The inside back cover of my green rent book, in Mr. Kauffmans fountain pen, said that apartment 2B belonged to Bernice Hollis for the rest of her natural life, rent fixed at 650 dollars, witnessed, and under it was the signature of a county judge, Judge Harmon.
Bradley snatched the book and said a rent book was not legal. His own man in the suit, a real estate lawyer, was already on his phone, and he told Bradley a witnessed, judge-signed, handwritten life tenancy might be very legal indeed.
But Bradley flipped back a page and went quiet, because there was another entry, dated three weeks before his father died. It was not about my rent. It was about the building. And it had Bradleys name in it, underlined twice.
Old Mr. Kauffman had seen his son coming. He had written, and had the same judge witness, a statement that the building was left to Bradley on one condition, that every existing tenant be allowed to stay at their current rent for as long as they lived. If Bradley broke it, the building went to the church instead.
He promised me that apartment with his word, and then he spent his last clear days making sure his word would hold up in a courthouse.
Bradley did not renovate 2B. My rent stayed 650 dollars. The notice came off my door, and the man in the suit took it down himself, almost gently.
I still live in apartment 2B on Locust Street. I kept the green rent book in the kitchen drawer, and on the first of every month I take an envelope downstairs, out of habit, to an empty office, and I think of a kind old man with a fountain pen who never once let me down.