Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

“I don’t have it,” he said. “When Marlene got sick I took a second mortgage on the duplex to cover what the insurance wouldn’t. I owe more on that place now than anybody would give me for it. I can’t sell it. I can’t fix it.”

“I had two deposits come due this summer,” he said.

“Yours, and the fellow on the right side who moved out in July. I figured if I kept them both, I’d have enough to get the roofer started. I’d pay it back some way. Somehow.”

“And the pictures?” I asked. Not hard. Just asking.

He shook his head without looking up. “Those are from a single-wide I used to rent out on Clinch Street,” he said.

“Two years ago. The tenant skipped out and left it like that. I had the pictures on my phone.”

“I needed a reason,” he said. “I needed folks to think I had a reason. I didn’t think anybody would look close. I didn’t think you’d come.”

“You put my name in front of the whole town,” I said. “Two families pulled their kids off my field trip list on Wednesday. I teach three-year-olds, Mr. Fink. All I have is that people trust me.”

He looked up at me then, finally, and his eyes were wet. “I know it,” he said.

“I knew it when I hit the button. I sat in my truck the next morning outside the Food City and I couldn’t make myself go in.”

Then he said something I have thought about a hundred times since. “Marlene would have skinned me alive,” he said.

“She used to make me take tomatoes to all the tenants. She’d have been on these steps with you, holding a mop.”

Mrs. Reese laid one hand on his shoulder. “She would have,” she said. “Now go get your checkbook, Darrell.”

He went inside. We could hear him opening drawers. When he came back he had a checkbook from the credit union and a ballpoint pen, and he sat back down on the doorsill and wrote it out right there on his knee.

Eleven hundred dollars. Pay to the order of Jordan Miles. In the memo line he wrote, in shaky block letters, “Full deposit. Unit was clean.”

He tore it out and held it up to me. His hand was shaking about as bad as mine had been on the walk up.

I took it, and I folded it once, and I put it in the back pocket of my jeans.

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I ought to be thanking all of you for not tearing my house down.”

Then he took his phone out of his sweatshirt pocket, and he opened up the Swap and Chat right there on the porch, and he deleted the post.

He showed me the screen so I could see it was gone.

“That’s not enough,” Doris said from the top step. She did not say it mean. She said it the way you would tell a child he had not finished his chores.

Darrell looked at her. Then he nodded. He typed for a long time, with one finger, and then he turned the phone around and held it out to me to read before he posted it.

“I posted pictures on here Tuesday and said my last tenant on Hickory Street trashed my unit. That was wrong. Those pictures were from a different place. Jordan Miles left that unit spotless and I owe her an apology, and I am sorry.”