The letter came in a plain white envelope with no return address, and I knew what it was before I opened it because I had been waiting eleven days for the check that was supposed to be inside it.
I stood on the little concrete stoop of my new apartment across town, the mailbox key still in my hand, and I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, standing there in the cold, because the numbers were not making sense to me. Mr. Vance was not returning my security deposit. Not part of it. Not most of it. All of it. Sixteen hundred dollars, gone, itemized on a single sheet of paper against a list of damages to a duplex I had kept cleaner than the day I moved in.
Continue on the next page:
