ADVERTISEMENT
“And what do I get?”
She watched me for a moment.
“When I’m gone, what I have becomes yours. I’ll leave everything to you.”
I stared at her.
“Are you serious? You barely know me.”
“I know enough.”
It sounded ridiculous, maybe even dangerous to believe. But I needed money, and some lonely part of me wanted her to be telling the truth. So I held out my hand.
“Deal.”
At first, it was exactly what she said it would be. I drove her to appointments, picked up groceries, sorted her pills into little plastic boxes, fixed a cabinet hinge, changed lightbulbs, cleaned gutters, and took out the trash. She complained through all of it.
“You’re late.”
“It’s been four minutes.”
“Still late.”
I would tell her she was impossible, and she would answer.
“Yet you keep coming back.”
Slowly, without either of us naming it, things changed. She started asking me to stay for dinner. Her cooking was terrible, but she acted personally insulted if I said so. Once she made meatloaf so dry I had to drink three glasses of water to swallow it.
“This is awful.”
She pointed her fork at me.
“Then die hungry.”
Some evenings, we watched game shows together. She yelled at contestants like they could hear her. She told me pieces of her life, and I started telling her things I never told anyone: foster homes, learning not to get attached, never planning beyond the next rent payment because hope felt unsafe. One night, she muted the TV and looked at me hard.
“You only think about surviving next month, James. Don’t you have dreams?”
I shrugged.
“I guess I’d like to keep working at the diner. Maybe get promoted one day.”
“Well,” she said, unimpressed. “I suppose that’s something.”
That winter, she gave me a pair of green knitted socks so ugly I did not know whether to thank her or file a complaint.
“I made these,” she said, shoving them at my chest. “So your feet don’t freeze.”
At the diner, Joe noticed I had been rushing out after shifts.
“You got yourself a girlfriend now?”
“I’m helping Mrs. Rhode.”
He nearly dropped the coffee pot laughing.
ADVERTISEMENT
