The Five Thousand a Month I Never Saw

“I’m going to tell Pastor Dale to quit paying me. They can put that toward the youth van. But somebody has got to clean that building, and I know where everything is.” I looked at him over my glasses. “What I want is help. Thursdays, five o’clock. It goes a good deal faster with two.”

It took him a second.

“You want me to come clean the church.”

“I want you to come see me. Once a week, on a day I can count on. You can’t sit still any better than your daddy could, so you may as well have a vacuum in your hand while you do it.” I got up to put the kettle on. “Bring Tyler. He owes me a Thursday. He can do the hymnal racks.”

My son stood in the middle of my one room in his good coat and looked at me like he had never seen me before in his life.

Maybe he had not. I am not sure I had let him.

“Five o’clock,” he said.

“Five o’clock. Wear old shoes.”

He stayed for a cup of tea. On his way out he stopped on the third step and rocked on it again.

“I’m fixing this Saturday,” he said.

He did, too. He brought his own drill.

I worked my two weeks. Ronnie gave me a sheet cake from the bakery case with Good Luck Sandy on it in green icing, and Cody’s mother came through lane four on my last morning on purpose and hugged my neck right over the conveyor belt. I double bagged her milk.

I told Pastor Dale to take me off the payroll. He argued for about a minute and a half.

The first Thursday, I truly did not know if Matt would come. I got there at a quarter till and unlocked the side door and filled the mop bucket, and I told myself that a man with eleven crews has things come up.

At two minutes to five I heard his truck in the gravel.

Tyler came in first, in old tennis shoes, carrying a dust rag like it was a flag. Matt came in behind him and stood in the back of the sanctuary with his hands on his hips, sizing up the job the way he must size up a roof.

“Where do you want me?”

“Vacuum’s in the closet by the baptistry. Go with the nap, not against it.”

He has missed two Thursdays since. Both times he called ahead.

I will tell you about Lauren, and then I am done.

She came the second week of January. Her father brought her. I heard two sets of feet on the iron stairs, and when I opened the door Gary was standing a step below her with his cap in his hands, and he said, “Sandy, I’ll be in the truck,” and he went back down.

He had driven her from Bixby to Sapulpa and walked her up to my door, a woman of thirty-nine, the way you would walk a child up to a neighbor’s porch over a broken window. I do not think either of them said a word to each other the whole forty minutes.

She stood in my front room. She looked at Ray’s recliner and the tractor calendar and the box fan. I had the oddest wish that I had shut that kitchen drawer.

She had an envelope from the credit union and a sheet of notebook paper.

“That’s what was left,” she said. “And that’s everything I spent, and what on. In my own writing. Daddy said it had to be in my own writing.”