The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight

Beth lives in Kansas City, and she loves me, and she is smart. But a lawyer costs money before he does anything, and nobody in that park had money for that. A lawyer would send a letter, and Silver Mesa would send a letter back, and forty-one old people would sit in their trailers for a year waiting on two letters to finish talking.

What I knew was that we had one thing the company in Scottsdale had never met. We knew each other.

The next morning I got a spiral notebook out of the drawer where Corinne kept her crossword books. I put on my windbreaker and my seed cap. I walked down to the first trailer on Lane A and knocked.

I had decided on the way what I would say at every door. I would write down how each household was fixed, one page per home, and I would not show anybody’s page to anyone without that person’s say-so. At the bottom of each one I would ask them to put their initials if they were willing for it to be read by somebody who needed to understand what this notice did. Some would not. That was fine.

The first door was Leland and Eunice Tibbs. Leland was a roofer for forty years and has hands like old rope. Eunice answered in her slippers.

“Homer. Come in, come in. Did you see that paper?”

“I saw it. I’m going door to door. I just want to write down how everybody is fixed. Is that all right?”

She made me sit at her table and gave me a slice of apple pie. I opened the notebook and asked three things. How long have you been here, what do you live on, and what would $800 do to you.

Leland talked, and then he stopped, and then he said quietly, “I don’t know how to say that in front of my wife.”

Eunice put her hand on his. “Say it, Leland.”

“We’d lose the truck. And then we couldn’t get to the clinic in Springfield. And then I don’t know.”

I wrote it down. Every word. Eunice initialed the bottom of the page herself and pushed it back across the table with one finger.

I did that for six days. Forty-one doors. Some people were embarrassed, and some people cried, and Sonny Paulsen, who did two tours in Vietnam and has not said a gentle word to anyone since, told me through his screen door that he was going to take the notice down to Scottsdale personally and shove it somewhere I will not repeat. He did not initial his page. He did hold the door open when I left.

By the end of the sixth day I had a notebook with forty-one pages. Thirty-eight were initialed. The three that were not, I folded in half and put in a separate envelope in the drawer. I added the rest up at my table, and I did not like what the numbers said.

Twenty-nine of the forty-one households lived on less than $1,600 a month. Nine of us were veterans. Three people were on oxygen concentrators, which run all night. One man, Nordstrom Alcott, was eighty-three and would not leave his trailer for anything, because his wife was buried across the highway and he could see her stone from his kitchen window.