My landlord kicked my fourteen-year-old’s toolbox into the storm drain in front of six little kids and said, “I don’t rent to a junkyard for welfare brats.” Then he told me he was keeping our $1,150 deposit for the grease on his driveway. He never heard the motorcycles coming up the hill.
Dominik had been fixing bikes on that driveway every Saturday since April.
He didn’t charge anybody.
The tools were his grandpa’s, a red metal box with a dented lid and a socket set missing the ten.
He used a bent spoon for a tire lever because the real one snapped in May.
That afternoon there were six of them lined up on the curb, their bikes lying in the grass behind them.
Peyton from three doors down was first, with a purple bike and a chain hanging off it like a necklace.
She was six, and she’d been crying about it since lunch.
Dominik had the bike flipped over on its seat, turning the pedal with one finger and listening to it.
I was inside folding work shirts. I clean offices overnight, and Saturday is the one day I see the sun.
Across the street Ethel was watering a plastic fern on her porch. She does that every week. Nobody has ever asked her why.
Then Marshall’s white truck pulled in behind my car.
Marshall Deluca owns our half of the duplex, the other half, and four more houses on the east side of Pueblo.
He’d texted me twice that week about “the junk.”
I answered both times. Kids’ bikes, I said. Gone by dark.
He didn’t knock.
He walked straight up the driveway in his loafers and planted both feet on the cardboard Dominik kneels on.
“What is all THIS?” he said.
Dominik looked up. “Her chain came off. I’m almost done.”
“I asked you a question.”
“It’s hers,” Dominik said, and pointed the spoon at Peyton.
Marshall looked down the row of kids on the curb like they were something stuck to his shoe.
Then he swung his foot.
The toolbox went over sideways and slid down the slope of the concrete.
Sockets everywhere.
Half of them rolled right into the storm drain at the bottom. I heard them hit the water from inside the house.
I was out the screen door before I had shoes on.
“Marshall, what the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t rent to a junkyard for welfare brats,” he said. “Get that JUNK OFF my property.”
Peyton grabbed her purple bike and held it against her legs.
Dominik didn’t say anything. He got down on his stomach at the drain and pushed his arm through the grate up to the elbow.
“There’s grease all over my concrete,” Marshall said. “That’s your deposit. Every dime.”
“That’s $1,150.”
“Then he should’ve thought about that.”
“He’s FOURTEEN.”
“And you’re month to month,” he said, and grinned at me with every one of his teeth.
That’s when the motorcycles came up the hill.
Four of them, slow, single file.
The kids on the curb scooted back into the grass.
Marshall laughed. “Oh, perfect. Now his friends are here.”
They weren’t anybody’s friends. I’d never seen them in my life.
The first one pulled up at the curb, cut the engine and took his helmet off. Gray buzz cut. Older than me by twenty years, easy.
Peyton dropped her bike and ran straight at him. “Pop-pop,” she said.
He scooped her up with one arm.
“This the one?” he said.
She pointed at Dominik, still flat on the concrete with his arm in the drain.
“He fixed it for nothing and then that man kicked it.”
The other three got off their bikes.
Nobody moved for a second.
The old man set Peyton down and walked over to the drain. He crouched next to my son and looked down through the bars.
“How many?” he said.
“Seven,” Dominik said. “And the ratchet.”
“Grady. Jamal. One of you still got the magnet in your bag?”
Jamal walked back to his bike without a word.
Then the old man stood up and looked at Marshall for the first time.
Not at his face. At his truck.
“Still driving the white truck, Marshall,” he said.
Marshall’s grin went somewhere else.
“Do I know you?”
“You should. Anthony Jennings. I came out to this address for the city in March.”
March.
Nobody had told me anybody came in March.
“You met me at the curb,” Anthony said. “Told me both units were vacant for repairs. Signed my form right there on your hood. NOBODY LIVES HERE. Your words, your pen.”
Marshall looked at me. Then at Dominik’s arm in the drain.
“That’s a separate issue,” he said.
“Same address.”
Jamal came back up the driveway with a magnet on a length of cord and put it in Dominik’s hand.
The first socket came up out of the drain, dripping.
