Chapter 2 - The Name She Asked Me to Spell
Before the three-hundred-dollar check, there had been twenty-six years of Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
Mondays belonged to the bathrooms and the kitchen, where flour always collected in the old wooden cabinet seams.
Thursdays were for the floors, though my knees had long since begun protesting the work.
And Fridays belonged, at least for the first half hour, to coffee and biscuits with Henrietta Lockridge.
She was ninety-four when she died, but her hands could still fold a napkin into four perfect corners.
"Elnora, those floors aren't going anywhere," she would say whenever I reached for my bucket too early.
"But I won't be here forever."
She spoke those words often enough that I sometimes teased her for being dramatic.
Now I would have given anything to hear them one more time.
The Lockridge farmhouse stood beyond the highway on a rise bordered by pasture, pecan trees, and a weathered red barn.
Henrietta had lived there since marrying her husband, Franklin, more than seventy years earlier.
Franklin had died long before I returned to work for her.
By then her sons had scattered toward Nashville, where success seemed to mean owning offices, wearing polished shoes, and forgetting which end of a broom belonged on the floor.
Carlton called his mother every Sunday.
I knew the schedule because Henrietta straightened her hair and settled near the telephone at four o'clock.
She always sounded pleased when his voice came through the receiver.
Sometimes the calls lasted seven minutes, sometimes twelve.
Afterward she would sit quietly and stare toward the orchard.
"He sounds busy," she usually said.
Thurston visited when he wanted money or needed her signature on a document.
Bertram visited less often but never arrived without questions about the land.
Neither of them stayed long enough to learn that their mother had begun favoring the small kitchen lamp over the bright ceiling fixtures.
They did not know which porch step creaked or that she hated finding a damp dishcloth in the sink.
I knew these things because I was there.
I also knew the difference between being useful and being loved.
Mama had warned me not to confuse the two.
She had worked for the Lockridges while raising me in the little white cottage, which stood within sight of the farmhouse chimney.
Her pay was modest, and she accepted things that I later came to understand she should have questioned.
But Henrietta, who had been younger then, remembered when my mother was sick and brought soup across the yard herself.
After Mama died, I left the property for a time.
I married, raised Alfreda, worked in a school cafeteria, and buried a husband whose heart gave out far too soon.
When I came back to work for Henrietta, we were both widows.
Neither of us called it friendship immediately.
We spoke about weather, church, and whether the biscuits needed more butter.
In time she told me things she never told her sons.
She worried Carlton mistook regular telephone calls for closeness.
She worried Thurston thought family property belonged to whichever person spoke the loudest.
She worried Bertram would sell the orchard the moment someone offered enough money for a subdivision.
I listened because that was what friends did, not because I expected anything in return.
Last Christmas, Thurston arrived in a cashmere coat and inspected the farmhouse as though measuring it for a sale.
He complained about peeling paint in the upstairs hall and demanded to know why his mother still paid a housekeeper.
I was carrying fresh towels toward the laundry room when he stopped me.
"You ought to clean my place in town, too," he said.
"Mother's already paying you, so why should it matter?"
I told him the work he proposed would require separate arrangements.
He laughed as if I had told a joke.
"You always were particular about a dollar."
Henrietta heard us from the sitting room.
She said nothing until he left.
The next Friday, over biscuits and honey, she asked a question that seemed to come from nowhere.
"Elnora, remind me of your middle name."
I looked up from my coffee.
"Ruthanne."
"One word?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"How exactly do you spell it?"
I spelled the letters slowly while she wrote them on a paper napkin.
She studied what she had written, then underlined it once.
"What for?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing important, sweetheart."
Her mouth had the same small stubborn smile it wore when she had already made a decision.
I forgot about that napkin for months.
There were groceries to collect, windows to wash, and a worsening pain in my left hip to ignore.
In August Henrietta became tired more easily.
I found her one Thursday sitting by the kitchen window with an untouched piece of toast.
She told me she was slowing down but had no intention of losing her sense.
When a doctor visited, I waited outside the room and heard her correcting him about the date.
She could remember what had happened at a church picnic in 1952 better than I could remember where I had placed my reading glasses.
A week before she died, she asked me to open the parlor curtains so she could see the pecan trees.
"Your mama loved that view," she said.
I sat beside her while sunlight moved across the floor.
"I know," I answered.
She reached for my hand.
"You have given this place a good deal of your life."
I told her I was grateful for the work.
She looked almost annoyed.
"I didn't say you owed me gratitude."
I had never heard her speak quite that firmly about it.
Then she softened and asked about Alfreda and the grandchildren.
I told her the youngest was learning to drive and the oldest wanted to become a nurse.
Henrietta seemed pleased that something beyond her farmhouse continued to grow.
She died peacefully in her sleep that September.
I helped the neighborhood women serve the funeral meal and washed every plate afterward because somebody had to.
Carlton thanked me in front of the guests and looked away when they were gone.
The next morning he handed me the check.
May you like
Only later did I understand that Henrietta's question about my middle name had not been a passing curiosity.
She had been making certain someone would write it correctly on a document none of her sons expected me to see.
