I Cleaned an Elderly Woman’s House for 26 Years, but After Her Funeral, Her Son Fired Me and Handed Me $300
My heart went to pounding.
“Is something wrong?” I said. “Did I do something?”
“No, honey,” Rosella said. “You didn’t do anything. I just need you to come in. When you can. I’m here every day eight to four-thirty.”
“What’s it about?”
Rosella was quiet for a second.
“I’d rather you see it,” she said. “In person.”
She hung up.
I sat there.
I thought somebody had stolen my name.
You hear about that on the news. Old people. Somebody takes your Social Security number and opens credit cards and you end up owing ten thousand dollars to a bank in Delaware.
Or I owed something.
Taxes. A fine. Something from when Clarence died. Some paper I didn’t sign right.
Something I couldn’t pay.
I called Alfreda again.
At school. On her lunch break.
I told her.
“Mama,” she said. “What did she say it was about?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said the register of deeds.”
Alfreda was quiet.
“The register of deeds,” she said slowly. “That’s property. Land. Mama, is this about the Lockridge place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mama,” Alfreda said. “Don’t you go stirring up those Lockridge boys.”
Her voice was sharp. Scared.
“If this is about their land,” she said, “they’ll eat you alive.”
She was right.
I knew she was right.
Those boys have money. Friends at the courthouse. Lawyers in Nashville. Thurston plays golf with the county commissioner. Bertram’s second wife was the daughter of a circuit judge.
And I have a twelve-year-old Buick and a three-hundred-dollar check on my refrigerator.
“Leave it alone, Mama,” Alfreda said. “Please. Whatever it is. Just leave it alone.”
For a whole day, I didn’t go.
I told myself to leave it alone.
Some things are better not poked at. When you’re old. And by yourself. And Black. In Maury County, Tennessee.
My mama used to say that.
Don’t go poking at white folks’ business, Elnora. Nothing good comes of it.
She said it when I was nine and asked why we didn’t eat at the big table at Thanksgiving.
She said it when I was sixteen and asked why the Lockridge boys went to Columbia Academy and I went to the colored school until they closed it.
She said it when I was thirty and asked why she’d never once been given a raise in twenty years.
Don’t go poking.
So I didn’t.
Tuesday. Wednesday.
I stayed home. I did my crossword. I watered my tomato plants. I looked at the check on the refrigerator.
But Thursday morning, I got up early.
Thursday.
The day I used to do her floors.
For twenty-six years. Every Thursday. On my knees. With a bucket and a brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap. Every room. The parlor. The dining room. The front hall with the black-and-white tile.
She’d follow me from room to room. With her coffee. Talking.
Elnora, did you know the Hendersons sold their farm to a man from California?
Elnora, I think the new preacher wears a toupee.
Elnora, you’re the only person in this world who’s ever gotten that hall floor to shine like my mother-in-law used to.
I woke up at five-thirty.
Same as always.
My body didn’t know she was gone.
I lay there in the dark.
And I thought about her face.
In the sitting room. At Christmas. When Thurston said Mother pays you anyway, what’s the difference.
How still it went.
And I thought about the napkin.
Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett.
I want to get it right.
I got up.
I put on my good dress. The navy blue one with the white collar. The one I wore to Clarence’s funeral and Mama’s funeral and Mrs. Lockridge’s funeral.
I put on my good shoes.
I put my driver’s license in my pocketbook.
I took the check off the refrigerator. I don’t know why. I put it in my pocketbook too.
And I drove to the courthouse.
The Maury County Courthouse is in the middle of the square in Columbia. Big. Brick and stone. A clock tower. Built in 1904.
When I was a girl, there was a water fountain on the second floor with a sign over it.
It’s gone now. They took it out in 1965. But I remember where it was.
I always look at the spot when I walk past.
The register of deeds is on the first floor. Down a long hallway. A wooden counter. Shelves behind it. Floor to ceiling. Full of big books.
Rosella was waiting at the counter.
She was about my age. Seventy, maybe. White. Small. Silver hair in a neat bun. A cardigan. Glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
She saw me come in.
She took off her glasses.
“You’re Elnora,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at me for a long time.
“I played bridge with Henrietta every Tuesday for forty years,” she said.
I didn’t know that.
“Every Tuesday,” Rosella said. “At her house. Four of us. Me and Henrietta and Lucille Bryant and Margaret Haynes. Lucille passed in 2018. Margaret’s in the nursing home on Hatcher Lane. It was just me and Henrietta the last few years. We played gin rummy instead.”
She smiled. A small, sad smile.
“She cheated,” she said.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“She did,” I said. “She cheated at checkers too.”
Rosella stopped smiling.
“She made me promise,” she said quietly. “Back in the spring. She made me promise I’d be the one to call you.”
She came around the counter.
She took me by the arm.
Her hand was small. Cool. Steady.
She walked me back.
Past the counter. Past the shelves. Into a room in the back. With long tables. Wooden. Old. Scarred from a hundred years of elbows.
On one of the tables, there was a book.
A big one. Heavy. Thick as a family Bible.
Bound in dark red leather. Cracked at the corners.
Down the spine, in gold letters:
DEED BOOK — MAURY COUNTY — VOL. 2847
She opened it to a page she’d marked with a strip of paper.
She turned the book around to face me.
She put her finger on a line.
“Read it, honey,” she said. “Read it yourself.”
I put on my reading glasses.
My hands were shaking so bad I nearly dropped them.
I looked down.
QUITCLAIM DEED
KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS, that HENRIETTA CALDWELL LOCKRIDGE, a widow, of Maury County, Tennessee, hereinafter called Grantor, for and in consideration of the sum of ONE DOLLAR ($1.00) and other good and valuable consideration, the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, does hereby REMISE, RELEASE, AND FOREVER QUITCLAIM unto
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