She was proud of her good name and the way people bragged about her and passed her around like a hot tip, but I resented how quickly they took her for granted.
Then, even while I took a shower, she stood in the bathroom doorway to lecture me about personal pride. It was as though I was not a twenty-year-old law student but a little boy who needed his neck scrubbed. […]
But I was convinced that it was a mistake for her to go back. It was unfair, ludicrous, impossible, and while she packed the Corolla in the driveway I told her so.
It’s demeaning, Mum! I blurted despite myself. Going back like this. The whole performance. It’s demeaning.
To who?
Anyway, we’ll show her.
How’s that?
We’ll clean that flat within an inch of its life.
Oh yeah, I muttered. That’ll put her back in her box. Go, Mum.
I was curious. What kind of person would do this? After years of faultless service there was no discussion, just the accusation and the brusque termination in three scrawled lines.
I brushed and wiped and waxed the long shelves of books and tried to imagine having strangers in our place looking in our fridge, touching our stuff, ripping hanks of our hair from the plughole. You’d have to imagine they were some kind of sleepwalker, that they were blind, incurious, too stupid to notice intimate things about your life. You’d have to not think about them, to will these intruders away. Or just be confident. Yes, I thought. That’s what it takes to be blasé about strangers in your house—a kind of annihilating self-assurance.
The lantern-jawed woman who appeared in so many—it was her. She looked decent, happy, loved by friends and family. Even as I clawed through her desk drawers, finding nothing more remarkable than a tiny twist of hash in a bit of tinfoil, I knew I wouldn’t find anything that would satisfy me.
Honestly, Mum, why didn’t we just give the place a light go through? Or better, just take the dough and split.
Because it would look like an admission of guilt.
Shit.
Language.
But this won’t convince her, Mum.
No, probably not.
You could report them missing yourself. Ask them to search our place. Force the issue. There’s nothing that can come of it.
Except talk. Imagine the talk. I’d lose the rest of my jobs.
Well, you’ve cleared your name. That’s something.
She shook her head with a furious smile.
Why not? I asked. Show her what we found, what she was too lazy to look for. Show her where they were.
All she has to say is that she made me guilty enough to give them back. That I just wanted to keep the job. To save my good name. Vic, that’s all I’ve got—my good name. These people, they can say anything they like. You can’t fight back.
In the kitchen I put the earrings beside the unstrung key and the thin envelope of money.
My mother stood silhouetted in the open doorway. It seemed that the very light of day was pouring out through her limbs. I had my breath back. I followed her into the hot afternoon.
