The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict

The paper was taped at eye level, right over the spot where the paint had worn thin from 50 years of my own hand pushing that door open.

I had come back from Tuesday Bible study with a casserole dish still warm against my hip, and there it was. A single sheet in a plastic sleeve, masking tape on all four corners like somebody had taken care to do it neatly. NOTICE TO VACATE, it said at the top, and under that, 30 DAYS.

I set the casserole dish on the porch rail. I did not drop it. I want that on the record, because somebody would ask me later if I dropped it, and I did not. I set it down careful, the way Bernard Liess taught me to set anything down when your hands are shaking, which is slow, with both hands, like you are setting down something that matters more than it does.

“Mrs. Mott?”

Sabrina Wills came up the walk with her little boy on her hip, the mail in her other hand. She has lived three doors down since she was in diapers, and I used to keep her on Tuesdays and Thursdays when her mother worked the second shift at the plant.

“It’s nothing, honey,” I said, which was the first lie I told that day and the last one I am proud of.

She looked past me at the door anyway. Her face did the thing faces do when they read a word like VACATE in a stranger’s house that is not a stranger’s house at all, not to her, not to half this town.

“Who taped that to your door?”

“I expect it was the new owner,” I said. “Man named Dace.”

“The one buying up Liess Street?”

“The very one.”

She set her mail down on my rail next to the casserole dish, which told me she was not going anywhere for a minute, and I was grateful for that, because my knees had gone a little soft and I did not want to be the only one standing on that porch when they did.

I am 74 years old. I have rented the house at 118 Chestnut from one family for 50 years, since the spring of 1976, when Bernard and his wife Verda first handed me a key that did not even have a tag on it yet. Bernard cut it himself at the hardware store that same morning. I remember because he was so proud of that little machine, the one that cuts keys, and he made me watch him do it like it was a magic trick.