Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

He mowed the strip between the two units himself. Once he brought me a sack of tomatoes from his garden.

His wife, Marlene, had passed the winter before I moved in. People said he had not been the same since.

I had seen him at the Food City a few times, pushing a cart with nothing in it but coffee and bread, and I had felt sorry for him.

That summer I found a little rental house closer to the daycare.

It had a fenced yard for the shelter dog I had been saving up for, and it was only a hundred dollars more a month.

The new landlady was a retired nurse named Mrs. Collins. She wanted first month’s rent up front, which I paid, and a deposit of $1,100 by the third Monday in September.

If I did not have it by then, the house went to the next person on her list.

I did not have $1,100 sitting around. I had about $300 in savings after the moving truck and first month’s rent.

The plan was simple: Darrell would return my old deposit, and I would hand it straight to Mrs. Collins.

So I was going to leave that duplex spotless. I told Mrs. Opal Reese as much one Sunday after church, standing in the fellowship hall with a paper cup of sweet tea, and that was where it all began.

Mrs. Reese is seventy-eight years old. She has been a member of our little Baptist church since 1968, when she married her husband, Clyde, who passed six years ago. She raised four children and buried one.

She is five foot nothing and walks with a hitch from a hip replacement, and if you tell her you need help, she will show up at seven in the morning with her sleeves rolled.

“How many rooms?” she asked me.

“Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bath,” I said. “Mrs. Reese, I wasn’t asking. I can do it myself over a couple of evenings.”

“Honey,” she said, “nobody does a move-out clean by themselves. What day?”

I told her the last Thursday and Friday of August. I had taken both days off from the daycare.

She nodded once and walked off toward the coffee urn, and I thought that was the end of it.

On Thursday morning at seven o’clock, a white church van pulled up in front of the duplex on Hickory Street, and nine women got out.

I had not asked a single one of them. Mrs. Reese had made the calls herself.

There was Faye Hensley, who is seventy-three and still drives a school bus route. There was Martha Gentry, who taught home economics at the high school for thirty years.

There was Nancy Pierce and her sister Jean, who are seventy and sixty-eight and do everything together, including arguing.

There was Shirley Watts, who runs the nursery on Sunday mornings, and Louise Tipton, who sings alto and brought a sack of extra rags. And there was Wanda Lyle, who lost her husband in the spring and said she needed something to do with her hands.

There was Doris Carter, the oldest of the group after Mrs. Reese, who brought a lawn chair because her knees would not let her kneel anymore and she intended to supervise. And there was Mrs. Reese herself, carrying a mop.

It was not a new mop. The handle was wooden and worn smooth and pale where her hands had held it, and the head was a heavy cotton string head, the old kind, the kind you wring out in a bucket with your own two fists.