My Landlord Is Worried
I should explain about the house. The house is not mine. The house belongs to a man named Harlan Pease, who is eighty-one, who inherited it from his mother in 1994, and who rents it to me for eight hundred and fifty dollars a month on the strength of a handshake and a conversation we had in the spring of my husband's death, in which I told Harlan I did not want to own anything ever again and Harlan said *that's a respectable position* and poured us both a finger of something from a jar.
Harlan lives half a mile up the road in a farmhouse that listed slightly to the west around the time of Eisenhower and has been patiently listing further ever since. He farms, in the sense that he has eighty acres and a small herd of beef cows and knows every one of them by name and by temperament, and he also taught chemistry at the regional high school for forty-one years, which in my experience is the best possible combination of professions for a landlord because Harlan cannot be surprised by either weather or adolescents, which covers most things.
Harlan came to see me on a Thursday in the second week of March, two days after Deb's retreat had ended and the last of the forty had driven their rentals back to the airport. He came in his truck, which is the color of an old brown egg, and he parked on the gravel and he walked, slowly because of his knee, up to the porch, and he did not knock,