The Page the Landlord Never Read
“Read the next line, Mr. Brandt,” I said.
“I’m not against service animals,” he said, and I believed him, which was the strange part. “I just saw a dog in a hallway.”
“Mr. Brandt.” It was Mildred Nolan. “Can I tell you what that dog does at my corner?”
He turned. “Ma’am?”
“Every morning at 7:52 there are 140 children crossing that street, and a pickup truck that runs the stop sign on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Bishop stops 6 feet from that curb and does not move for any amount of coaxing. Walt says, ‘Forward,’ and Bishop says no. That’s called intelligent disobedience. It’s part of the training. That dog has kept that man out of the path of a truck 11 times that I have personally counted.”
She said it flatly, like a ticket she was writing.
“He’s gone past my window about 3,000 times,” Virgil Dillard said from the mailboxes. “Nine years, every day but Christmas. I don’t need a government page to tell me that animal’s working.”
Nobody else said anything. Nobody helped the man with the silence. They let him have the whole length of it.
My brother had not moved from his doorway. He stood in the sunshine from the front glass with his hand on the harness, his face tilted slightly to the left of the man, the way he does when he is listening hard.
“Would you read the third paragraph out loud?” Walt asked. “I haven’t had that part read to me.”
Todd Brandt cleared his throat.
He read it. His voice was not steady. A service animal, such as a dog trained to guide a person who is blind, is not a pet. A building’s no-pets rule cannot be applied to such an animal. A landlord may not charge a pet fee, a pet deposit or pet rent for it. If a person’s disability and need for the animal are plain to see, a landlord may not ask for paperwork.
He stopped. He read the last line again to himself.
“Plain to see,” he said.
“That’s right,” Walt said gently. “That’s about me. It’s the only time in my life it has been.”
I had been bracing since Thursday for the next part. I had been sure he would lift his chin and say he would have to run this by his attorney.
What he said was close enough to it that I almost smiled.
“I’m going to be straight with you,” Todd Brandt said, and he looked at Walt, not at me. “This is a page off a government website. I’m not saying it’s wrong. But I have a lender and an insurance carrier and a management company, and I am not going to stand in a hallway and tell you the notice is gone because seven people are looking at me. I need to read the law behind this page and make some calls. I’ll call you Monday.”
“That’s fair,” Walt said. “I would think less of you if you did it any other way.”