week. That was a lot of money to lose.
But it wasn’t about the money. I knew it wasn’t.
I just didn’t know what it was about.
The last Thursday was the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
The movers had come on Monday. Most of the furniture was gone. The piano was gone, shipped to Susan’s house. The long dining room table was gone. The beds were gone. The rugs were
rolled up and gone.
I walked into that house at nine o’clock, and my footsteps echoed.
I cleaned it anyway. There wasn’t much left to clean. Mostly I wiped down the empty rooms and
swept the bare floors. But I did every room. Every bathroom. I cleaned the claw-foot tub, even though nobody would use it for a while. I cleaned the checkered kitchen floor on my hands and knees, the way I had four hundred times before.
It was harder than I expected. There were pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had hung for fifty years. The wedding photo. The little girl on the swing. The man with the bow tie and the fish. The wallpaper around them had faded, and the rectangles underneath were brighter, like
ghosts.
The kitchen calendar was gone. It had hung by the phone for eight years. Every Thursday, there was a little C written on it in her perfect cursive. I used to see it and feel something I couldn’t name.
I kept reaching to move things that weren’t there anymore. I went to lift the picture frames off the piano, and there was no piano. I went to straighten the guest towels, and there were no towels. I went to check the sticky drawer, and the drawer was empty, and it slid open without sticking at all,
because somebody had finally fixed it.
It was me. I had fixed it two years ago. With a bar of soap on the runners.
Mrs. Whitaker was there. She was sitting in one of the two chairs she’d kept, at the small round
kitchen table by the window. She didn’t read. She didn’t drink her tea. She just sat there and watched me work.
At two o’clock, I was done. I put my supplies back in my bucket. I carried it to the front door.
Then I took the brass key off my key ring. The one she’d handed me eight years ago in this same kitchen. Don’t lose it. I hadn’t. Not once.