Anthony didn’t watch it. He was watching Marshall.
“Ma’am,” he said to me, “how long have you two lived here?”
“Three years in June.”
“And the other four houses, Marshall? On my list they’re all EMPTY too.”
Marshall put his hand on the handle of his truck door.
Anthony took out his phone and started scrolling with his thumb.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I want to read you what you wrote about the yellow one on the corner.”
The yellow one on the corner
Anthony held the phone out at arm’s length, the way men his age read anything.
“Twelve-oh-four Mesa,” he said. “Corner lot. Yellow siding.”
Marshall kept his hand on the truck door. He didn’t open it.
“‘Interior gutted. No plumbing. No working electric. Unfit for occupancy. Owner intends to demolish.'” Anthony looked up. “Your handwriting. Signed March fourteenth, same afternoon as this one.”
On the curb, Tuan put his hand up like he was in school.
He’s nine. He lives in the yellow house with his grandma, Wanda, and he was third in line that day with a bike that had no brakes at all.
“We have plumbing,” Tuan said. “My grandma does the dishes in it.”
Nobody laughed. Grady looked at the ground.
I went down the driveway barefoot and stood over my son at the drain. The concrete was hot enough that I had to keep moving my feet.
I put my hand flat on Dominik’s back. His shirt was soaked through.
He didn’t look up. He let the magnet down through the bars again, slow, like a fishing line.
“Wanda’s staying in that house as a favor,” Marshall said. “She’s not a tenant. That’s family business.”
“She’s not your family,” I said. “She’s from Rocky Ford.”
“How much does she give you a month?” Anthony said.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Anthony said, and typed something into his phone with one thumb.
Then he put the phone in his shirt pocket and turned to me. All the way to me, like Marshall had gone home.
“Ma’am, I need you to hear something before you say another word to me.”
I said okay.
“If I write this up, I don’t inspect one house. I inspect all five. Anything that fails gets an orange notice on the front door. Orange means nobody sleeps inside until it’s fixed and signed off.”
“Nobody,” I said.
“Nobody. Kids included.”
Marshall let go of the truck door. He was smiling again, smaller.
“Go ahead, Ileana,” he said. “Tell him all about it.”
A second socket came up on the magnet. Dominik set it on the cardboard next to the first one, in a line.
Peyton was holding Anthony’s pant leg.
Up the street, the screen door on the yellow house opened and Wanda came out on her porch with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“So I’m going to ask you once,” Anthony said. “Do you want me to write it up today?”
The coffee can on the fridge
We moved into Unit B three years ago in June, with a U-Haul trailer and a mattress tied to the roof of my car.
The sign in the window said FOR RENT, CASH OK, and a phone number written in marker.
Nobody else on the east side would take me. No credit, a night job, a boy, and an eviction from a place in Colorado Springs that was not my fault and is still on my record anyway.
Marshall met me at the curb in the white truck.
He laid the lease out on his hood because the wind kept taking it. Four pages. He held them down with his forearm and flipped them for me.
“Initial there. There. Sign there,” he said. “I’ll text you a picture of the whole thing tonight.”
He never texted the picture. I never asked.
He shook my hand like I’d done him a favor. “I give people a chance,” he said. “Somebody gave me one.”
The first Christmas, he brought us a spiral ham in a gold bag and stood in the doorway while Dominik thanked him twice.
Rent was $1,150. The deposit was the same, one month, cash.
Every first of the month he came by in the white truck, and I gave him a money order from the Walmart on Northern.
He wrote me a receipt from a carbon book he kept on the dash. Little pad, yellow copies. RENT RECEIVED printed across the top in red. Then the date, the amount, Unit B, and his initials, M.D.
“I run it proper,” he said, the first time. “Everybody on my street gets a receipt.”
I kept every yellow copy in a Folgers can on top of the fridge, with the microwave warranty and Dominik’s shot records.
The first November, our furnace quit. Marshall came on a Sunday with his nephew and a used furnace in the truck bed. They put it in themselves in about four hours.
It clicks three times before it lights. It has done that every morning for three winters.
“Don’t let anybody mess with it,” Marshall said, “and don’t call anybody about it. You call me.”
