The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month
Looking
I spent the next two weeks looking, in between claims.
There is not a lot for rent in a town our size. Most of the rentals are upstairs units in old houses on Main Street or duplexes out by the highway that fill up with whoever is working at the cheese plant that season.
Then a man I’d done a claim for last spring, Dale Larson, told me at the gas station that his tenant in the lower unit of his fourplex on Oak Street was moving to Rice Lake at the end of the month.
The fourplex sat on the edge of town, a six-minute drive from the elementary school, with a bean field and a line of spruce trees past the back window. Whitney could make the run in her car with Ellie on the way to the clinic.
Dale was seventy-two and had owned the building for thirty years. He showed it to me on a Wednesday. Two bedrooms, one bath, a little kitchen, a living room with beige carpet and one big window that faced west.
“Eight-fifty a month,” Dale said. “Heat and water included. I don’t do the electric. First month and a security deposit, same as the rent, and I don’t take dogs.”
“No dogs,” I said. “One five-year-old.”
“Five-year-olds are fine,” Dale said. “Five-year-olds don’t chew the baseboards. Usually.”
The deposit was the other eight-fifty. Whitney had Someday. I didn’t know exactly what was in it, but I knew it was more than that, because she had told me at Easter she was finally over four thousand.
So I would pay the first month. That was the part that is always hardest, the part that keeps people stuck in places they have outgrown, the first check before the first paycheck lands.
I sat across from Dale at the little kitchen counter in that empty apartment and wrote him a check for eight hundred fifty dollars. Dale looked at it and then looked at me over his reading glasses.
“Your sister know about this?”
“Not yet.”
He folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket. “My brother did something like this for me in 1979,” he said. “I was mad at him for about a month. Then I wasn’t.” He handed me a ring of keys. “Lease is in her name. She signs when she’s ready.”