Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

The post went up on a Tuesday night in September, a little after nine, while I was sitting on a stack of moving boxes eating cold pizza out of the box in my new kitchen.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Then it buzzed again. Then it buzzed so many times in a row that it slid off the edge and landed face down on the linoleum.

It was my friend Kayla from work. Her text said, “Have you seen the Swap and Chat?” and then, a second later, “Jordan, call me. Don’t read the comments first.”

Of course I read the comments first. Everybody does.

The Swap and Chat is our town’s community Facebook page. About four thousand people live in our little corner of east Tennessee off Highway 11W, and it felt like every one of them was on that page.

People use it to sell tomato plants and ask whose cows are out on the county road.

And that Tuesday night, my landlord used it to tell the whole town I was a pig.

Darrell Fink had posted four photos. A hole punched through a bedroom wall. A cracked bathroom tile.

A tub with a brown ring nobody could have scrubbed out with a wire brush. A kitchen floor covered in what looked like spilled cat litter and old grease.

Above the photos he had written one sentence. “This is how my last tenant left my property on Hickory Street, so learn from my mistake and check references.”

He did not use my name. He did not have to. There are only two units on Hickory Street, and everybody knew I had just moved out of one of them.

By the time I read it there were forty-one comments. Somebody had already typed my name.

Somebody else wrote, “Isn’t she the one who works at the daycare?” A woman I had never met wrote, “And they trust her with babies.”

I set the phone down on the box beside me and stared at the wall of my new kitchen for a long time.

I am twenty-nine years old. I teach the three-year-olds at Little Acorns Learning Center on Main Street.

I am a lot of things. A person who leaves a mess for somebody else to clean up is not one of them.

My daddy raised me that way. He worked thirty-one years at the plant up in Kingsport, rotating shifts, and every Saturday he still had our whole yard mowed and the gutters cleared before lunch.

You leave a place better than you found it. That was the rule in our house.

So I want to tell you what that duplex looked like when I handed Darrell Fink the keys, because I was there. And so were nine women from my church.

I had rented the left side of that duplex on Hickory Street for three years.

It was a plain little place, two bedrooms, one bath, vinyl plank floors, a window unit in the living room that rattled like a tractor.

The rent was $850 a month, and I paid it on the first, every month, for thirty-six months.

When I moved in, I paid him a security deposit of $1,100. He told me it was more than most because he had been burned before. I understood. I signed the lease and he shook my hand.

He was not a warm man, but he was not a cruel one either, or so I thought. He fixed the water heater the day it went out.