I called him. He came. That’s the kind of landlord I thought I had.
In March he texted me on a weekday morning.
City sewer crew in the street 10 to 2. Take the boy somewhere. Don’t park in the drive. I’ll take 40 off for your lunch.
I’d just gotten home from my shift. I wanted to sleep more than I wanted anything. But I put Dominik in the car and drove to the Golden Corral, and he had three plates, and I had coffee and fell asleep in the booth.
When the first of April came, Marshall wrote the March receipt over again in his book because he said he’d done it wrong. Then he tore out the yellow copy and handed it to me.
I put it in the can. I remember thinking forty dollars was the nicest thing a landlord had ever done for me.
The toolbox was my dad’s.
He worked the rail car shop at the steel mill for thirty-one years, and that box rode in the bed of every truck he ever owned. The ten-millimeter socket has been missing since 1998. My dad swore until the day he died that it was inside a Ford Escort somewhere in Cañon City.
When he passed, two winters ago, he left the box to Dominik and nothing to anybody else, because that was all there was.
Dominik fixed his own bike with it first, in April. Then Peyton’s brother’s. Then word went down the street the way it does with kids, and by May there was a line.
Every Saturday he flattened out fresh cardboard. Every Saturday he lined the sockets up on it, biggest to smallest, with a gap where the ten should be.
That was the cardboard Marshall stood on.
On the driveway, Anthony was still waiting on me.
Up the street Wanda had come down off her porch to the sidewalk. She stopped there with the dish towel in her hand.
“Give me till Monday,” I said.
Anthony looked at me for a long time. Then he took a card out of his wallet and put it in my hand.
“Monday,” he said.
Marshall got in the white truck and backed out around my car with two wheels in the grass.
He rolled the window down at the bottom of the drive. “Don’t make me come back here, Ileana.”
Dominik brought up all seven sockets on Jamal’s magnet, one at a time, and set them in the line.
Grady lay down on the concrete next to him with a coat hanger and tried for the ratchet for twenty minutes.
It was sitting on a ledge of mud too far back for the hanger and too heavy for the magnet.
The ratchet stayed down there.
Wanda’s Buick
I slept four hours on Sunday and walked to the yellow house at two in the afternoon.
Wanda’s Buick was in the drive with a crack across the windshield that’s been there since I’ve known her. She was on the porch in a lawn chair. She didn’t get up.
Tuan was inside. I could hear the TV.
“He came last night,” Wanda said before I said anything. “Ten o’clock. He beat on the door like the police.”
“Marshall?”
“Who else? He said if anybody from the city comes, I’m his cousin’s widow, and I’m staying here free while he fixes it.”
“You’re not his cousin’s widow.”
“I know that, mija. He knows that.” She pulled the dish towel off her shoulder and folded it in her lap. “The city doesn’t know that.”
Wanda is sixty-eight. She gets $1,140 a month from Social Security, and she gives Marshall $600 of it, cash, on the first.
She’s had Tuan since he was two. His mother is in Texas and calls on holidays.
“He kicked Dominik’s tools in the drain, Wanda. My dad’s tools.”
“I saw it from the porch.”
“Then you know what he is.”
“I know what he is,” she said. “I knew what he was the day he took my cash and didn’t ask for my name.”
She looked down at the street toward the duplex. You can see our driveway from her porch. You can see most of the street.
“Last spring he had me sign a paper,” she said. “On his truck. He said it was for the insurance.”
“What paper?”
“Some paper. The print was small. My glasses were in the house.” She shrugged. “He said, initial here, here, here.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
Tuan came to the screen door in his socks and looked at me. He had a popsicle. He went back in.
“You’re going to call that man Monday,” Wanda said. “The one with the motorcycle.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Tell him you got mixed up. Tell him you’re a, what did he say, a caretaker. Say whatever Marshall wants.”
“He wants my deposit. He wants us gone.”
“He wants you quiet. Quiet he lets you stay.” She leaned forward in the lawn chair. “I’ve been quiet four years in this house.”
“There’s no plumbing in your house, Wanda. On paper.”
“On paper I’m dead too, probably. I don’t care what the paper says. I care where Tuan sleeps.”
