The Saturdays I Took Next Door

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The next Saturday I woke up at six, same as always. I was halfway into my cleaning jeans before I remembered there was no place to go.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with one leg in.

Mark was already up. I could hear him in the garage, sorting his father’s tools onto the pegboard. I made coffee and drank it standing at the sink. I looked at my own kitchen floor, which was clean, because I am me.

And I thought about Mrs. Agnes Pruitt.

Agnes Pruitt lived right next door to Helen in the old two-story with the wide front porch. She was eighty-four that spring, a year older than Helen, widowed going on twenty years. She and Helen had been neighbors since 1968. Every Saturday morning of the fifteen years I cleaned, Agnes came across the side yard at nine o’clock sharp with her own cup, and the two of them sat at Helen’s kitchen table and drank coffee and went through the whole town, house by house, while I worked around them.

And for years, Agnes had been saying the same thing over that coffee. She’d watch me go by with the mop and she’d say it right in front of Helen, to devil her.

“When Helen can spare you, Tina, I’d pay you for a Saturday. I’d pay you good.”

And Helen would say, “You keep your hands off my girl, Agnes.”

And I would laugh, because nobody had ever paid me to clean anything, and because it was just the two of them carrying on.

I stood at my sink that morning and I thought: Helen can spare me now.

I work as an aide at the elementary school. I help in the second grade room and I do lunch duty and bus duty, and I love those children, and I make fifteen dollars and forty cents an hour, nine months of the year. In the summer I make nothing at all. Mark and I had been getting by for twenty-seven years the way most people around here get by, which is carefully.

I finished putting my jeans on.

I told Mark where I was going. He came to the garage door with a wood rasp in his hand and looked at me.

“She’ll want to pay you,” he said.

“I’m going to let her.”

He nodded slowly. “What are you going to ask?”

I had not gotten that far. I thought about what the service out of Dubuque charges, the one with the yellow cars. I thought about fifteen years.

“Twenty-five dollars an hour,” I said.

It sounded like somebody else’s voice. Mark did not blink.

“Sounds about right,” he said. “Sounds low, tell you the truth.”

He got the Kirby out of the closet and put it in my trunk.

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I parked on Locust Street in front of Agnes’s house, not Helen’s. That alone felt strange. Helen’s house sat there next door with the curtains gone from the front windows, and I made myself not look at it.

I got the Kirby out and started up Agnes’s porch steps with it in both arms.

She had the screen door open before I got to the top. She was in her housedress and her good cardigan, with her white hair set, and she was smiling like a woman whose ship has come in.

“I wondered how long it would take you,” she said.

“Mrs. Pruitt, I don’t want to presume.”

“Presume,” she said. “Get in here. I’ve been looking at these baseboards for six years.”