The Saturdays I Took Next Door

It was the blue apron with the white rickrack.

“It was still on the hook in the hall closet,” she said. “I saw it there in April and I wondered why you didn’t take it.”

“Nobody told me to.”

Debra shut her eyes.

“Take it,” she said. “Please, Tina. I’m telling you to.”

---

Mark and I counted it that night after she had gone. We did it together at the kitchen table with the back door open and the June bugs hitting the screen.

Seven hundred and forty-one ten-dollar bills.

Seven thousand, four hundred and ten dollars.

Out of seven hundred and eighty Saturdays in fifteen years, I had missed thirty-nine. Our week at the lake every summer. Jeff’s graduation and Amy’s. The spring the river came up and we were all sandbagging downtown. The two weeks I had the flu so bad Mark had to carry me to the car.

Helen had kept better books on me than I had ever kept on myself.

“That’s yours,” Mark said. “That is not ours, it’s yours. You do what you want with it.”

“I know what I want.”

I wanted a second machine, a light one for stairs, so I would not have to haul the Kirby up to Lisa Schroeder’s second floor. I wanted a real caddy for my supplies in place of the dishpan I had been using. The rest went into the credit union on Wednesday morning, in an account with my name on it and nobody else’s. The girl at the window asked what kind of business it was.

“Cleaning,” I said. “Tina’s Saturdays.”

I kept back one bill. The top one from the 2011 bundle, soft as a handkerchief. It is in my Bible at the Thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, and it will stay there.

Mark did not sleep much that night. I could feel him lying awake.

About two in the morning he said, into the dark, “I’m coming with you Saturday.”

“You’ve got the yard.”

“The yard’ll keep. I’m coming with you Saturday, and the Saturday after. I’m going to do it the whole month. I let them run that afternoon like you were the hired help, Tina, and you weren’t even that, because the help gets paid. I can’t fix it by saying so. So I’m going to carry your vacuum.”

“Mark.”

“Mom would have had something to say to me. You know she would.”

I did know. So I let him.

He came every Saturday in August. I want that written down somewhere. A man of fifty-two who had worked fifty hours that week at the terminal got up at six and put on old jeans and followed his wife up and down Locust Street.

He was not a natural. The first week he mopped himself into a corner of Mr. Becker’s kitchen and had to stand there till it dried. But he can do things I cannot. He pulled out Agnes’s refrigerator and her stove by himself and I cleaned behind both for the first time in six years. He took down every storm window at the Hoffmans’ and washed them on sawhorses in the driveway. He fixed Lisa’s back screen door, and rehung a cabinet for Mr. Becker, and oiled every squeaking hinge on that street without being asked.

He would not let me pay him out of the money. “I’m not working for you,” he said. “I’m working it off.”

The third Saturday, Agnes had him down on his knees doing her baseboards while she supervised from a kitchen chair.