself, and she stayed for coffee until her boy fell asleep on my front room rug, and she did not once look at the clock.

That piece of paper, I should tell you plainly, so nobody reading this thinks I did not understand my own situation. A 30 day notice in Missouri ends a month to month tenancy. That is all it does. It does not put a single thing of mine on the curb on day 31. It does not bring a sheriff to my door with a truck. If I did not leave on my own, Mr. Dace would have had to go to the county courthouse and file for it properly and wait on a judge’s calendar, and that takes a good deal longer than 30 days most of the time, and courts in this county do not love putting a 74 year old widow out of a house for no cause at all. I knew every bit of that, the same way I know a 10 year old mortgage note or a feed bill, because I have lived my whole life paying close attention to the paper that passes through my hands. I am telling you this so you understand: I was never afraid of that notice the way Mr. Dace wanted me to be. I was something harder to name. I was tired, and I was sad, and underneath both of those I was getting ready.

Mr. Dace came by himself two days later, in a gray truck so clean it looked rented. He was maybe 40, trim, with the kind of tan that comes from a gym and not a field. He did not come inside. He stood on the second porch step with a folder under his arm and told me, not unkindly, that nothing in this was personal.