Mrs. Whitaker calls me too. Every Sunday. She tells me about the mountain outside her window and her book club and the man down the hall who keeps trying to beat her at chess and never does. I tell her about my week. About the houses. About Willa.
Last month she said, “Carly. You still haven’t called me Margaret. Not once. In nine years.”
“I know,” I said.
“Will you ever?”
I thought about it.
“Probably not,” I said.
She laughed that loud, surprised laugh I heard for the first time at her kitchen table. “Good,” she
said. “I’d be disappointed in you if you did.”
I still clean houses. I have eleven clients now. I hired a helper last spring, a young woman named Dani who’s twenty-three and has a four-year-old son and was living in her car when I met her. I pay
her more than anybody ever paid me when I was starting out. I let her bring her son on snow days. He’s teaching himself to read by sounding out the labels on cleaning bottles.
