A Meter Reader’s Notes

I never told anybody the real reason I moved out. I just said mold. There was mold too, to be fair.
I read gas meters for a living. Did it about seven years, around Dayton, Ohio. You see a lot of homes in this job. More than a hundred a day. The meter’s usually in a basement, a utility closet, sometimes out on the back porch — you open up, write the number, walk out. Thirty seconds tops. But in those thirty seconds you read the whole house. Whether somebody actually lives there, alone or with family, neat or rough. Occupational habit.
To tell you about the place I lived, I have to start with the job, because the job is why I picked the place.
Fall of 2017, I had to move. I found a two-bedroom unit that fit my budget, second floor of a small building. Realtor said it got good light and the gas ran cheap. The cheap-gas part hooked me. See, that’s a real signal. A unit with consistently low gas usage either has good insulation or the last tenant lived careful — one or the other. It means it’s not a bad place. So I signed.
About a month after moving in.
I came home one evening, opened the utility closet, and the meter number caught my eye. Job being the job, I just see it. I can’t not see it. And the number that day was a little off.
I barely used any gas. My life was out in the morning, back at night, and that day all I’d made was a pot of ramen before work. Meters are honest. A pot of noodles barely moves the dial. Look at the tenths and it ticks up a hair, but during the eight or nine hours a person’s out of the house, it should sit still. I hadn’t set the furnace on a timer or anything.
But the…