In eight years, she had never asked me to sit down.
I sat down. On the edge of the chair. With my bucket still in my hand.
“I’m moving to Oregon”, she said. “Be near Susan. There is a very nice apartment in a senior building, about ten minutes from her house. It has an elevator. And a dining room. And a library.”
“Oh,”
I said. It came out like I had been punched. “Oh. It’s—it’s wonderful. It’s really good. For you.”
“I’m eighty”, she said. “I’m tired of having a whole floor that I don’t use.”
We both laughed. It was a strange, wobbly laugh.
“When?” I asked.
“The house is listed. There is already an offer. A young family, with three little boys. I will be gone by the end of November.”
End of November. Six weeks.
I went home that day and sat in my driveway for twenty minutes before entering. I told myself it was a question of money. Losing my most reliable customer. One hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. It was a lot of money to lose.
But it wasn’t about the money. I knew that wasn’t the case.
I just didn’t know what it was.
The last Thursday was the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
The movers came on
Monday. Most of the furniture was gone. The piano was missing and shipped to Susan’s house. The long dining room table was gone. The beds were gone. The carpets were rolled up and disappeared.
I entered this house at nine o’clock and my footsteps echoed.
I cleaned it anyway. There wasn’t much left to clean. Most of the time I wiped empty rooms and swept bare floors. But I did all the pieces. Every bathroom. I cleaned the free-standing bathtub, even though no one used it for a while. I cleaned the kitchen tile floor four hundred times, as I had done four hundred times before.
It was harder than I expected. There were pale rectangles on the walls where the paintings had been hanging for fifty years. The wedding photo. The little girl on the swing. The man with the bow tie and the fish. The wallpaper around them
