Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

I lifted my mop a little, just so he could see it, and behind me I heard a bucket handle clink against a bucket.

He opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it again. “That’s my property,” he said finally. “I don’t have to show anybody anything.”

“No sir, you don’t,” I said. “But you showed it to four thousand people on Tuesday. I’d just like to see it too.”

He did not answer. I waited. The nine women on the steps waited. Out on the street a dog barked and somebody’s lawnmower started up a block away.

“The bedroom wall,” I said gently. “In your picture there’s a hole in it. Which bedroom is that?”

He looked at the porch floor. “The back one,” he said.

“Mr. Fink, the back bedroom in my unit is drywall, painted gray,” I said.

“The wall in your picture has wood paneling. And the tub in your picture is almond. Mine is white. And my kitchen floor is gray planks, not green linoleum.”

I said it quietly. I did not say it to win. I just said it.

Darrell did not say anything at all. His face went a shade I had never seen on a grown man, red and then pale, almost the color of his sweatshirt.

He put one hand on the door frame like he needed it to hold him up.

“I can show you my pictures,” I said. “I’ve got eighty-six of them, every room, with the date on every one. Mrs. Reese made me take them. Or we can walk over to Hickory Street right now. Whatever you’d rather.”

He still could not name a single spot. Not a stain, not a scuff, not a nail hole.

He just stood there in his doorway with nine women on his steps and his mouth working with nothing coming out of it.

That was when Mrs. Reese leaned her 1971 mop against the brick beside the door and stepped up next to me.

She is so small she barely came to his shoulder. She looked up at him for a long moment.

“Darrell,” she said, very quietly. “I’m going to tell you something your mama would have told you if she were standing here. And then you’re going to do the right thing, because you’re a better man than this week.”

He looked down at her. And I watched something in his face give way.

“I taught you in Vacation Bible School the summer you were eight,” she said.

“You were the boy who gave his cookie to the little Stiles girl because she didn’t have one. I’ve known you fifty-three years. You are not a thief.”

“You are a man who is scared,” she said. “And scared men do foolish things. So you tell us what’s got you so scared, and we’ll stand here and listen. And then you write this girl her check.”

For a minute I thought he would shut the door on all of us. Instead, Darrell Fink sat down hard on his own doorsill, right there in front of us, and put his face in his hands.

None of us said a word. Faye set her bucket down on the porch floor, real quiet, like you would in a hospital hallway.

Doris lowered herself onto the top step. The lawnmower down the street kept going.

When he finally talked, he talked to the porch floor. “The roof on that duplex is leaking,” he said.

“Both sides. Water’s coming in over the right unit. Roofer out of Morristown quoted me nine thousand four hundred dollars.”