trailer park, remove his hat, and knock softly on Larraine’s door.
When they got to the Southside Church of Christ, a modest brick building with a high-pitched roof roughly a mile and a half northwest of the trailer park, Mr. Dabbs would hold the door open. Larraine would step gracefully in, walking past her photograph on the wall displaying members’ portraits. In the sanctuary—a humble space, unadorned—sunlight from large back windows streamed onto the pews. The ceiling bowed up, resembling a great overturned boat. Larraine would take her seat in the second to last pew on the left, next to Susan and Lane. This was where her family had always sat. Susan usually ignored Larraine and pretended to read the bulletin as Pastor Daryl, a large man with red hair and beard, strolled the aisle, shaking hands and slapping backs.
This being a Church of Christ, there was no organ or piano; no acoustic guitar. When the congregation stood to sing “I Stand in Awe” or “O Worship the King,” voices rose up a cappella. Larraine prayed with her palms resting gently on her thighs. When it was time to take the offering, she would let the basket pass. Susan would drop something in.
Recently, Pastor Daryl had been preaching on “The Cost of Discipleship.” He would pace the front of the church, Bible in one hand, PowerPoint clicker in the other, and repeat Jesus’s more impossible injunctions: “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
“I think one of the biggest shames of Christianity is people that halfway follow Jesus,” Pastor Daryl observed one Sunday. “A partial commitment is a dangerous way to live….You got neighbors around you that need help. You got people that need helping and that need loving and, as Christians, you can be demonstrating that love to them.” During Pastor Daryl’s sermons, Larraine would sit still with near-perfect posture, rapt from beginning to end. She loved going to church and had since she was a child.
When Larraine called Pastor Daryl to ask if the church could lend her money so that she might avoid eviction, he said he’d have to think about it. The last time Larraine called, she had said she’d been robbed at gunpoint. Pastor Daryl reached into the church’s coffers and gave her a few hundred dollars for the rent. Larraine had been robbed, but not by a stranger with a gun. Susan and Lane’s cokehead daughter had broken into her trailer when no one was home. Susan phoned Pastor Daryl to report Larraine’s lie.
Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was “pure Christianity.” When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. “She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly….Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, ‘Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.’ ” It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded—that was a more trying matter.
Pastor Daryl called Susan and told her that Larraine had asked for money to stay her eviction. Susan replied by saying that she didn’t think the church should give her sister anything. Pastor Daryl called Larraine back and told her that he wouldn’t be helping this time.
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In the trailer park office, Lenny was bent over his desk, filling in his rent rolls, when a woman named Britney Baker walked in. She was in her late twenties, wearing cheap sunglasses. Britney pulled her mail out of her box and then turned to Lenny.
“I’m going to pay it, you know,” she said.
“Good,” Lenny said.
“I’m going to pay this week. Don’t give me a five-day. I mean, Tobin knows my situation.”
And with that, Britney left. Lenny shook his head and looked back down at his rent rolls, which showed that Britney owed a balance of $2,156.
The relationship between nonpayment of rent and eviction was anything but straightforward. Every month in the trailer park, tenants who owed more than a thousand dollars were not evicted while some who owed far less
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