The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 3

I will tell you what I did that first week, because it was not clever.

I called the legal aid office in Lima. A young woman there listened to me for twenty minutes, and then she told me, very kindly, that a month-to-month tenancy can be raised on thirty days’ notice. She said nothing about the number was against the law.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s within his rights.”

I called my daughter Denise in Dayton. She told me to come live with her and my son-in-law. She said there was a room over the garage.

I loved her for saying it. I also knew I would be dead in that room within two winters. I did not tell my children the new rent, because they would have tried to pay it.

The notice came the next morning. It was a single typed page, taped to my storm door with blue painter’s tape, and it said the rent was now $1,950, effective the first of October.

Between my school pension, Social Security, and Leonard’s survivor benefit, I take in sixteen hundred and forty dollars a month.

I sat on the porch swing and looked at the rest of Locust Street. I had seen the other five notices go up. The Okafors had one. They were a young couple with twin boys. Mrs. Birdie Anselm next door had one. She was eighty-four and had lived in her house since 1971, and she held her notice in both hands on her front steps as if it were a hymnal in a language she could not read.

Nobody on that block was a person who called a meeting. We were people who put our heads down and began quietly to pack.

I thought about the court, and I could not see it. I thought about calling Mr. Tauber’s office and being put on hold.

And then I thought about the twenty-two thousand four hundred dollars.

He had put a price on a porch in his own plans. In front of me, on his own tablet, in his own number. And then he had told me the porch was worth zero.

I did not have a way to make him pay for it. But I had a way to make him say the number again where somebody else could hear.

I went down to the cellar and took the Folgers can off the shelf above the washer.