I
was about to bid Miz James farewell, when we heard a tremendous crash from
upstairs and the raised, angry tones of Bryan berating Mamie about
something. The verbal barrage went on
for quite a while, interspersed with more thuds, thumps and crashes. It sounded as if all hell were breaking loose
up there.
"Does
this happen a lot," I asked Miz James who didn’t seem fazed by the
noise..
She
raised an eyebrow. "Uh, huh. He has a temper, that Bryan. I dunno how Mamie takes it."
The
third week in August, several people called to inquire about the
apartment. I told three of them that I
would be at the house that Sunday between ten o'clock and two o'clock. I duly arrived at the house on Sunday morning
and sat on the front porch in one of Miz James's garden chairs to await the
prospective tenants.
No
one came.
The
ever-present Miz James, however, kept me well regaled with all the doings of
the neighborhood until I could have screamed.
Bryan periodically exercised his lungs upstairs, throwing around his
weight and God knew what else besides. During
a break in the yelling up above, I tentatively rang the doorbell. Mamie answered the door with what looked like
the beginnings of a black eye. She came
out to sit with us for a while.
"You
can't go on like this, girl" Miz James told her, and for once I agreed
with her.
"I
know," Mamie said. "I'm going
to give him the shove one of these days."
Finally,
close to two o'clock, just as I was getting ready to leave, two young women
walked up the street to the house. One
of them introduced herself as Giselle.
With light, coffee-colored skin and delicate features, she was quite a
beauty.
Giselle
introduced the other woman as her sister Barbara and told me that just herself, her two children and her dog would be living in the apartment. I remembered my mother had taken a call from
a woman who had seemed very anxious to know if I rented to people with
dogs. I didn’t see why not. If it was a choice between having a #tenant
with a dog – in this case, a boxer – or no tenant, the tenant with dog won
hands down.
I
showed Giselle around the #apartment, and she liked it very much. She seemed calm and collected and also told
me she was quite handy around the house.
She wouldn’t need to call me for minor things, such as a leaky faucet or
a blocked toilet.
“Who
will paying the rent and the security deposit?” I asked.
“The
Department of Social Services will handle the security and pay part of the
rent. I’ll pay the balance,” Giselle
said. “I get disability payments for my
son, too, so don’t worry, I can afford the #rent. Can you fill out the landlord statement, in
case I get the apartment?”
“Okay,
and here’s an application form for you to fill out too.”
After
Giselle had filled out the application and left, I turned to Miz James.
"Well, she seems okay."
"Ah,
ha! You see? There you go already," Miz James
remarked. "Taking the first person
that comes along. That's not the way to
be a #landlord."
"I
know," I admitted, "but she did seem nice, all the same."
That
night, I called the phone number for Giselle’s landlord, which she had written
down on the application. Her current
landlord gave her a good reference, which included positive words like
"clean" and "respectable."
I phoned Giselle afterwards to tell her she could have the apartment,
dog and all. She promised to deliver the
landlord statement to Social Services the next day.
The
following morning at work, I arranged with the #building #inspector and Mr.
Catcher to inspect the downstairs apartment for the #security #deposit and #rental #certificate. They certainly were getting
a lot of business from this particular landlord. Wim resigned himself to another trip to
Schemmerhorn, but at least I had managed to coordinate the appointments with
the building inspector and Mr. Catcher for the same time, so that Wim would only have
to make one trip.
Miz James moved out the last
weekend of August. This was fine by me
because it gave me a couple of days to get the apartment ready for
Giselle. The day she left, I handed
her a $475 dollar check for the security deposit. She had been a good tenant overall, and the
apartment was in good condition.
Once she’d departed, however, and I had a chance to really look around at a year’s worth
of wear and tear, I was disappointed at how much painting had to be done. I spent the next three nights painting the
worst rooms and touching up others. At
least Miz James had done a thorough job of cleaning – the stove and
refrigerator didn’t need any work, and the semi-gloss kitchen walls had been
scrubbed clean of grease.
The
same weekend that Miz James moved out, someone vandalized the graveyard behind 51 Manson Street.
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