The Lot Rent That Doubled Overnight
A man’s voice came on, not young. Tired, a little hoarse. “Trevor. Tell me it’s done.”
“Mr. Weymouth. I’m at the park. I haven’t delivered them.”
“Why not?”
“There are people here who’d like me to read something. I did. It’s an eighty-eight-year-old woman. If the rent goes up she goes into a nursing home at $3,400 a month.”
“I’m sorry for that. I mean it.” There was a pause on the line. “Trevor, I’ve got a note at the bank that doesn’t care who she is. I’ve got partners. The numbers don’t work at $400. I didn’t write the rules. We’re not a charity.”
“No, sir.”
“Put the papers in the mail. They don’t need to be handed. They get thirty days either way.”
Pell looked at the stack on the clipboard. He looked up at me through the windshield, and then at the eleven people on the gravel.
“I’m not going to hand them out,” he said. “You can have somebody mail them from Scottsdale. I won’t be the one.”
“Then I’ll have them mailed Friday.”
“Yes, sir. That’s fine.”
“Trevor.” A longer pause. “Is Mr. Eastman there?”
I leaned toward the window. “I’m here.”
“Mr. Eastman. I read your letter. I’m not going to pretend I enjoy this.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m not promising a thing. I’ll call the commissioner.”
The line went quiet. Pell set the phone on the dash.
“That’s what I’ve got,” he said. “I bought you a week. Maybe less.” He picked up the clipboard, took the whole stack out from under the clip, and slid it into the glove box. He turned the little key and put the key in his shirt pocket.
“I’ll have the office unlocked Tuesday and Thursday,” he said. “Nine to noon. Somebody should be able to talk to a person.”
He started the truck. He drove up Lane A at about four miles an hour, past every porch, and I watched him look at each one as it went by. At the end, he turned around in the gravel and drove back out the gate.
I stood with the notebook in my hand. Eunice took the dish towel off the cinnamon rolls.
“Well,” she said. “Somebody eat.”
The papers did go out. They came in the mail Friday, forty-one of them, with a Scottsdale postmark, and I took mine out of the box and set it on the kitchen table next to the first one. They said the same thing, and I read it once.
The county meeting was Monday night in the courthouse annex. They set up sixty folding chairs and ran out. Half the people there were from town, not the park. A man who runs the feed store said he had never heard of a company that wanted to own a piece of a town and not know a name in it. Silver Mesa sent nobody. Randolph Delaney let their empty chair sit through two hours of testimony, and the county paper ran a picture of it on the front page. The caption said: Owner did not attend.
On Wednesday the phone in my kitchen rang, and it was the same voice, hoarse and tired.