Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

He took the keys from me in the doorway. He did not ask to walk through. He did not say much of anything.

I told him I had left it clean and he said, “We’ll see,” and closed the door.

I did not think much of it. He was a quiet man. Back in July I had told him about Mrs. Collins and her deadline.

He had said he would do his best to get it to me early. I believed him.

Two weeks of September went by. Nothing. I called him on the Wednesday and he did not pick up.

I left a polite message. I called again on the Friday and he answered on the fourth ring.

“Mr. Fink, it’s Jordan Miles, calling about my deposit,” I said. “I just wanted to check whether you’d had a chance to do your walk-through. My new landlady needs hers by the twenty-first.”

There was a long pause on the line. Then he said, in a voice I had never heard from him before, flat and hard, “You’ll get what you’ve got coming.” And he hung up.

I went back through the eighty-six photos one by one, trying to work out what I had done. I could not find a thing.

Then came Tuesday night, and the post, and the forty-one comments, and the woman who said they trusted me with babies.

I did not sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table with my photos on my phone and his on my laptop, going back and forth until my eyes burned.

And somewhere around one in the morning, I saw it.

The tub in his photo was almond colored. That pinkish beige color they put in every bathroom in 1985.

My tub on Hickory Street was white. I had cleaned it with my own hands. Nancy and Jean had argued over it for six hours.

I looked closer. The floor in his kitchen photo was green linoleum with a little square pattern. My kitchen had gray vinyl planks.

The bedroom wall with the hole in it had wood paneling on the lower half. My bedrooms were plain drywall, painted a color called Agreeable Gray.

These were not photos of my duplex. I did not know whose place they were. But they were not mine.

I want to tell you what I wanted to do at one in the morning, because I am not proud of it.

I wanted to post my eighty-six photos right under his, tag everyone who had commented, and let the whole town watch him squirm.

I had the post written. I had the photos picked out. I had my thumb over the button.

Then I thought about Darrell at the Food City with nothing in his cart but coffee and bread.

And I thought about Mrs. Reese, who had said she wanted pictures so he would never have to wonder.

I did not press the button. I put the phone face down and went to bed and lay there until the sun came up.

I know the question people would ask me, because Kayla asked it first, the next morning at work while we were setting out the cots for nap time. “Why don’t you just take him to court?”

I had looked it up. In Tennessee, small claims goes through general sessions court.

The filing fee in our county was close to a hundred dollars, and the clerk told me on the phone that a hearing date would be two to three months out.