I cried all the way home.
Eight miles. Down the Hampshire Pike. Past the Dollar General and the Methodist church and the feed store.
With that check on the seat beside me.
Three hundred dollars.
At my age, cleaning that house was my whole income. Besides my Social Security.
Seven hundred and eighty-four dollars a month. It comes on the third. It doesn’t stretch. My rent on East End Street is six-fifty. The light bill is ninety. My blood pressure pills are forty-one dollars a month even with the Medicare.
Mrs. Lockridge paid me two hundred dollars a week. Cash. Every Friday. In an envelope. Under my coffee cup.
That’s what kept me.
I got home at ten-thirty in the morning.
I sat down at my kitchen table.
I put the check in front of me.
I looked at it.
That night, I called my daughter.
Alfreda lives in Murfreesboro. She’s fifty-one. She teaches fourth grade at Black Fox Elementary. She’s married to a man named Dwayne who works at the Nissan plant in Smyrna. They have two boys in high school and a mortgage and a minivan with a transmission problem.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Mama? It’s late. Are you okay?”
I told her.
The back door. The screen. The china cups. The check.
Mother’s gone. We won’t be needing you.
Alfreda was quiet.
“Mama,” she said finally. “You can’t keep scrubbing floors at seventy-two anyhow.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked her.
She got quiet.
Real quiet.
I could hear the TV in the background. One of the boys yelling about a video game.
“We can’t take you in, Mama,” she said. “We just can’t right now.”
I sat there with the phone to my ear.
“Dwayne’s hours got cut,” Alfreda said. Fast. Like she’d been practicing. “Marcus needs braces. The roof’s leaking. There’s no room, Mama. The boys share a room already. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I understand,” I said.
I did understand.
That was the worst part.
I hung up.
I sat in my kitchen.
And I looked at that three-hundred-dollar check until it got dark.
I didn’t cash it.
I don’t know why.
I put it on the refrigerator. Under a magnet shaped like a peach that Mrs. Lockridge brought me back from a trip to Georgia in 1997.
I looked at it every morning.
Mother’s gone. We won’t be needing you.
I started looking for other work.
I called the doctors’ wives. The ones I used to clean for in the eighties. Most of them were dead. The ones that weren’t had cleaning services now. Young girls with matching T-shirts and a van.
I called the Methodist church about cleaning the fellowship hall. They had a man.
I called the nursing home on Hatcher Lane about the kitchen.
They asked how old I was.
I told them.
They said they’d call me back.
A week later, my phone rang.
It was a Tuesday. Ten in the morning. I was sitting at my kitchen table doing the crossword in the Daily Herald. In pencil. I never could do it in ink like she could.
The phone rang.
A number I didn’t know. A 931 number. Local.
I almost didn’t answer.
I did.
“Is this Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett?” a woman asked.
Nobody calls me by all three names but the doctor’s office.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“This is Rosella,” she said. “At the register of deeds. Over at the courthouse.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need you to come see me, honey,” she said. “Bring your ID.”
My heart went to pounding.
“Is something wrong?” I said. “Did I do something?”
“No, honey,” Rosella said. “You didn’t do anything. I just need you to come in. When you can. I’m here every day eight to four-thirty.”
“What’s it about?”
Rosella was quiet for a second.
“I’d rather you see it,” she said. “In person.”
She hung up.
I sat there.
I thought somebody had stolen my name.
You hear about that on the news. Old people. Somebody takes your Social Security number and opens credit cards and you end up owing ten thousand dollars to a bank in Delaware.
Or I owed something.
Taxes. A fine. Something from when Clarence died. Some paper I didn’t sign right.
Something I couldn’t pay.
I called Alfreda again.
At school. On her lunch break.
I told her.
“Mama,” she said. “What did she say it was about?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said the register of deeds.”
Alfreda was quiet.
“The register of deeds,” she said slowly. “That’s property. Land. Mama, is this about the Lockridge place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mama,” Alfreda said. “Don’t you go stirring up those Lockridge boys.”
Her voice was sharp. Scared.
“If this is about their land,” she said, “they’ll eat you alive.”
She was right.
I knew she was right.
Those boys have money. Friends at the courthouse. Lawyers in Nashville. Thurston plays golf with the county commissioner. Bertram’s second wife was the daughter of a circuit judge.
And I have a twelve-year-old Buick and a three-hundred-dollar check on my refrigerator.
“Leave it alone, Mama,” Alfreda said. “Please. Whatever it is. Just leave it alone.”
For a whole day, I didn’t go.
I told myself to leave it alone.
Some things are better not poked at. When you’re old. And by yourself. And Black. In Maury County, Tennessee.
My mama used to say that.
Don’t go poking at white folks’ business, Elnora. Nothing good comes of it.
She said it when I was nine and asked why we didn’t eat at the big table at Thanksgiving.
She said it when I was sixteen and asked why the Lockridge boys went to Columbia Academy and I went to the colored school until they closed it.
She said it when I was thirty and asked why she’d never once been given a raise in twenty years.
Don’t go poking.
So I didn’t.
Tuesday. Wednesday.
I stayed home. I did my crossword. I watered my tomato plants. I looked at the check on the refrigerator.
But Thursday morning, I got up early.
Thursday.
The day I used to do her floors.
For twenty-six years. Every Thursday. On my knees. With a bucket and a brush and Murphy’s Oil Soap. Every room. The parlor. The dining room. The front hall with the black-and-white tile.
She’d follow me from room to room. With her coffee. Talking.
Elnora, did you know the Hendersons sold their farm to a man from California?
Elnora, I think the new preacher wears a toupee.
Elnora, you’re the only person in this world who’s ever gotten that hall floor to shine like my mother-in-law used to.
I woke up at five-thirty.
Same as always.
My body didn’t know she was gone.
I lay there in the dark.
And I thought about her face.
In the sitting room. At Christmas. When Thurston said Mother pays you anyway, what’s the difference.
How still it went.
