The Service Center

The letter from the Urban Renewal Agency came in the spring, and Dolores Morales read it twice at the kitchen table and then she read it to her daughter Maria over the telephone, and Maria said she would come on Sunday and they would talk about it, and Dolores said there was nothing to talk about, the letter had already done the talking, but she was glad the girl was coming anyway.

The house was on a short street off Sage, east of Wells, three rooms and a porch and a yard where her husband Hector had grown tomatoes until the year he died. It was not in the good part of town and it never had been. The neighborhood ran from the alley north of Fourth Street up to Sixth, and east of Wells toward Sage, and the families in it were the families the rest of Reno did not think about, the Italians whose fathers had come for the railroad, the colored families who could not buy anywhere else, a few Mexican families like the Moraleses who had been in the Truckee Meadows longer than most of the people who looked down on them. Hector’s grandmother Guadalupe had come up from Sonora in 1869 and worked the railyard by the river, and the family had been somewhere in the bottom of this town ever since, by the river first and then up here, ninety-some years of it, and now a letter on government paper said the neighborhood was blight.

That was the word. Dolores had looked it up to be sure she understood it. Blight. A thing that withers a plant, that spoils it from inside. They had surveyed the whole area years back, declared it a slum and a blight, and gone to Washington for the money, and now the money was here and the Agency was buying the houses one by one and tearing them down, and the families were being scattered, two hundred of them and more, paid for their homes and sent off to find somewhere else, and the children who had walked to Orvis Ring on Evans Avenue would walk somewhere else now, or be driven, or be gone.

Maria came Sunday after Mass. She was twenty-five, working days at an insurance office downtown and taking her classes at night, planning to make something of herself in an office with a window, and she sat at the kitchen table where Dolores had read the letter and she went through the papers slowly, the appraisal and the offer and the relocation notice, and her face while she read them was a face Dolores did not entirely recognize, older than the girl had any right to look, set hard around the mouth.

“They’re offering you what the house is worth,” Maria said finally. “On paper. What a house like this is worth on paper in a neighborhood they already condemned. It’s not enough to buy in anyplace decent and they know it.”

“It is what they are offering.”

“That’s not the same as enough, Mama.”

Dolores got up and put the coffee on, because she needed to do something with her hands. Out the window the yard was coming green, Hector’s old tomato ground gone to weeds she had never had the heart to clear, and beyond the back fence she could see two houses already down on the next street, just gaps now, flat dirt where the Bettencourt place and the Salcido place had stood, the wood hauled off, nothing left but the front walks running up to where the doors had been. They were going to put commerce here, the Agency said. A service center. Warehouses and businesses, close to the new freeway they were building north of Fourth, the interstate that would let a man drive clear across the country without stopping in Reno at all. The neighborhood was being cleared to make a place convenient to a road designed to pass it by.

“Where will you go?” Maria asked, quieter now.

“I do not know yet.” Dolores watched the coffee. “Your aunt says there are apartments out toward the south. Cousin Eddie says come to Sparks, there is room, but I am not going to Sparks to live in Eddie’s spare room at my age and listen to him talk about the railroad.” She almost smiled. “I will find something. People find something. That is what people do.”

Maria did not answer. She was looking at the relocation notice, at the map printed on the back of it, the neighborhood drawn in clean lines with the project boundary around it like a fence, every house a little rectangle with a number, her mother’s house a rectangle with a number, the place she had been born reduced to a parcel on a planner’s map, and Dolores watched her daughter look at that map for a long time, longer than the map deserved, and she understood that Maria was not reading it the way Dolores had read it. Dolores had read it as a sentence already passed. Maria was reading it as a thing that someone had made, in an office, with a window, with a pen, the kind of office Maria was studying nights to work in, and she was learning something from it that Dolores could not teach her and was not sure she wanted her to know.

“You could fight it,” Maria said. “Some of them are fighting it. There was a case, it went all the way up. The Agency won, but still.”

“I am sixty years old. I am not going to spend what I have left fighting the United States government over three rooms and a tomato patch.” Dolores poured the coffee and brought two cups to the table and sat down across from her daughter. “You want to fight something, Maria, you go and learn how the map gets made. You go and sit in the room where they draw the fence. That is where the fighting is. Not here at my kitchen table after they have already drawn it.”

Maria looked up from the map. Something moved behind her eyes, and Dolores knew she had said either exactly the right thing or exactly the wrong one, and that she would not know which for years.

“Drink your coffee,” Dolores said. “It is getting cold, and I did not condemn it. They only condemned the house.”

Maria laughed, once, despite herself, and she set the relocation notice down on the table, but Dolores noticed that when the girl gathered her things to go that evening, she folded the notice with its printed map and put it in her purse and took it with her, and she did not ask if she could, and Dolores did not say a word.

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