I Cleaned an Elderly Woman’s House for 26 Years, but After Her Funeral, Her Son Fired Me and Handed Me $300
Before I left, Carlton came into the kitchen.
“Elnora,” he said. “Will you come back tomorrow? To help start packing up her things? The clothes. The kitchen. I don’t know where anything is.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Nine o’clock.”
“Thank you,” he said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Like he wanted to say something else.
He didn’t.
The next morning, I drove back out to the Hampshire Pike.
In my twelve-year-old Buick. With a box of trash bags and a roll of packing tape on the passenger seat.
I parked by the back door. Where I always parked. For twenty-six years.
I walked up the steps.
Carlton met me at the back door.
He didn’t open the screen.
He stood behind it. In a gray sweater. His hands in his pockets.
Behind him in the kitchen, I could see his brothers.
Thurston and Bertram. Leaning on her counter. Drinking her coffee. Out of her good china cups. The ones with the little blue flowers. The ones I’d washed and dried and put away the night before.
Thurston had his boots up on her kitchen chair.
Carlton reached into his pocket.
He held out a check.
Through the crack of that screen door.
I took it.
I looked at it.
Three hundred dollars.
Made out to Elnora Whitsett.
Signed Carlton A. Lockridge.
“Mother’s gone,” he said. “We won’t be needing you.”
That was all.
Twenty-six years.
And he didn’t even ask me in.
I stood on the back steps of the house where I learned to walk.
Holding a check.
Looking through a screen door at two grown men drinking coffee out of a dead woman’s china.
I’d always thought Carlton was the good one.
The son who called his mama every Sunday at three o’clock.
The one who stood alone on the porch at the funeral.
The one who said, You were with her more than any of us.
I’d thought wrong, I told myself.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I don’t know why I said sir.
I’ve been saying it my whole life. To Lockridges. To doctors’ wives. To lawyers. To the dentist with the toothbrush.
Mama said it. Her mama said it. It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it.
Yes, sir.
I turned around.
I walked back down the steps.
I got in my Buick.
Behind me, through the screen, I heard Bertram laugh.
I cried all the way home.
Eight miles. Down the Hampshire Pike. Past the Dollar General and the Methodist church and the feed store.
With that check on the seat beside me.
Three hundred dollars.
At my age, cleaning that house was my whole income. Besides my Social Security.
Seven hundred and eighty-four dollars a month. It comes on the third. It doesn’t stretch. My rent on East End Street is six-fifty. The light bill is ninety. My blood pressure pills are forty-one dollars a month even with the Medicare.
Mrs. Lockridge paid me two hundred dollars a week. Cash. Every Friday. In an envelope. Under my coffee cup.
That’s what kept me.
I got home at ten-thirty in the morning.
I sat down at my kitchen table.
I put the check in front of me.
I looked at it.
That night, I called my daughter.
Alfreda lives in Murfreesboro. She’s fifty-one. She teaches fourth grade at Black Fox Elementary. She’s married to a man named Dwayne who works at the Nissan plant in Smyrna. They have two boys in high school and a mortgage and a minivan with a transmission problem.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Mama? It’s late. Are you okay?”
I told her.
The back door. The screen. The china cups. The check.
Mother’s gone. We won’t be needing you.
Alfreda was quiet.
“Mama,” she said finally. “You can’t keep scrubbing floors at seventy-two anyhow.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked her.
She got quiet.
Real quiet.
I could hear the TV in the background. One of the boys yelling about a video game.
“We can’t take you in, Mama,” she said. “We just can’t right now.”
I sat there with the phone to my ear.
“Dwayne’s hours got cut,” Alfreda said. Fast. Like she’d been practicing. “Marcus needs braces. The roof’s leaking. There’s no room, Mama. The boys share a room already. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I understand,” I said.
I did understand.
That was the worst part.
I hung up.
I sat in my kitchen.
And I looked at that three-hundred-dollar check until it got dark.
I didn’t cash it.
I don’t know why.
I put it on the refrigerator. Under a magnet shaped like a peach that Mrs. Lockridge brought me back from a trip to Georgia in 1997.
I looked at it every morning.
Mother’s gone. We won’t be needing you.
I started looking for other work.
I called the doctors’ wives. The ones I used to clean for in the eighties. Most of them were dead. The ones that weren’t had cleaning services now. Young girls with matching T-shirts and a van.
I called the Methodist church about cleaning the fellowship hall. They had a man.
I called the nursing home on Hatcher Lane about the kitchen.
They asked how old I was.
I told them.
They said they’d call me back.
A week later, my phone rang.
It was a Tuesday. Ten in the morning. I was sitting at my kitchen table doing the crossword in the Daily Herald. In pencil. I never could do it in ink like she could.
The phone rang.
A number I didn’t know. A 931 number. Local.
I almost didn’t answer.
I did.
“Is this Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett?” a woman asked.
Nobody calls me by all three names but the doctor’s office.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“This is Rosella,” she said. “At the register of deeds. Over at the courthouse.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need you to come see me, honey,” she said. “Bring your ID.”
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