The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict
Gaylen rode with him. Kurt had called the hardware store on Wednesday and asked what a man could do besides apologize, and Gaylen, who had been waiting three weeks for somebody to ask him that, had said: bring a pen. Kurt got out of the car in a pressed shirt he had plainly bought for the day, one sheet of paper folded in thirds in his hand, and he came up my walk slow, the way a man walks up to a door he has already knocked on once in his mind. Down the street Sabrina had her curtain pulled back, watching, with no pretense of doing anything else.
He did not come up onto the porch. He stopped on the second step, the same one Mr. Dace had stood on, and he stayed there, one step below me, which I took to be on purpose.
“Mrs. Mott,” he said. “I am not going to stand here and say I didn’t know who lived in this house. I knew a woman lived here. I never asked her name, and that is worse. I would like to say the rest of it, and then I’d like you to tell me if I may.”
I told him he could.
“Gaylen found out what Mr. Dace paid. Fifty-eight thousand dollars. I have most of what I got in April, forty-six thousand seven hundred. The rest went to tuition and the business, and I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise.” He looked at his own hands. “Gaylen is putting in nine. And Pastor Dunmire’s people took up twenty-three hundred in a plate last Sunday that nobody told me about until it was counted. That is fifty-eight. That is the house.”
“The church did that?” I said.
“The church did that,” Gaylen said quietly. “You’d have said no, Hazel. So we didn’t ask.”
“The closing is sixteen hundred and forty dollars,” Kurt went on, “and my grandfather’s estate never caught up on the property taxes. Thirty-one hundred. That is mine. I won’t have a dime of it come out of a church plate or out of Gaylen’s store. That is the price of April, and I’m the one who ran up the bill.”
Right about then, a gray truck so clean it looked rented came down Chestnut and stopped at the curb, and I knew it before the door opened.
“I asked him to come,” Kurt said, without turning around. “He said he’d think about it.”
Mr. Dace got out with the same folder under his arm, the one with my address typed wrong by one digit on the label. He did not come up the walk. He stood by his truck, a good thirty feet off, and for the first time since I had met him he looked like a man who did not have all the numbers on his side.
“Mrs. Mott,” he said. “Kurt called me Thursday. I paid fifty-eight thousand dollars for this house, and fifty-eight thousand is what I’ll take for it. Not a dollar over. The closing on my end cost me nineteen hundred and that’s mine, I’m not billing anybody for it. And there’s no penalty for backing out. I want that said out loud, on your walk, in front of the man who sold it. I’d have taken a penalty from anybody else. I’m not taking one from you.”