She stood up for the first time and put her hand on the porch post.
“Ileana. Who rents to me? Tell me one person.”
I couldn’t.
“Orange on the door,” she said. “I heard him say it. Orange means out.”
“Anthony said they’d have to fix it.”
“Marshall fix it?” She laughed, one time, through her nose. “Marshall is going to sell it.”
“Sell it to who?”
“Ask him. Don’t ask me. I just live here.”
She opened her screen door. The TV got louder.
“You call that inspector,” she said, “and me and Tuan sleep in the Buick.”
Pink flags
Sunday night, before my shift, I tried to fix it myself.
I texted Marshall from the break room at the bank building where I mop the lobby.
I’ll scrub the driveway myself this week. Keep whatever you think the grease is worth. Just leave Wanda alone and let us stay through the winter.
He read it at 11:48. The little word came up under it.
He didn’t answer.
I got home at 6:40 Monday morning.
There was a sheet of paper taped to the screen door, at my eye level, with blue painter’s tape on all four corners.
NOTICE TO QUIT. Thirty days. Unit B. Signed M. Deluca, and dated Sunday.
Under it, in pen, he’d written: Deposit applied to damage to concrete.
Then my phone buzzed in my hand. A photo of the same notice, taken on my own door, sent from his phone at 5:12 in the morning. No words.
He’d been on my porch while I was mopping.
I sat on the step and read it twice. Then I went inside and woke Dominik up for no reason, just to see him.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
He looked at the paper in my hand. He went back to sleep anyway. He’s fourteen.
At nine I called the number on Anthony’s card.
I was going to tell him I’d changed my mind. That he should leave it. That we’d move, and Wanda could stay, and he could go back to whatever list I was on.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Ms. Ortega,” he said. “I was going to call you.”
“I need you not to write it up.”
“Ma’am, it’s not mine to not write up anymore.”
“I asked you for till Monday. It’s Monday.”
“You did, and I gave it to you. Marshall didn’t.” I heard him set something down. “He called my supervisor at home Saturday night. Nine-thirty. Filed a complaint on his own property.”
“His own property.”
“Says you’re a caretaker who quit the job and won’t leave. Says the kids on the driveway are trespassers he can’t keep off. Says you’ve got bikers threatening him.” He breathed out. “That’s a complaint with an address on it. I have to go out on a complaint.”
“When?”
“Thursday. Nine in the morning. All five.” He waited. “Ms. Ortega. You still there?”
“Is the yellow house one of the five?”
“Every house he owns on that street.”
I hung up without saying goodbye. I’ve never done that to anybody.
On Tuesday afternoon a gray pickup parked in front of the duplex with a yellow tripod in the back.
A man in an orange vest set the tripod up on our lawn and looked through it at the side of the house.
I went out in my slippers.
“Can I help you?”
“Just the survey, ma’am. I’ll be out of your way in a half hour.”
“What survey?”
He looked at his clipboard like the answer was on it. “Lot lines. For the closing.”
“What closing?”
“Ahn Development’s buying the whole run from the owner. This one, the other side of the duplex, three on Elm, and the yellow one up there on Mesa.” He pointed with his pen. “Five lots.”
“Lots.”
“They’re putting in townhomes. It’s all coming down.” He bent to the tripod. “Closing’s the thirtieth.”
The thirtieth. I counted it on my fingers against the notice on my door. Thirty days, to the day.
“There are people living in these,” I said.
The man straightened up and looked at our window, at the curtain, at my car.
“Paperwork says they’re all empty,” he said. “Vacant sale. That’s the whole deal.”
He went down the slope of the driveway with a bundle of wire flags and started pushing them into the grass along the property line.
He stopped at the drain and looked down through the grate for a second, the way everybody does.
Then he stuck a pink flag in the grass right where Peyton’s purple bike had been lying.
Page four
Marshall knocked on Wednesday night.
It was nine o’clock. I leave for work at ten. He knew that. He knows my whole schedule. He’s the one who told me which nights the buses run late.
He had a manila folder and a white envelope. He was wearing the loafers.
“Five minutes,” he said. “I’m not here to fight, Ileana.”
