What Linda Ames Said at the Door

What I did and did not do

People ask me now why I did not call the sheriff.

I thought about it. I stood there and thought about it with my phone in my hand. Our county had one deputy on nights, and he covered six hundred square miles. If he came, he would come in forty minutes, and he would stand on that porch with me and Roger would not be there, and the locks would still be changed.

And then what? Then I would have a report with a number on it, and three kids in a van at ten o’clock at night, and nowhere to put them.

I did not need a fight. I needed beds.

My mother was in Garden City, three and a half hours west. My friend Kim from the bus barn had a two-bedroom trailer and four kids of her own. Travis’s folks were in a care home in Salina, and his brother was in the Army at Fort Riley in a barracks.

The only person in Kansas who had a key to my house was Roger Ames.

So I loaded what I could reach. I put the laundry basket of school clothes in the back, and the box with the kids’ bedding, and the box marked bathroom in my handwriting, which meant Roger or whoever helped him had packed it from my own cabinets. I put Travis’s boots on the floor of the passenger side.

I left the table. I left the bike. I left the chairs upside down.

By the time I got back in the driver’s seat, June was asleep in her car seat with a carnation in her fist, and Bo was asleep against the window with his glasses crooked. Kaylee was still awake. She was holding the guest book in her lap.

“Where are we going,” she said.

“To get our key,” I said.

Town

Roger and Linda Ames lived on Elm Street, three blocks off the highway, in a two-story white house with a wraparound porch and a yellow porch light that was always on. Everybody in town knew that house. The Ames family had owned it since before the elevator was built.

I parked at the curb at nine-thirty-seven. I know because I looked at the clock on the dash and thought, this is the latest I have ever knocked on anybody’s door in my life.

Kaylee had fallen asleep by then. All three of them were asleep. The van smelled like carnations and ham.

I sat there for three minutes. I told myself I was waiting to see if the downstairs lights were still on. They were. I could see the blue of a television in the front room.

Then I got out and shut the door very quietly and walked up the sidewalk.

I still had my house key in my hand. I had not put it down since the back step. It was the only thing I could think to bring, as if I could show it to him and he would see that it was mine and that it ought to work.

I went up the steps under the yellow light. I could hear the television. It was the late news out of Wichita.

At nine-forty I rang the bell.

The door

It took him a minute. I heard the chair, and his feet, and the deadbolt.

Roger Ames opened the door in his sock feet and a flannel shirt, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the remote still in one hand. He saw me and his face did something I had not expected. It went careful. Like a man who has been waiting for a phone call he does not want.

“Jenna,” he said.

“Roger,” I said. “My key doesn’t work.”

He looked at the key in my hand. He looked at my dress.

“I sent the notice,” he said. “October twenty-eighth. Three days. You were past due two months.”

“I know what I was past due.”

“I have got thirty-eight houses in this town,” he said, and his voice was not loud. It was flat, the way a man reads off a list. “If I let one go two months, I have got thirty-eight going two months. My dad ran it this way and I run it this way. Pay or possession. That is how it has always been done.”

“I was in Wichita,” I said. “I left you two messages.”

“I got them.”

“Then you knew where I was.”

He opened his mouth. And then the hall light came on behind him.