staying another year

Tuesday night, I signed a new lease for our existing house, guaranteeing us the right to stay through May (with option to extend through August.)

This has been quite a process.

On August 14th, the landlord said he wanted the house back. "Karen, our family situation has changed and we will needing the 111 Franklin house by January 1, 2010. As such, the present contract will be honored on a month-to-month basis until the the above time."

I pressed for details. After all, when I call up with a problem like "the closet rod just broke off of the closet," I usually have to spend awhile hearing about the problems he's having with animals, repairs, and/or people (his retarded brother, his wife wanting him to leave- more on that later) as he tries to distract me from the idea of having him fix anything.

But in this case, all I got was, "As I mentioned, our family situation has changed and we need use of the house. We could use the premises like right away, but we didn't want to inconvenience you more than necessary."

Hypothesis A: his wife kicked him out.

I (long story short here) decided that the easiest solution was to move into the house across the street, a house that looked rather ramshackle and had attracted some dubious previous tenants, the patriarch of which liked to yell, "Boy, get your ass in here!" at his sons, and who lived in the house for 2 weeks after the electricity and water were cut off (think about the details of that), and was then evicted. But I digress.

The across-the-street landlord completely redid the whole place, so it was like our house except newer and with less storage. He called our landlord as part of the background check.

At this point I got a call from my landlord's wife, surprised that we were moving out immediately and not when it would be convenient for them, namely, in January. It turned out that she wanted to move their adult son into the house, have him live there for free, and find him a roommate that would pay their mortgage payment- not terribly fair, but at least disproving Hypothesis A.

Two weeks later, we finally actually got offered the house across the street, and after a wee bit of deliberation I called the landlord's wife to ask her if they'd be OK with us moving Sept. 15th. Pause. "So, let me ask you something... would you guys be happier if you didn't have to move?"

Yes, actually, we would, even though we were rather happy about being THIS CLOSE to getting rid of you as landlords.

So, we're staying.

The odd thing is...

...we have not actually spoken to the landlord through all of this, we've only spoken to his wife.

That would not be so strange if he hadn't been showing this other woman around the property. A blonde woman (his favorite). A kind of trailer-trashy looking woman with some sort of American flag T-shirt. They were holding hands on our street. At that point I thought she was the landlord's wife, for obvious reasons.

Then his wife came over to have us sign the lease, and she's an academic-looking type, with grayish hair, very nice. Decidedly not the same woman.

Meanwhile, the landlord is in Florida for the funeral of his retarded brother.

Hypothesis B: The wife leased us the house unbeknownst to him and the blond woman. Then she sent him to Florida with a one-way ticket.

I hope Hypothesis B is right.