Nine Mops on the Landlord’s Porch

“That thing is older than me,” I said.

“It’s older than your mama, or near enough,” she said. “Clyde bought it for me at the hardware store in 1971, the week we moved into our first house with a real kitchen floor. I have changed the head maybe forty times. I have never changed the stick.”

I held the door open, and she walked into my old duplex like a general walking onto a field.

They had brought everything. Buckets and rags and old toothbrushes. Baking soda and white vinegar and a jug of bleach.

Faye had brought a box of biscuits and a thermos of coffee from the Hardee’s out on the highway.

I want to be honest about the state of the place. It was not dirty, but it was lived in.

There were scuffs where I had moved furniture, two nail holes from a picture of my granny, and gray grout in the corners. It was the kind of ordinary wear a landlord expects and a deposit is not meant to cover.

But Mrs. Reese did not care about ordinary. “We are going to leave this place so clean he could eat off the floor,” she said.

“And then we are going to take pictures of it, so he never has to wonder.”

That was her idea, the pictures. I remember thinking it was an old woman being careful. I did not know yet how much I would need them.

We split into teams. Martha and Shirley took the kitchen. Nancy and Jean took the bathroom and fussed at each other about the right way to clean grout for the better part of six hours.

Faye and Wanda did the windows, inside and out, with newspaper and vinegar the way their mothers taught them.

I patched the nail holes with spackle and painted over the scuffs with the touch-up can Darrell had left in the utility closet when I moved in.

Doris sat in her lawn chair in the doorway and told everybody what they were missing.

Mrs. Reese did the baseboards. All of them. On her knees, with a bucket of warm soapy water and a rag, moving down every wall of that duplex one foot at a time.

I tried to take over for her twice and she shooed me off both times.

“My knees have done harder work than this,” she said. “Go do something you’re good at.”

On Friday we did the floors. Every inch of vinyl plank was scrubbed and then mopped twice, once with soapy water and once with clean.

Mrs. Reese mopped the living room herself with her 1971 mop, and when she was done the floor shone in the afternoon sun from the window.

Before we left, Wanda went out to her car and came back with a quart canning jar full of zinnias from her garden, orange and pink and red.

She set it on the kitchen counter by the sink.

“For the next girl who lives here,” she said. “So she knows somebody cared about this place.”

Then Mrs. Reese made me walk through every room with my phone and take pictures of everything.

Every wall, every corner, the inside of the oven, the inside of the fridge, the tub, the toilet, the closets, the window tracks. Eighty-six photos, all with the date stamped in the phone.

At four o’clock that Friday afternoon, I locked the front door, and I walked the keys over to Darrell’s house two streets away, a small brick house with a concrete porch and pink geraniums in a pot by the door.