“They are my closing papers, son,” I told Daniel, and I drew the brown accordion folder onto my lap. “I sold my company last month. Nineteen million dollars, and a promise by the buyers that every one of my three hundred employees would keep a job for at least five years.” The kitchen went silent. Earl set down his glasses. Tiffany, with her hand still resting on the bowl of butter beans, looked as though somebody had pulled a chair out beneath her. “Ruth,” she said, quite faintly, “what company? You clean houses.” I looked at her kindly. “I do,” I said. “Hospitals, mostly. And schools, and offices. Three hundred a night.”
I told them the whole story then, slowly, because they needed it slowly. How I began in 1979, in a rented apartment in Macon with a mop and a bucket. How my first client was a dentist who paid me in cash and teeth cleanings. How the second was a church, and the third a school, and how, by nineteen eighty five, there were four of us in matching smocks. I told them about the night shifts, the double shifts, the funerals I missed because a floor needed waxing. And how I always wore the blue smock, so that every woman on my crew would know I was one of them.
Earl reached across the table and laid his big, spotted hand on mine. “Ruth,” he said, “you never said.” I squeezed it. “You never asked, Earl, and that is one of the reasons I married you. But Tiffany, I think you have been asking something else for twelve years. You have been asking whether I was enough for your dinner parties.” She went crimson. “So let me answer it. The woman who handed you the dish towels last Thanksgiving signed the paychecks of three hundred people. She has never missed a payroll in forty five years.”
A blue smock hid a woman who signed three hundred paychecks and still scrubbed the floors herself.
Nobody breathed. Then Tiffany burst into tears, not delicate ones but the ugly sort that come up out of the stomach. “I never knew,” she said. “I swear it. I thought you were just a, I thought, oh God.” Daniel put his arm around her, and then, as if remembering, took it away again. “Tiff,” he said, in a voice I had heard only once, at the funeral of his grandfather, “the medical bills. Tell her.” She nodded. Between sobs she told us. The pool had cost sixty thousand dollars. The credit cards had come due. And an elderly man living on a railroad pension had seemed an easy kindness to lean upon.
“I told myself he did not need it,” she whispered. “I told myself he would never notice.” I took the brown folder off my lap and set it on the table. “Tiffany,” I said, “look at me. I am not going to shout. I am not going to call the sheriff. The check register of Earl is going to be the only judge in this kitchen.” I opened it to the last page. “Thirty one thousand two hundred dollars. You will repay every cent. Not to me. To Earl. And you will repay it the way I earned it, which is by working.”
Her eyes widened. “Working?” “Yes,” I said. “Six months, three nights a week, with the cleaning crew at the Medical Center in Macon, on the floor I scrubbed myself for twenty years. You will wear a smock. You will push a mop. And your pay will go to Earl, check by check, until the account is whole.” She started to speak. Daniel interrupted. “Mom,” he said, “that is the fairest thing I have ever heard.” He looked at his wife. “And I will go with her on the first night. I should have asked where the money was going.”
They did it. I will never forget the first night, in October, when I stood in the corridor of the Medical Center in my old blue smock and watched a woman in a clean new one push a cart down the hall. Tiffany did not look at me. She mopped a long stripe of linoleum, straight and careful, and when a nurse stopped to ask where the supply room was, she answered politely and went back to work. By the third week her hands were red. By the third month she stopped crying in the car. By the sixth, she was laughing with the crew.
The rest of the money I spread the way it deserved. A million two hundred thousand went to the employees, in checks I handed out myself at a picnic in Central City Park, with fried chicken and a banner that read Thank You. Some of the women had worked for me thirty years. One of them, Delphine, seventy one years old, took the envelope and looked at the number and put her head on my shoulder and said nothing for a long time. A scholarship at the community college now carries my name, for the daughters and sons of cleaning women.
Tiffany finished her six months in April. On the final night she knocked on my kitchen door in her blue smock, with an envelope in her hand. Inside was the last payment, plus a note. I read it standing at the sink, with the faucet running. She wrote that she had learned the names of eleven women on her shift, and that she knew now what it cost to keep a building clean. She wrote that she no longer handed anyone a dish towel without asking their name first. And at the bottom, in smaller print: Miss Ruth, you are the best boss I ever had.
Earl and I sit on the porch most evenings now, in the rockers, with sweet tea and a plate of pimento cheese sandwiches. Earl says I should buy a boat, or a house in Savannah, or at least a new station wagon. I tell him the old one runs fine. Last Saturday, though, I did something silly. I walked into a store in town and bought a new smock, bright blue, with my name stitched in white thread over the pocket. Miss Ruth, it says. I wear it to the garden. The tomatoes do not care what it cost.