On the ninth day, I took a bus up to Worthington because a coffee shop there had a HELP WANTED sign in the window. When I got there, the sign was gone.

I was so tired and hungry that I walked into the little grocery store next door to buy a banana and a carton of milk. Two dollars and eighteen cents.

On my way out, I passed the community bulletin board by the door. Lost cats. Guitar lessons. A church rummage sale.

And an index card, handwritten in careful blue ink, in old-fashioned cursive.

Live-in woman wanted to cook and keep house. Room, board, and $600 a week. Must be honest and able to work. Inquire: Mrs. O. Hargrove.

There was a phone number at the bottom.

I read it twice.

Then I took the card off the board, put it in my pocket, and walked to the pay phone outside, because I didn’t have a cell phone.

The woman looking for help was Opal Hargrove. She was seventy-four years old and a widow, and she lived alone in a white two-story house on a quiet street lined with oak trees.

She opened the door before I even knocked.

She was wearing a navy blue dress with a white collar, and her white hair was pinned up in a neat twist at the back of her head. She was small and straight-backed, with a cane she didn’t seem to need much. But it was her eyes I noticed. Sharp gray eyes, like a schoolteacher’s. Eyes that seemed to see things I was working very hard not to show.

She looked me up and down. My too-big blue shirt. My worn-out sneakers. The plastic grocery bag with a banana in it.

“Come in,” she said. “Wipe your feet.”

We sat in her kitchen. It smelled like coffee and lemon dish soap. There was a stack of newspapers on one chair and a shoebox full of crumpled receipts on the counter.

“Can you cook real home-cooked food?” she asked. “Not out of a box. I mean real food.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What can you make?”

“Pot roast. Chicken and dumplings. Meatloaf. My mother’s chili. I can bake bread, if you have a decent oven.”

She nodded slowly. “Can you keep books?”

I almost laughed.

“Better than I cook,” I said.

One of her white eyebrows went up.

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Then you start tomorrow,” she said.

I almost said yes. I almost just took it and ran.

But I’d spent nine days watching people’s faces change on the phone. I didn’t want to see hers change after I’d already unpacked.

“Mrs. Hargrove,” I said. “Before you decide, there’s something you should know. I just got out of prison. Nine days ago. I served almost four years for fraud.” I took a breath. “I didn’t do it. But I know everybody says that.”

She didn’t say anything right away.

She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip. She put it down again. She looked at me over the rim of it.

“I asked if you knew how to work,” she said. “Not whether your life has been perfect.”

I just sat there.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Seven o’clock. I like my eggs scrambled soft, and I like my coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. Can you manage that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My voice cracked a little.

“Good. Now eat that banana before it goes brown. You look like you haven’t had a real meal in a week.”

That evening, I moved into a small bedroom on the second floor, at the back of the house. It had a single bed with a white chenille bedspread, a wooden dresser, a lamp with a fringed shade, and a window that looked out over Opal’s backyard. There was a clothesline out there, strung between two metal poles. A vegetable garden with tomato cages. A bird feeder.

I set my plastic bag on the dresser.

Then I closed the bedroom door.

I just stood there with my hand on the doorknob.

For almost four years, I hadn’t been allowed to close a door. Other people decided when doors opened and when they shut. A guard with keys. A buzzer. A loudspeaker. Count time, six times a day.

I turned the doorknob and opened the door again. Then I closed it. Then I opened it.

I did it four times.

Nobody yelled. Nobody came.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands. I didn’t cry. I just sat there and listened to the quiet of a room that was, for now, mine.

For the first few days, Opal and I kept things completely professional.

I made breakfast at seven. Soft scrambled eggs and coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. I made lunch at noon and supper at six. I washed her clothes and ironed her dresses and dusted the china cabinet in the dining room, which was full of little porcelain birds.

She ate alone at the dining table. I ate alone in the kitchen. That was how she wanted it, and I didn’t mind. I was used to eating fast and alone.

On the third day, I started on the shoebox.

It was full of receipts. Grocery receipts. Pharmacy receipts. Utility bills. Bank statements she’d stuffed in there without opening. Some of them went back two years.

I sat at the kitchen table after supper with a pencil and a legal pad and sorted them into piles. By category. By month. I made a little ledger in neat columns. Income on one side, expenses on the other.

When I was done, I found two problems. Her cable company had been charging her twice a month for eleven months. And the man who mowed her lawn had been billing her for weekly service in the winter, when nothing grows.

I wrote it all down and left the legal pad on the dining table next to her coffee cup in the morning.

She read it while she ate her eggs. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she looked up at me over her glasses.

“You weren’t always a housekeeper, were you?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I used to run a company.”

I waited for the questions. What kind of company? What happened? Who were you before?

She just nodded and picked up her phone and called the cable company and gave them a piece of her mind for twenty minutes straight.

That was the first time I really liked her.