Helpers
An excerpt from a memoir in progress.
Maddie got to work immediately, and so did I. She tackled the office, a room at the front of Elizabeth House that had a large, single pane window with leaded glass at the top that looked out onto the street. There was also a skinnier window that faced the narrow strip of property between Elizabeth House and a duplex next door. I started cleaning the master bathroom. We had just begun when the door bell rang. Someone had programmed it to a jarring, digital chime.
Standing on the front porch was a young man in his twenties with a small tattoo just below his left eye. He explained he was there to clean the carpets. He said his name several times, but I couldn’t pronounce it. “It’s like Isaiah,” he said, “only with an e.”
I accompanied Esaiah downstairs and showed him the black drips on the carpeted steps, across the family room, and then the large, wet stain in the small bedroom. I told him Payton and I concluded it wasn’t urine.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But there’s definitely been a dog down here. I know the smell.”
“Do you think you can get rid of the stains?” I asked. “And the smell?”
“I’ll try,” Esaiah said.
Back upstairs, Maddie reported that while cleaning the window on the outside of the office, she’d been stung by a bumblebee. “There must be a nest,” she said, “so I gave up.” She also showed me a tiny hole in the large window. It looked as if someone had shot a BB through it. I had been snapping pictures constantly to document the state of the rental, and I added the hole in the window to my collection.
I had just returned to the master bathroom when the doorbell rang again. This time standing on the patchy, overgrown front lawn were two men and a young boy. Adolpho introduced himself. They were here, he said, to mow the lawn.
I led Adolpho and the other man, whom Adolpho introduced as his brother and the little boy as his son, around the side of the house along the alley to the backyard. No words were needed to express the problem of the junk pile and the hitch.
“You want us to haul that away?” Adolpho asked.
I stared at him. “You would do that?”
Adolpho nodded, as if hauling junk was just part of lawn care.
I thanked him. I thanked him again. My desperation was showing, but I didn’t care. I’d been at Elizabeth House for only two hours, and in that span the world had shifted.
“You’re from Idaho?” Adolpho asked. We’d walked by my car parked off the alley to get to the backyard, and he’d noticed the plates. “I love Idaho. Why did you move here?”
This kind man, working late on a Friday afternoon in June, with his silent brother and little boy, had asked the question I had been asking myself from the moment I arrived. A truthful answer would be long, complicated, and filled with a heartache I thought I had healed from. But arriving at Elizabeth House had brought a new grief to the surface. I could feel it, demanding I notice it and give it expression. The move I thought would be life-giving had now plunged me into a new loss, one that I was ashamed to name out loud, but which I felt keenly—the loss of status. I was once a middle-class homeowner, but as of today I lived in a shitty rental in a dubious neighborhood.
“That,” I said, mustering the best smile I could, “is a long, sad story.”
Adolpho nodded. I’d said enough. He left to get something from the trailer, while his brother propped open the back gate with a broken brick. That left me standing alone with Adolpho’s son, a boy I guessed to be about the age of seven or eight.
I retrieved the longboard from the top of the junk pile. “Would you like this?” I asked.
He nodded and took it from me solemnly.
Esaiah was just hauling his industrial vacuum back up from downstairs when I went back into the house. His face was shiny with sweat.
“I think I got it all,” he said.
“You got the stains out?”
He nodded. “Do you want me to do that room, too?” He was pointing to the master bedroom upstairs, my room. The carpet was darker and showed no obvious stains, but I guessed they were there.
“Yes, please,” I said.
I checked on Maddie. She’d done a careful sweep and mop of the wood floors in the office, getting that one room as clean as possible. Esaiah finished and hauled his vacuum out the front door.
“Thank you so much,” I said. The words felt inadequate. The house was hot on a summer afternoon, the downstairs especially. Yet Esaiah had soaked and scrubbed the carpets at Elizabeth House with his heavy vacuum like he was on a personal mission.
Outside, I heard a motor start. Adolpho’s brother was on a riding lawn mower, cutting the high grass in the front yard to mere inches. Instantly, it looked better. The two men had already hauled all the junk from the backyard, including the heavy hitch, onto their trailer. Adolpho suggested I keep the metal shelving unit, and he’d stood it upright in a small shed that took up a corner of the backyard. After mowing the back, Adolpho and his brother cut the giant sucker tree down to its base. There was now enough space in the tiny backyard to imagine it as a backyard.
When they finished, the yard was unrecognizable from the space Payton had showed me just hours before. Adolpho tried to show me how to program the sprinkler system, but it was right next to the bumble bee nest Maddie had discovered, and two giant bees rose out of the ground and chased him back to the front of the house.
I stood in the front yard and waved as Adolpho and his family left in their truck and trailer with all the junk from Elizabeth House piled on the back. The pizza delivery man arrived, and Maddie and I shared a pizza for dinner before she had to leave. She helped me haul the mattress I brought from my SUV and get it into the room she’d cleaned meticulously, the one room in Elizabeth House that felt clean enough to sleep in.
I didn’t want to be alone in the house, so I went for a short drive, going by landmarks in the city I had been to when my former husband and I visited our daughter while she attended college in Salt Lake. Grief rose swiftly and unbidden, a familiar, hard weight against my sternum, when I drove by a park where my husband and I had once sat on the grass and watched our dog run and play.
When I could avoid it no longer, I returned to Elizabeth House. I washed my face and brushed my teeth in the master bathroom which smelled like a science lab. I’d discovered that someone had sealed the shower without scrubbing the mildew first, so the mold was permanently encased under silicone. The towel ring beside the sink pulled easily out of the wall, and the granite counter top was covered with a sticky residue that would not come off.
I made up the mattress on the floor of the office with sheets and a comforter and crawled into it. Listening to the sounds of the city in my new home, I cried myself to sleep.
—
Dear Reader, I couldn’t see at the time the incredible miracle of all these helpers arriving when they did. Do you think it’s possible to recognize the small, everyday miracles as they happen or do we only see them in hindsight? Please share in the comments if you’d like, and I’ll respond.
