Kyle had no idea who owned the park. That was the first thing I understood, sitting in the office of Joanne with a cup of coffee and a list of lot numbers. He had learned from a friend, a property manager in Orlando named Chip Dalton, that Lakeside Pines had been sold, and that the buyer would pay a relocation fee of four thousand dollars for every lot cleared in the first ninety days. The buyer in Tampa had never offered it. Chip had invented it, to move people out so that he could buy the lots cheap, and Kyle believed every word, because Kyle always believes anyone who says money is coming.
Joanne Rourke had followed the white pickup to a gas station on Highway 27 and written down the plate, and she had also recorded Kyle on her phone, handing a notice to Mr. Albright, who is ninety three and a veteran of Korea. He read it twice and said, “Son, I was at the Chosin Reservoir. A piece of paper does not scare me.” I played the recording three times, and then I drove to the hospital in Ocala. Mrs. Pickett had a broken wrist and a bruised pride. She held my hand and said, “Merle, I knew you would come.”
By nine that night I had a copy of the purchase contract on my kitchen table, with the bold clause my lawyer, Carlton Fisk of Ocala, wrote in 2023: no forced evictions, no rent increase above three percent, and any person who acts as an agent of the buyer without written authority exposes the buyer to cancel the deal. I looked at that line a long time. It was a sword and a shield, and it was pointing, by accident, right at my own son in law. Dot used to say that every bully carries a receipt. I called Carlton and told him to bring a notary.
A bold clause gave one pool salesman the length of a Saturday morning to bring his father in law back to the truth in Ocala.
I gave my terms to Kyle at seven the next morning at the pool of Lakeside Pines, which is where the residents gather at that hour for water aerobics. He had come back to hand out more notices. I stood at the edge of the shallow end in my rubber boots, with Joanne beside me, Carlton in a seersucker suit and forty residents in the water. I said that every notice would be withdrawn in writing by noon, that he would apologize in person to every household, that Chip Dalton would be reported, and that if he did these things I would keep the matter inside the family.
Kyle held a stack of notices dripping from the splash. He said that his pool business in Gainesville had lost its two biggest accounts, that he owed his supplier sixty thousand dollars and that Chip had promised him a fee for every lot he cleared, and that he told himself it was a favor to the family because the park was just a trailer park anyway. He stopped. The women in the water had gone quiet. “Mr. Haskins,” he said, “I said that at the party, about the trailers, and I think I have been saying it in my head for years.”
Then Kyle did the cowardly thing. He snatched the clipboard out of the hand of Carlton, meaning to run to his truck with the signed contract copy, and he bolted from the pool deck across the park road toward the gate, his wet shoes squeaking. Joanne cried, “Stop that man.” Forty residents turned in the water as one, all of them wearing their swim caps. I leaned on the rail. It has been my experience that nothing in a mobile home park happens without somebody seeing it, and everybody saw this.
A Thoroughbred yearling from the farm next to the park, who had slipped through a broken fence that morning, was standing in the middle of the road eating a hibiscus. Kyle ran straight into the colt. The colt, who was young and offended, shook his head, stepped sideways and sat down in front of the truck, which no horse in Marion County has ever done on purpose. Kyle stood there holding the clipboard, and the colt licked it. Mr. Albright, in his lawn chair by lot 12, called out, “Son, you can ask him nicely. He was here first.”
Every notice was withdrawn by noon, as I had asked, and Kyle spent the following weekend going from door to door with a box of donuts and an apology, with Joanne walking behind him with a clipboard of her own. Chip Dalton lost his license when the state saw the recording. The buyer in Tampa sent a letter thanking me for the information and stating that anyone acting as their agent without authority would be pursued. Mrs. Pickett came home from the hospital in a golf cart parade. Kyle sold the white pickup and went to work for a pool supplier in Ocala that paid by the hour.
In the name of Dot, who passed in 2021, I started the Dot Haskins Tootsie Roll Fund. It pays for lawyers, moving help and emergency rent for older residents of mobile home parks who face a wrongful eviction, in Marion, Lake and Sumter counties. In the first year we helped twenty three households keep their lots, and the first was a retired school bus driver named Mr. Oakley in a park outside Leesburg, whose landlord had posted a notice on a Friday night. Carlton takes the cases for half his rate. The children of the park hand out the Tootsie Rolls at every hearing.
In June, Brooke came to the park for a weekend with a box under her arm. Inside was a framed photograph of herself at six, standing in the shallow end of the pool with a mouth full of Tootsie Roll and Dot laughing behind her. She hung it in the clubhouse next to the shuffleboard trophies. Lorna came too, and stood in the doorway for a long minute. Then she hugged me, and said, “Daddy, I am sorry about the jokes.” I said I had been called worse. We ate pulled pork on the porch, and Kyle brought the napkins.
