PART 1 — THE ENVELOPE AT THE FRONT DOOR
“Mother’s gone, Dolores. There’s no reason for you to keep coming around here.” Gerald Harrow said it on the front porch, holding a white envelope out toward me the way a man pays a delivery boy he never intends to see again. Behind him, in the front hall whose floors I had waxed for thirty-one years, his two grown sons stood holding coffee mugs, watching me like I was a stray that had wandered up the steps.
I was seventy-one years old. I had my cleaning caddy in one hand and my flowered apron already tied on, because it was Tuesday, and on Tuesdays and Fridays I cleaned the Harrow house. I had done it since the spring of 1993.
“Gerald, the funeral was only Saturday,” I said. “I thought I’d air out her room. Wash her quilts before they get musty.”
“We’ll handle Mother’s room.” He pushed the envelope closer. “That’s two weeks’ pay. That’s more than fair.”
I took it, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do with my hand. Wade, the older boy, looked down into his coffee. Tanner, the younger one, met my eyes for half a second, then stared at his father’s back like he wanted to say something and couldn’t find the nerve.
“Your mother kept her lemon oil under the kitchen sink for the banister,” I said. “Whoever you hire, tell them not to use the spray kind. It clouds the wood.” Gerald only said, “Goodbye, Dolores,” and the big oak door closed with that soft, heavy click I had heard ten thousand times from the other side.
I stood on that porch a long minute, beside the geraniums I’d planted for Adelaide in May. Then I walked down the steps to my car before anybody inside could watch me cry.
My name is Dolores Mae Pruitt. I have lived in Willow Bend, Ohio, my whole life. My husband, Earl, has been gone nine years. My son moved to Arizona, and my granddaughter, Lacey, is in nursing school in Columbus, working nights to pay for it. My Social Security covers rent and pills and not much else. The Harrow job was the steady thing in my life, the thing I could count on.
But it was never only a job. Every Tuesday, before I lifted a rag, Adelaide Harrow made me sit at her kitchen table for tea and the newspaper crossword. “The dust has been there since Eisenhower, Dot,” she’d say. “It’ll keep. Give me a seven-letter word for stubborn.” She was ninety-one when she died, and she could still finish that puzzle in ink faster than I could find my glasses.
That evening I sat at my own little kitchen table, still in my apron, and opened the envelope. Inside were six hundred and forty dollars in cash and a folded note in Gerald’s blocky handwriting: Final payment. Please return the house key by mail. I pulled my key ring out of my apron pocket to unhook it, and that was when my thumb found the other key, the small brass one I had nearly forgotten.
Back in March, Adelaide had taken my key ring off the hook by her back door and threaded that little brass key onto it herself, her fingers shaking but determined. “Keep this on your ring, Dot,” she’d said. “Don’t ask me about it yet. When the time comes, somebody will tell you what it opens.”
I had laughed and called her a woman of mysteries. She hadn’t laughed back.
I mailed Gerald his house key the next morning. I kept the brass one.
The days that followed were long and strange. I woke at six on Tuesday out of habit and had nowhere to go. I called around to a few families who used to ask about my schedule, but most had hired younger women or one of those cleaning services with matching shirts. I counted the six hundred and forty dollars twice and told myself it would stretch.
Ten days after Gerald shut the door, my telephone rang.
“Mrs. Pruitt? My name is Nathaniel Greer. I was Adelaide Harrow’s attorney.” His voice was quiet and careful. “You’re named in her will, ma’am. And I need to ask you something important.” He paused. “Do you still have the small brass key she gave you?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “Why?”
“Because Gerald Harrow called my office this morning,” he said, “demanding to know where it is.”
