Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

The law also says a landlord is supposed to give you a written list of whatever damage he is keeping your money for.

Darrell had never sent me one. A judge would likely have been on my side. In November. Maybe December.

But Mrs. Collins needed her $1,100 by Monday, five days away. Small claims would get me my money long after somebody else was living in the little house with the fenced yard.

And a court date would not fix the forty-one comments, or the two parents who had pulled their kids from my classroom’s field trip sign-up that morning without saying why.

So that Wednesday evening after work, I drove over to Mrs. Reese’s house on Pine Ridge Road and knocked on her kitchen door, the way everybody at our church does, because nobody uses her front door.

She was snapping late pole beans into a dishpan at the kitchen table.

She looked at my face and set the dishpan aside and poured me a glass of tea without asking. I sat down and told her everything.

I showed her his photos. I showed her ours. I showed her the almond tub and the white tub, the green linoleum and the gray planks.

She put on her reading glasses and looked at both for a long time without saying a word.

When I was done, she took her glasses off and folded them and set them on the table. “Have you said anything back to him on the computer?”

“No ma’am,” I said. “I wanted to. I had it all written out.”

“Good,” she said. “Don’t. You fight on that page, you’re just one more voice yelling in a barn. And it’ll be there for the rest of your life with your name on it.”

“Then what do I do?” I asked. “He won’t take my calls. He won’t talk to me. I need that money by Monday, and I need people to stop thinking I’m the kind of person who’d do that.”

Mrs. Reese looked out her kitchen window for a minute. Then she said, “What time is Darrell Fink home on a Saturday?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Morning, probably. He mows on Saturday afternoons.”

“Then we’ll go Saturday morning,” she said. “After breakfast. You and me and the girls.”

“Go and do what?” I asked.

“Knock on his door,” she said, “and ask him to show us the damage. Nicely. He said in front of the whole town that we left a mess. Well, we were there. We’d like to see what we missed.”

I laughed, because I thought she was joking. She was not joking.

“Mrs. Reese, I can’t ask nine women to march over to a man’s house over my deposit,” I said. “That’s not fair to them.”

“You didn’t ask them the first time either,” she said.

“Honey, he didn’t just say you left a mess. He said we did. Every one of us scrubbed that place. Faye did the windows with her bad shoulder. Doris supervised. You think Doris is going to let that stand?”

She picked up the phone on the kitchen wall, the old kind with the curly cord, and started dialing.

I sat there and listened to her make nine phone calls in a row. Not one of them took more than two minutes.

I want to say one thing about my daddy here, because somebody always asks where the men were.