What Linda Ames Said at the Door

The porch

I stood on that back step for a long minute with the key in my hand.

Kaylee had followed me out of the van. She was eleven, and since the hospital she had started following me everywhere, like she was afraid to let me get out of sight.

“Mom,” she said. “Why is the table outside?”

“Go sit with your brother and sister,” I said. “Lock the doors. I’ll be right there.”

She did not go. She came up the steps and stood beside me and read the paper in the sleeve. She was a good reader. She had always been a good reader.

“Are we getting kicked out,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“Nobody is getting kicked out,” I said. “Somebody made a mistake. Go sit with Bo.”

She went. I watched her walk back across the yard in her black tights and her good shoes, and I thought, she buried her daddy today and now she is reading eviction papers by a yard light.

I called Roger’s cell. It rang five times and went to a recording that said the mailbox was full. I called the office number on the notice. It was a landline in his house. It rang and rang.

It was eight-fifty at night.

I found the envelope under the doormat while I was looking for anything else, a note, an explanation. It was a three-day notice, dated the twenty-eighth of October, folded in thirds and gone soft from rain. Somebody had tucked it in the storm door and the wind had done the rest. I had been at the funeral home that day picking out a casket.