I let him stand in the doorway. I didn’t let him in.
Dominik was in the hallway behind me, in the dark, where he thought I couldn’t see him.
“I heard you talked to the inspector,” Marshall said. “That’s fine. That’s your right. I’m not mad.”
He held up the envelope.
“This is your deposit. Eleven-fifty. Plus five hundred for the trouble. That’s sixteen-fifty, cash.” He tapped it on the doorframe. “And you stay through the twenty-ninth. You don’t have to be out a day early.”
“The twenty-ninth.”
“Most landlords give you nothing on month to month. I’m giving you sixteen-fifty and a month.”
He opened the folder.
On top was a typed page with a line at the bottom.
I, Ileana Ortega, have occupied Unit B as an unpaid caretaker during renovations at the owner’s request. No rent has been charged. No tenancy exists.
“You sign that for tomorrow,” he said. “You give that to Jennings. He goes away. You go away happy.”
“I pay rent,” I said.
“Do you?” He smiled. He turned the typed page over.
Under it was a lease page. My handwriting in the corners. IO, IO, IO. My full signature at the bottom, dated three years ago in June.
The heading said CARETAKER OCCUPANCY AGREEMENT.
Occupant receives lodging in exchange for caretaking duties. No tenancy is created. Any sum held is a caretaker bond and may be applied by the owner to damages.
“Page four,” Marshall said. “You signed it on my hood. I flipped it for you. You remember.”
I remembered the wind. I remembered his forearm on the pages.
I took my phone out of my back pocket and took a picture of it while he was holding it. He let me. That’s how sure he was.
“See?” he said. “Get a good one. Show it to your bikers.”
“They’re not my bikers.”
“Wanda signed one. Elm signed theirs. Every one of my houses signed one, Ileana. You’re the only person on this street making this hard.”
He closed the folder.
“You know what a caretaker is, when the owner says the job’s over? A guest. You know what a guest is, when the guest won’t leave?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ll leave this,” he said, and put the envelope in my mailbox on the wall, and flipped the little lid shut on it.
From the hallway, Dominik said, “We pay you every month. I’ve seen her.”
Marshall leaned around me to look at him.
“Then your mother should’ve read what she signed, buddy.”
He went down the steps. At the bottom he stopped next to the drain and looked at the pink flag in the grass.
“Tomorrow at nine you’re my caretaker,” he said. “Or you’re a trespasser with a kid.”
March fourteenth
I went to work. I mopped the bank lobby and the third floor of the insurance building and I don’t remember doing either one.
I got home at 6:30 Thursday morning. The envelope was still in the mailbox. I took it inside and set it on the kitchen table, sealed.
I didn’t go to bed.
I took the Folgers can down off the fridge. I wanted to know what I’d paid that man in three years. I wanted to know the number before I sold it to him for sixteen-fifty.
I dumped it out on the table. The microwave warranty. Dominik’s shot records. A birthday card from his father, sent in February, which is wrong by four months.
And the yellow copies, soft from being handled, curled at the corners.
I laid them out in rows, by month, like Dominik does the sockets.
Thirty-eight of them.
RENT RECEIVED, in red, across the top of every single one. Unit B. $1,150. M.D.
Thirty-eight times he’d written the word rent in his own pen and handed it to his caretaker.
I got to March and stopped.
$1,110. Then, in his writing, small: less 40, lunch, sewer day. And the date.
3/14.
I sat there with it in my hand.
The furnace clicked three times in the basement and lit. That’s how I knew it was seven.
Dominik came out in his shorts and stood in the kitchen doorway with his hair flat on one side.
“Did you sleep?”
“No.”
He looked at the table. All the rows. He came over and picked up the March one, because it was the one in my hand and he took it out of it.
He read it.
“That’s the buffet day,” he said. “You let me have three plates.”
“I know.”
“There wasn’t any sewer crew.”
I looked at him.
“I came out to check on my bike when we got back. Like two o’clock.” He put the receipt down on the table, square in its row. “Nobody moved the grate. It still had leaves on it from the winter. I remember because I was going to clean it out.”
He’s been on his stomach at that drain more than anybody alive.
