I called Mrs. Whitaker on Wednesday night. I was so nervous my voice shook.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know this is unprofessional. Would it be all right if I brought my daughter tomorrow? She’ll be quiet. She’ll just sit in a corner and read. I promise she won’t touch anything.”
There was a long pause on the other end.
“Bring her,” Mrs. Whitaker said.
So I brought Willa. She was nine and a half, with a messy brown braid and glasses that were
always sliding down her nose. I sat her at the kitchen table with her library book and a sketchpad and made her promise, four times, that she would not move from that chair.
Mrs. Whitaker was home that day. She came into the kitchen around ten and looked at Willa sitting
at her table.
Willa looked back at her. She pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Hi,” Willa said. “I like your house. It has a lot of windows.”
“It does,” Mrs. Whitaker agreed.
“How many?”
Mrs. Whitaker thought about it. “I don’t know, actually. I’ve never counted.”
“Can I count them?”
I was halfway up the stairs with a bucket. I stopped. “Willa. We talked about this. You stay in the chair.”
Mrs. Whitaker looked at me. Then at Willa.
“She can count them,” she said. “I’d like to know.”
So my daughter spent that whole snow day walking around Margaret Whitaker’s house with a
sketchpad, counting windows and drawing a floor plan. Room by room. She drew the kitchen with the checkered floor. She drew the living room with the piano. She drew the claw-foot tub.
When she was done, she presented it to Mrs. Whitaker at the kitchen table.
“Forty-two windows,” Willa announced. “And one of them in the attic is broken. There’s a bird’s
nest in it.”
Mrs. Whitaker looked at the drawing for a long, long time. She didn’t say anything.
“You can keep it,” Willa said. “If you want.”
“Thank you, Willa,” Mrs. Whitaker said quietly. “I’d like that very much.”
I didn’t think about it again. I figured it would end up in a drawer somewhere, or in the recycling
bin.
Life went on. It wasn’t easy. But it went on.
I picked up more clients. By the second year, I had nine houses a week. Mondays were the Garcias and the young couple with the twins. Tuesdays were the dentist’s office and old Mr. Pham.
