The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight
“I’ll tell you what I can and can’t do. I can’t promise a loan to a group that doesn’t own anything yet, and I won’t. What I can do is tell you what a lender will ask for first. An appraisal. A real engineer’s look at that lagoon, which I suspect is the most expensive thing on the property. And a letter showing the park would actually be for sale. You don’t have any of the three.”
“What’s it cost to get the first two?” Leland asked.
“About $6,800 between them.”
That was a number people could see. Nobody in the room had $196,800, but a good many of them had twenty dollars. Bernice’s group said they would put in the rest of whatever we could not raise. Randolph said the county would host a public meeting and put it on the Monday agenda after the first, and he would invite Silver Mesa to come answer questions. “I can’t make them show up,” he said. “I can make sure everyone in this county knows whether they did.”
We took up pledges on the back of a bingo sheet. Edith wrote down fifty dollars and said it was what she could manage without missing her Thursday card game. Nordstrom put down twenty. By the time the room emptied, we had $1,430 in the Tibbs’s flowered cookie tin and Bernice’s promise for the rest.
I wrote the letter the next morning. Beth read it over the phone and fixed my commas. It was one page, addressed to Mr. Pell at Silver Mesa Holdings, with forty-one signatures on the back. Thirty-seven had signed at the hall, and I walked the other four down myself.
It said that the residents of Meadowlark Court had received the notice of October first. It said that no resident would be signing the acknowledgment. It said that every household would continue to pay lot rent of $400 on the first of the month, as always, and that a money order for each would be left at the office. And it said that the residents would like a chance to meet with the owner, and that a public meeting had been set with the county.
For nine days, nothing.
Then Trevor Pell called me, on the twenty-sixth. He said the notice would stand. He said that on the first he was required to deliver papers to every resident who had not signed, and that he hoped it would not come to that. I told him he was welcome to come, and that he would find us where we always were. He said, “Have a good evening, Mr. Eastman,” and hung up.
I told the neighbors. I did not tell them to come. I said that I would be standing at the office door at nine on the morning of the first, and that anybody who felt like a cup of coffee was welcome.
The first came in cool and bright, forty-eight degrees, and the gravel was dry. There were eleven of us at the office door by a quarter to nine. Leland brought a thermos. Eunice brought a pan of cinnamon rolls under a dish towel. Sonny Paulsen came out with a flag on a short stick, not waving it, just holding it, and stood off to one side by himself. Nordstrom stayed in his trailer with his daughter, and Edith stayed on her step on Lane B with her cardigan on. Nobody had asked either of them to come out. That was the one thing I insisted on.