The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict

I sat down on the kitchen chair and held the telephone against my chest for a moment. I had never counted. I had only ever fed them lunch. Two hundred and six small people had hung a jacket on that hook by the door, and I could not say a word to the man for a minute, so he said the rest for me.

“Somebody ought to remember that number,” he said. “Now somebody does.”

The second piece I learned from Gaylen, and he told it reluctantly, the way a man reports something he had no hand in. Mr. Dace had one contractor lined up to bid the renovation on my house, a drywall man named Brauer from over in Mercer County. Brauer came into the hardware store to price sheetrock, and when Gaylen asked him what the job was, he said Chestnut Street, the Mott place, and Gaylen said, “That’s Hazel Mott’s house.”

Brauer went quiet. His mother, he told Gaylen, had left him in my back bedroom every morning of 1988, crying, until I taught him to like it there. He set the box of screws back on the counter and said he would not be hanging a board in that room. He told Mr. Dace he was booked through the winter. That was the whole of it. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had known his mother was one of mine until he said so across a counter.

The third piece came to my kitchen table on a Sunday after church. Gaylen came by himself, in his good jacket, and stood in my doorway turning his hat in his hands the way his father used to. He had driven to the county recorder’s office that week, where anybody with a dollar for the copies can look up what a house sold for, and he put a slip of paper in front of me with a number on it in his small square handwriting.

58,000.

That was what Mr. Dace had paid Kurt in April.

“I can put up nine thousand of that out of the store account,” Gaylen said. “Tomorrow. I am not asking to be paid back, and I am not asking you to sign a thing. I’m asking you to let me.”

I thanked him and told him I would think on it, which in my mouth has always meant no, and he knew it, because he had heard me say it to his mother a hundred times. He left the slip of paper beside the sugar bowl.

“I’ll leave it there,” he said. “Until you change your mind.”

He tried the bank too, because he is a practical man. He walked in on the square and asked the loan officer, a woman named Gail who has worked in that building longer than the carpet has, whether Mr. Dace had borrowed against my house. That was none of Gaylen’s business and he knew it. Gail folded her hands on her desk and said she could not discuss any customer’s accounts, his or anybody’s, and that if he had questions about his own he was welcome to sit down. That was all she said. She did not look sorry and she did not look pleased. She looked like a woman who knew the rules and meant to keep them, and Gaylen came out of there telling me he thought the better of her for it, and so did I.