The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight
And one more number. Forty-one homes times an extra $400 a month times twelve months. That comes to $196,800 a year. Out of the pockets of people who had not a dollar to spare. Somebody in Scottsdale had put that figure in a spreadsheet next to a column called Upside.
I put my pencil down.
I saved Edith for last on Lane B, because she asked me to. She wanted to put on a nice dress.
When I knocked, she let me in and set out two cups of weak coffee with a plate of vanilla wafers. She sat in the kitchen chair across from me. Her late husband Arnie’s recliner sat empty in the next room, with the afghan folded over the arm, the way she kept it. She answered my three questions in a flat steady voice. Thirty-six years. $1,104 a month. And then she was quiet.
“Edith, what would $800 do?”
“It would put me in the Methodist home in town, Homer. They have a waiting list, and it’s $3,400 a month, and I’d have to give them the trailer. Except nobody wants the trailer. So I’d give them nothing, and they’d still take me, because my daughter in Tulsa signed a paper that says she’ll cover the difference.”
“Does she know that?”
“She knows.” Edith looked at the plate of wafers. “Her husband is sick and her boy is still in college. She doesn’t have room for me. She told me that three years ago and I told her it was fine.”
I did not say anything.
Then Edith got up and took her cane from the hook by the door. “Come out back,” she said.
Behind her trailer, along the fence line, was a lilac hedge. It was ten feet tall and as wide as a barn door, and it had grown up over the back bedroom window and shaded half the yard. The leaves were turning, going brown at the edges.
“My mother had these at the home place in Cass County,” Edith said. “When the farm sold, I took a cutting in a wet paper towel. I put it in the ground the spring I moved here. Nineteen ninety.” She touched a branch. “I can take my chair, Homer. I can take the photographs. A lilac that size doesn’t go in a truck.”
“No, ma’am.”
“It would be a stump in the lot behind a new trailer I don’t have.” She turned and looked at me. “Write all of it down. Every number, even the daughter. Show it to whoever you have to. They have never once had to look at one of us.”
So I wrote it all down, there in the grass, on the notebook against my knee. She took the pencil from me and wrote her initials at the bottom herself, E.N., a hard little line on each letter. It was page fourteen. Lot fourteen, page fourteen. I had done them in order.
At the bottom of the page, in my own careful pencil, I added one line. She showed me the lilac.
The next morning I called Randolph Delaney.
Randolph is the Presiding Commissioner of Vernon County now. Twenty years ago he was a skinny kid on my road crew, and I was the one who taught him not to clip mailboxes. He has been in a suit for eleven years, and he still calls me “Old Man.”