The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 1

“Zero,” Neil Tauber said. “I say that with respect, Mrs. Kimbrell. But it’s zero.”

He was sitting in Leonard’s chair at my kitchen table, with a tablet propped against the sugar bowl and his sunglasses pushed up into his hair.

It was a Tuesday in late August. I had made coffee because that is what you do when a man comes to your door, even a man you did not invite.

My name is Odessa Kimbrell. I am sixty-eight years old, and I have lived at 214 Locust Street in Corliss, Ohio, for twenty-two years.

Mr. Tauber was forty-one, trim, in a fleece vest with his company’s name stitched over the heart. He had bought my house, and the five others on our block, from the estate of the man who had been my landlord since the autumn I turned forty-six.

He had been polite for ten minutes. He said the word “transition” four times. Then he turned the tablet around and showed me a number.

“Market rent for a renovated three-bedroom in this part of the county is nineteen-fifty,” he said. “That’s where you’ll be as of the first of October.”

I had paid six hundred and fifty dollars on the first of every month since the Bush administration.

I did the arithmetic out loud, the way I used to count heads on my bus. “That’s three times what I pay now.”

“Exactly three,” he said, pleased, as if I had gotten a spelling word right.

“This house is not renovated.”

“It will be,” he said. “After.”

I asked him what “after” meant, and he told me. He planned to put all six houses on the market by February. New kitchens, new floors, new everything. Out-of-town buyers, a hundred and eighty-nine thousand apiece. He swiped the screen and showed me a drawing of my own house, only with the gray siding and black window frames you see on every flipped house in America.

“You can stay if you pay,” he said. “I’m not an unreasonable person. But I’m running a business.”

I looked at the drawing for a while. There was a long front porch on it, wide and square, with a roof.

“Is that my porch?” I said.

“That’s the old porch. We’ll be taking it out.” He tapped a line at the bottom of the screen. “New composite porch, demo and rebuild, twenty-two thousand four hundred. Buyers want a porch. It photographs well.”

I did not say anything. I took the stub of pencil I keep by the telephone and the back of an electric bill, and I wrote down $22,400.

Mr. Tauber watched me with the patient smile of a man humoring somebody’s grandmother.

“Mr. Tauber,” I said, “I have lived in this house twenty-two years. I built that porch. I put in the garden, I painted every room twice, and I put a furnace motor in the cellar in the winter of 2011 with money I did not have.”

“And I appreciate that history,” he said. “I really do.”

“I would like to know what it counts for.”

That was when he said it. He was not angry. That was the worst of it. He said it kindly, the way you tell a child the dog went to a farm.

“Zero, Mrs. Kimbrell. Not the porch, not the flower beds, not the paint. You made those improvements to a building that belonged to somebody else. That’s a gift to the owner. It doesn’t move my number a dollar.”

He stood and pushed in Leonard’s chair, which I noticed, because nobody had done that in nine years.

“Take the porch with you, if you like,” he said at the door. “It’s coming down either way.”

Then he went down my steps, the ones I laid, and got into a white pickup truck with a magnet on the door.

I stood at the screen door with the electric bill in my hand.

I did not cry. People think they know how a woman my age takes a thing like that.

I was counting.