Chapter 7: What We Did Last Time
I left them on the porch and closed the door, but I didn't lock it. I told myself I needed air, needed to think, and I walked down the hall to the small bedroom I used as an office. The navy suitcase was still visible from the window. Amanda had not moved it. Tyler stood a few feet back with his hands in his pockets, holding that dark duffel bag at his feet like he was afraid to set it down.
My desk was against the far wall under the window that looked out to the side yard. I kept two filing cabinets there, the beige metal kind with the label holders I had bought at Office Depot ten years earlier. I pulled the bottom drawer open. It stuck like it always did. I had to jiggle it.
The folder was exactly where I had left it. AMANDA & TYLER 2019-2020, written in my own black Sharpie. I sat down and spread it open, and the paper smell hit me first, old copies and dust.
The first page was the electric bill. February 2020. $312.47, marked PAST DUE in red. Under it, March. $298.10. Then a copy of the check I had written to the city water department because the service had been scheduled for shutoff. I remembered standing at the kitchen sink with no water pressure, trying to wash dishes while Amanda slept in the guest room until eleven.
I had told them three months. That was the agreement when they came in November of 2019. Tyler had lost his warehouse job and their apartment on Maple had raised the rent $400. Amanda cried on my porch then too, though it was snowing then, not this soft gray autumn light. I said three months to get back on their feet. I even wrote it on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to the fridge so we would all remember.
Three months turned into five. I found the note still in the folder, the edges curled. By April, Tyler was doing day work when he could and Amanda was selling things online, but no rent came. I paid the property taxes that spring and the roof repair after the ice dam, and they paid nothing toward groceries though they ate what I bought.
The property damage was in the second half of the folder. Photos I printed at Walgreens. The back bedroom door where the doorknob had punched through the drywall during an argument they had about money. The stained carpet in that same room where Tyler had tried to clean paint off his boots with bleach. The cracked bathroom tile where a shower rod had fallen and no one told me for two weeks, and the water ran down into the ceiling below. It was not malicious. It was careless, and it was my house.
I had not kicked them out. I had asked. Four times. Amanda said, "We just need two more weeks," and then two more. Finally I called the county clerk because a friend at church told me I had to. She said if someone lives in your house more than thirty days, even family without a lease, you have to give formal notice.
I remembered printing the 30-Day Notice to Vacate on my own printer. The paper jammed twice. I handed it to Amanda at the kitchen table and her hands shook. She said, "You're really doing this to us?" I said I had to. The sheriff's deputy taped a copy to my own front door two weeks later when they didn't leave, and the neighbors saw. Mrs. Chen from next door didn't speak to me for a month. The notice went on the record. And because I had co-signed that furniture loan for them that winter to help them "get started again," my credit took the hit when they stopped paying after they left. It dropped forty points. It took a year to fix.
That was nine months. Not three. Nine.
I closed the folder and looked back out the window. The navy suitcase was still there, in the exact same spot, its silver handle extended. That handle was the line. I could see it clearly now. If I let that suitcase cross the threshold again without anything written down, I would be back in that same drawer, pulling out the same kind of bills next summer.
Amanda knocked then, a soft tap on the front door, not the pounding from before. "Mom?" she called through the wood. "Are you calling someone?"
I stood up. My knees hurt. I took a fresh legal pad from the desk drawer and a pen. I sat back down.
I wasn't writing a punishment. I was writing what I should have written in 2019. If I helped at all, it would not be with a key. It would be with a check payable to a landlord I verified, for a set amount, for a set time, with dates. It would be a list of what I would and would not do, signed and kept in that same beige cabinet.
May you like
I wrote at the top: TERMS FOR ASSISTANCE - NOT RESIDENCY. My handwriting was shaky but legible.
Outside, the wind moved through the orange trees and I heard Tyler say something low to Amanda. I couldn't make out the words. I kept writing, because I knew now that cohabitation would not happen again, not the way it had before.