I got my phone and scrolled back through Marshall’s texts to March. It was still there.
City sewer crew in the street 10 to 2. Take the boy somewhere. Don’t park in the drive.
Don’t park in the drive.
Then I opened the picture I took of page four at the door. No tenancy is created. My initials. His forearm at the edge of the shot, in the striped shirt.
I set my phone down on the table next to the March receipt.
Dominik leaned over and looked at both of them. He didn’t say anything. He moved my phone a little so it was lined up with the paper.
Then he went to his room and came back with the bent spoon and put it in his pocket. I don’t know why. He just did.
I put the yellow copies back in the Folgers can one row at a time, March last, on top.
I put the envelope from the mailbox in my work bag next to my badge. I didn’t open it.
At 8:40 the white truck turned into our driveway.
The hood of the white truck
Marshall parked it nose up the slope, the same as Saturday.
A city car pulled in at the curb ten minutes later, and Anthony got out of it in a short-sleeve shirt and a tie, with a clipboard and his phone. No motorcycle.
Marshall was talking before Anthony shut the car door.
“Morning, Jennings. Before you start. I’ve got paperwork on this unit, and I want it on the record, because she’s going to tell you a story.”
“Good morning, Marshall.”
“She’s a caretaker. She’s been a caretaker the whole time. I’ve got her signature.” He had the manila folder under his arm. “The job’s over and she won’t leave, and I’ve got a buyer who’s been very patient.”
Anthony looked at me on the step.
I came down the driveway with the Folgers can under one arm and my work bag on my shoulder.
I stopped at the white truck and put the white envelope on the hood first.
“Here’s your sixteen-fifty,” I said.
Marshall looked at it. “That’s yours. That’s a gift.”
I opened the can and took out the first yellow copy and laid it on the hood next to the envelope.
Then the next one.
“What is this?” Marshall said. “What are you doing?”
I kept laying them down. June. July. August. The hood was warm already. I put the bent corners flat with my thumb.
“Those are utilities,” Marshall said. “She pays me for utilities. Water. Trash.”
Anthony leaned over the hood with his hands behind his back and read the top of one out loud.
“Rent received.”
“That’s how the book comes. I bought it at the Office Depot. I didn’t print it.”
“Unit B, eleven-fifty,” Anthony said. “That’s a lot of trash.”
“It’s a figure of speech, Jennings. It’s a receipt book. You write in it what you write in it.”
I laid down the second year. Then the third. The hood was almost full. I had to go up onto the windshield.
Marshall moved his folder to his other arm.
“Ileana. Stop. Come on. Look at me.”
I didn’t look at him. I got to March and held it.
“Mr. Jennings,” I said. “Can I see your form from March?”
Anthony took out his phone and found it with his thumb and set the phone on the hood. Face up. Marshall’s handwriting. NOBODY LIVES HERE, in capitals, and his signature under it, and the date.
I put the March receipt down next to the phone.
Same date. Same pen. Same hand.
Less 40, lunch, sewer day.
Anthony read it for a long time. He didn’t touch it.
“You paid her forty dollars to be gone that morning,” he said.
“I gave her a break on rent. That’s being a decent person. That’s a crime now?”
“You just said rent.”
Marshall opened his mouth and shut it.
Then he laughed, and put the folder down on the hood, right on top of April.
“Okay. Okay. What do you want, Ileana? Two thousand? Let’s say two. You stay through Christmas. I’ll put it in writing.”
“She doesn’t want it in writing,” Anthony said. “Not yours.”
“I’m not talking to you. Ileana. Twenty-five hundred. That’s more than this unit’s worth to you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You think he’s your friend?” Marshall said. He pointed at Anthony. “He’s going to put orange on your door in about ten minutes. You know that, right? That furnace in there, I put that in myself. No permit. No nothing. You think that passes? You’re going to be on the sidewalk by Sunday, and he’s going to drive away in his city car.”
“I know,” I said.
That stopped him for a second.
Then something came off his face. The smile, the ham, the receipt book, all of it.
“I picked you,” Marshall said. “You understand that? I picked every single one of you. Cash. No credit. A kid. A night job. Some old lady with no name on anything. You know why I picked you?”
Nobody answered him.
“Because people like you don’t call anybody. That’s the whole thing. You don’t call anybody, you don’t read anything, and you’re grateful. You were supposed to be grateful.”
Up the street, the screen door on the yellow house slapped shut.
Wanda was coming down the sidewalk in her house shoes with Tuan holding on to the back of her shirt.
She had a gallon Ziploc bag in her hand. It was full of yellow paper.
She walked right up the driveway past Marshall and put the bag on the hood of the white truck, on top of my rows.
“He gives everybody a receipt,” Wanda said. “He runs it proper.”
Marshall looked at the bag. Six hundred, six hundred, six hundred. RENT RECEIVED. Four years of them.
“Wanda,” he said. “You signed—”
“You told me I was family,” she said. “Your cousin’s widow. I don’t even know your cousin.”
Tuan looked up at Marshall from behind her.
“We have plumbing,” he said.
Anthony took the Ziploc bag and the Folgers can and set them side by side on his clipboard.
“Marshall, as of this morning every one of these is a rental with tenants and an open complaint. Nothing transfers with an open violation on it. I’ll be calling Ahn Development myself.”
“You can’t do that.”
“And when the city posts a unit for the owner’s own work, the owner pays the tenant’s relocation. That’s the ordinance. Not my opinion.”
“I’m not paying a dime to anybody.”
“Then I’ll write that down too,” Anthony said, and did.
He went inside with me to look at the furnace.
It clicked three times and lit. He shined a light along the gas line to where it was wrapped with tape. He wrote for a long time.
When we came back out, he peeled an orange sheet off his clipboard and pressed it flat on our screen door, right where the notice to quit had been.
Then he walked up the street to the yellow house with Wanda and Tuan, and pressed another one on hers.
Wanda didn’t look at me when she came back for her bag.
Marshall picked his folder up off the hood. The yellow copies under it slid. A couple went down the slope toward the drain, and Dominik stepped on them with his sneaker before they got there.
Marshall opened the door of the white truck.
“Seventy-two hours,” he said to me. “Who do you think rents to you now?”
Saturday on Abriendo
We moved on a Sunday, into a fourplex on the west side above a tire shop, on the check the city made Marshall write.
It’s $1,290 a month. I picked up Sundays at the bank building to cover the difference. I see the sun on Saturdays still. It’s in the parking lot.
Three weeks after the orange sheet, Dominik flattened a new box behind the tire shop.
He lined up the sockets on it, biggest to smallest. Seven that came out of the drain. The rest that never went in. A gap where the ten should be.
The ratchet is still in the storm drain on the east side, on a ledge of mud, as far as I know.
He uses one of Jamal’s now. Jamal brought it by on his bike the first week and didn’t stay to be thanked.
Two girls from downstairs were on the curb by nine-thirty with a scooter and a bike with a flat. Then a boy from the tire shop’s side street. Then Wanda’s Buick pulled up, crack and all, and Tuan got out with his bike that has no brakes.
Wanda stayed in the car with the window down. She has a room at a motel on Elizabeth until the yellow house is fixed or sold, whichever Marshall gets to first. She waved at me with two fingers.
At ten, four motorcycles came up the street, slow, single file.
The girls from downstairs scooted back.
Anthony pulled to the curb and cut the engine and took off his helmet. Peyton climbed down off the back of his bike in a helmet three sizes too big.
She was holding a purple bike up on its back wheel with both hands. Grady had carried it on his.
The chain was hanging off it like a necklace.
“Again?” Dominik said.
“She does it on purpose,” Anthony said. “To come see you.”
Peyton didn’t deny it. She laid the bike in the grass and sat down first in line.
Dominik turned the bike over on its seat. He took the bent spoon out of his back pocket.
He turned the pedal with one finger and listened. Then he looked down the curb at all of them.
“Okay,” he said. “Who’s next after her?”
If this one got to you, pass it to somebody who once signed a lease on the hood of a truck.
For more stories of family betrayal and the people who show up when it matters, read the night a family toasted a boat instead of a graduation and the son who sold his father’s old wrecker. And for another secret that turns a household upside down, there’s the assistant due in July.
