“She is paying sixty dollars, Mom. In cash.”
She turned the hanger so the dress faced the dark hallway, the pale fabric catching the glare from the driveway.
“Joe always said Bob worried too much,” I said, looking down at the scarred wood of our kitchen table. “He used to say Bob would pay a man to watch the rain fall just so he didn’t have to stand in it alone.”
“Bob does not worry about the garden,” Norma said, already moving toward the hallway to hang the dress in her room. “He just wants it cleared before the township inspector comes by next week. He told me his sister has some old cedar chests in the barn she wants moved, too.”
“You are not moving furniture, Norma,” I said, my voice dropping. “We agreed on light yard work.”
“It is just small boxes, Mom,” she said, her voice fading as she walked down the hall. “She needs the space.”
Through the double-paned glass of the back door, the heavy, rhythmic rattle of a diesel engine broke the quiet of the afternoon. Bob’s rusty blue pickup truck had stopped near our mailbox, the tailpipe blowing a gray smudge of exhaust into our hedge.
I wiped my palms on my apron and went down the back steps before Norma could follow.
The gravel shifted under my shoes as I reached the driver’s side window. Bob sat behind the wheel, his sixty-two-year-old face gray in the shadow of his baseball cap. His palms were rubbing slowly against the fabric of his trousers, leaving faint damp marks on the denim.
“Norma said she is starting tomorrow,” I said, leaning my elbow against the warm, pitted metal of the door.
Bob did not look at me directly. He kept his eyes on our garage doors, his fingers twitching against the steering wheel.
“She is a good worker, Helen,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly mumble. “Her dad would have been proud of how she handles herself.”
