The woman looked at me and said, “I thought you knew. Your husband told me I could stay here until Keith came back.” I told her Keith wasn’t coming back and that nobody had permission to live in my house. She looked genuinely confused. Then she pointed toward the mattress and said my husband had brought it down in December. The hot plate was his too. So was the little refrigerator I’d thought we’d thrown away. I asked how long she’d been staying there. She said almost four months. Then she handed me a stack of mail and said, “He told me to keep these here so you wouldn’t see them.”
I went upstairs and called my husband. He didn’t answer. I called again, and this time he picked up. I asked him who the woman downstairs was. He said her name was Marlene and that she’d fallen on hard times. I asked why he’d moved her into our basement without telling me. He said she wasn’t hurting anyone and that she’d be gone soon. Then I asked why he’d been locking the basement door every morning. He went quiet. I asked what was in the mail. He told me not to open it. That was when I knew there was something he hadn’t told me. I opened the oldest envelope. It was from the county.
The property records showed Marlene had filed for a mailing address change using our house as her residence. But the strangest document was dated six months earlier. My husband had signed a statement saying she had permission to occupy the basement as a tenant. I had never seen it. I called the county and asked whether anything else had been filed under our address. The clerk paused and said there was one more document — an application for a business license. I asked whose name was on it. She read it back to me. It was Marlene’s. Then she said, “Ma’am, the business address is your basement, and your husband is listed as the emergency contact.” I looked at the woman standing in my kitchen and asked what she actually did down there. She started crying and said, “He told me you were his landlord.”
