“A debt? To who? You don’t owe me anything.”
“Not to you,” she said. “To a woman named Alice Ashford.”
She got up. She walked to the window over the sink and stood there with her cane, looking out at
the backyard. At the bare garden and the oak tree and the gray November sky.
“My mother cleaned houses,” she said.
I stared at her back.
“Your mother—”
“She cleaned houses. For thirty-one years. In Pittsburgh. My father worked at the steel mill and drank most of what he earned, and then he left when I was six, and after that it was just my
mother and me. She cleaned five houses a week. Sometimes six.” Mrs. Whitaker’s voice was very steady. The steadiness of someone who had practiced saying something in her head for a long time. “She had a bucket. A gray metal bucket, with a dent in the side. I remember that bucket
