The end of November. Six weeks.
I drove home that day and sat in my driveway for twenty minutes before I went inside. I told myself it was about the money. Losing my most reliable client. A hundred and twenty-five dollars a
week. That was a lot of money to lose.
But it wasn’t about the money. I knew it wasn’t.
I just didn’t know what it was about.
The last Thursday was the Thursday before Thanksgiving.
The movers had come on Monday. Most of the furniture was gone. The piano was gone, shipped to Susan’s house. The long dining room table was gone. The beds were gone. The rugs were
rolled up and gone.
I walked into that house at nine o’clock, and my footsteps echoed.
I cleaned it anyway. There wasn’t much left to clean. Mostly I wiped down the empty rooms and
swept the bare floors. But I did every room. Every bathroom. I cleaned the claw-foot tub, even though nobody would use it for a while. I cleaned the checkered kitchen floor on my hands and knees, the way I had four hundred times before.
It was harder than I expected. There were pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had hung 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 had faded, and the rectangles underneath were brighter, like
