I put down the telephone and sat in my truck in the dark with the engine off, and I looked at the lights of the park through the windshield. Two hundred twelve lots, strung along the live oaks, a long galaxy of porch bulbs and television glow. I knew every one. Then I called Rosa back, and I asked her to meet me at the clubhouse at seven in the morning with the master key and the file on Lot 41. She said she would bring the pastry. Rosa always brings pastry. I told her I would bring the sheriff.
By nine the next morning, Deputy Alvarez of the Marion County Sheriff was standing with me and Rosa in the doorway of the trailer with the green awning. The door was unlocked. Inside, the carpet had been pulled, and the walls had been scraped to the studs, and the whole living room was filled with sacks, flattened boxes and long folding tables. It was not renovation. It was packing. Rosa lifted a corner of a tarp, and under it were forty stacked cartons stamped with the name of a pharmacy supply company, and a clipboard that held a list of dates.
The deputy read the clipboard silently, and he took a long breath through his nose. “Mrs. Sizemore, this is a delivery log,” he said. “Somebody is using this lot as a drop point for stolen goods. Cartons of medication, shipped up from Miami, and sold on the internet. Duane Kittle has been doing this since August.” I looked at the date on the last line. “And who gave him the key?” I asked. Rosa put her hand on my arm. She said, in a whisper, “The new owners did not. A man came in and showed me a letter from the company. It was Rick who signed for it.”
A real estate photo of Lot 41 and a hidden second key gave one park owner the length of a single Saturday to bring her daughter back to the truth in Ocala.
I gave my terms to the deputy in the doorway. I would call my daughter and tell her that I had decided to take Lot 41 after all. I would ask her to bring Rick to see the trailer on Saturday at noon, to hand me the keys in person. The deputy would wait at the clubhouse with two other officers, and Rosa would keep the coffee going. I wanted Tammy to see. I wanted to give her the chance to hear what her husband had done from his own mouth, without a lawyer, in the one place on earth I had never let her go.
They came at noon, in the white Lexus, and Tammy stepped out in sunglasses with her nose wrinkled at the weeds. Rick followed with a ring of keys, grinning. I met them at the green awning in my old Ford Ranger overalls. “Rick,” I said, “I accept. Show me the porch.” He swept the door open with a bow, and they stood together in the stripped, empty living room, with the tarp, and the cartons, and the clipboard laid out on the folding table. Tammy stared. Rick stopped smiling. I said, “Tell her about Duane Kittle, Rick.”
He tried to talk his way out of it, as I knew he would. Then he told it, because Tammy would not stop looking at him. Duane was his cousin, he said. Duane had gotten out in July and needed a place, and Rick owed him eighty thousand dollars from a business that went wrong. When Duane saw the sale of Pine Hollow in the Ocala paper, and the name of Loretta Sizemore on the deed, he had put it together. Rick would move me to Lot 41, where nobody would look, and sell my two acres to a developer for two million dollars on a power of attorney. He would split it with his cousin.
Tammy took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were wet. “Rick, you said Mama was broke,” she said. “You said we were saving her.” Rick snatched the clipboard and the deposit paper off the folding table, meaning to dash out through the back door and across the yard and into the woods behind the retention pond, and he flung open the door of the trailer and ran down the back steps. He ran down the little path of crushed shell. And he stopped, so abruptly that his loafers skidded, at the bank of the retention pond, where a six foot alligator was sunning itself on the path.
The alligator was named Gertrude, and she had lived at Pine Hollow for eleven years. She lifted her great head, regarded Rick Hollis with one prehistoric yellow eye, and did not move. Rick backed up. The alligator opened her mouth, a slow hinge of white, and closed it. From the porch of Lot 41, Deputy Alvarez came out with his hand on his belt and said, mildly, “Sir, I believe you are going to want to hand me that paper and walk very slowly toward me.” Rick did exactly that. Gertrude went back to sleep.
In the name of Wayne, who passed in 2018, I started the Wayne Sizemore Fund. It pays for first month rent, hurricane repairs and new roofs for older residents of mobile home parks, in Marion, Citrus and Sumter counties. In the first year we repaired one hundred nine homes. A woman of eighty one in a single wide near Dunnellon, whose roof had been under a blue tarp since the last storm, stood in her yard and watched the shingles go on. She told me she had never in her life been given something she did not have to pay back.
Tammy comes to the park on Saturdays now in jeans and an old shirt, and she fixes toilets with Rosa and sits with the tenants who cannot pay. She parks the Lexus around the corner on purpose, she says, so that nobody will mistake her for a visitor. Last week I found her at the clubhouse counting rent in a coffee can. She looked up and said, “Mama, how did you know where to put the decimal point for forty one years?” I said the land does not care who looks down on it. She said, “No. But it knows who looks after it.”