The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict

Pastor Dunmire read the notice out loud in his office with his glasses pushed up on his head, and then he set it down on his desk very gently, the way you set down something you intend to come back to.

“Hazel,” he said, “you are not going anywhere. Not while I am pastor of anything in this county. Now tell me. How many children came through that house?”

“I never counted,” I said. “I should have. I just fed them and put them down for naps and sent them home.”

“I’ll ask around the congregation,” he said. “Somebody will remember a number.”

Carlene Vance cried behind the counter at the diner, which embarrassed her, and she wiped her face with her apron and poured me a coffee I had not asked for and would not let me pay for.

“My Jenny was in your sandbox until she was five,” she said. “She still talks about the oak tree. She is 34 years old and she still talks about a tree, Hazel.”

“Trees do that to children,” I said. “It is one of the only things I take credit for.”

Gaylen Nordby did not say much at all. He is a quiet man, built like his father, with a hardware store that has been on the square since before I had him in that bassinet. He wrote the address down on the back of a receipt and put it in his shirt pocket and said, “I’ll make some calls.”

I did not know yet what that meant. I found out over the following three weeks the way you find out the real size of anything in a town like mine, in pieces, and mostly secondhand, and mostly from people who were trying to tell me as little as they could so I would not feel handled.

Those were long weeks, and I will not pretend otherwise. I ate supper at Sabrina’s table twice, with her boy banging a spoon on the highchair tray like he was calling a meeting to order. Carlene sent me home with a pie on a Wednesday that was no occasion for pie. Pastor Dunmire drove down Chestnut on his way to nowhere in particular three evenings out of seven, and I let him think I did not notice. Not one of them said a word about the house when they came. They just made sure I was never the only person in it after dark, which is its own kind of answer, and I took it as one.

Pastor Dunmire called on a Thursday morning, early, while I was still in my robe with the kettle going.

“Two hundred and six,” he said, without so much as a hello.

“Two hundred and six what?”

“Children, Hazel. We went through the church directory and the old Christmas card lists and half the congregation’s memories, and that is as close as anybody could count. Two hundred and six children through your front door in thirty years.”