The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight
No signs. We had agreed on that. We stood by the office with a thermos, in the sun, in our own park on the first of the month.
A little before nine, a white pickup with Arizona plates turned off the highway and slowed.
It was a clean late-model Ford. The man driving looked straight ahead at first, and then left and right. He stopped at the office. He sat there with the engine running.
I walked up to the driver’s window. I had the spiral notebook in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
He rolled the window down.
“Good morning, Mr. Pell. I’m Homer Eastman. We spoke on the phone.”
He was younger than I had expected. Thirty-four, maybe. Pressed shirt, a company fleece. A clipboard on the seat beside him with a stack of papers under a binder clip.
“Mr. Eastman.” He cleared his throat. “That’s a few people.”
“It’s who wanted to come.”
“I see that.”
“Would you care for a cup of coffee?”
“I can’t, I’m sorry. I have to deliver these.” He touched the clipboard. “It isn’t personal.”
“I know it isn’t,” I said. “I’m not going to ask you to change your mind, Mr. Pell. I know you don’t set the numbers. I only want you to do one thing before you put a paper in a hand. Read one page of this. You pick it.”
I held out the notebook. He looked at it for what felt like a long time. Then he took it and turned off the truck.
He turned past the first few pages. He stopped on one. I knew which, because I could see the corner of it from where I stood. Page fourteen.
He read it. He read it down to the pencil line at the bottom. He did not hurry. Eleven people stood in the sun and nobody said anything, and a meadowlark that had no business being there in October was singing on the fence behind the office.
“The lilac,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she the one with the daughter in Tulsa?”
“That’s her.”
He closed the notebook. He held it flat on his knee.
“There’s a deck,” he said. “Ownership put it together before they closed on this place. There’s a slide that says what kind of tenant this is. Do you know what the word is?”
“I couldn’t guess.”
“Captive.” He did not look at me. “Because the homes can’t leave. I didn’t pick it. I read it in a conference room in Scottsdale and I thought, well, that’s what they call it.”
“We don’t feel captive this morning,” I said.
“No.” He almost smiled and then did not. “Can I make a phone call?”
“You can make as many as you like.”
He took the call in his truck with the window down. I do not think he meant for us to hear, but he put it on speaker because his hands were full of the notebook and the phone, and the truck was quiet.