Then I went out and ate my sandwich in my car.
It didn’t feel right to eat in her kitchen. It was her kitchen. I was the cleaner. I didn’t want her to
come home and find crumbs, or think I was making myself too comfortable. So I sat in the front seat of my old Honda with the engine off and ate my sandwich and looked at the oak tree.
I did that every Thursday for eight years.
Mrs. Whitaker came home at 1:15 that first day. She walked through the house slowly. I followed her. She didn’t say anything. She ran one finger along the top of the piano. She looked in the upstairs bathroom. She opened the oven.
She stood looking into the oven for a long time.
Then she closed it and turned around.
“Thank you, Carly,” she said.
That was all. But she said it in a way that made me stand up a little straighter the whole drive home.
For the first year, we barely talked.
I came every Thursday at nine. She was usually gone. There was always a note on the counter, on
the same thick cream paper, in the same perfect cursive. And there was always a check, made out to Carly Brennan for one hundred dollars. Never late. Never a penny short.
