I Cleaned an Elderly Woman’s House for 26 Years, but After Her Funeral, Her Son Fired Me and Handed Me $300

Last Christmas, she said, my son Thurston told her to come clean his house in town. He said, “Mother pays you anyway. What’s the difference.”
She set the cup down.
That’s when I knew, she said. I’d raised a son who couldn’t see the difference between a woman and a mop.
And I’d lived on stolen land for seventy years and never once asked whose it was.

Nobody asked me to do this, she said. Elnora doesn’t know. She’s never asked anybody for anything in her whole life.
She almost smiled.
That’s the problem.

So I’m going to sign it, she said. Tomorrow. At the courthouse. With my son Carlton. And I’m going to spell her name right.

And Elnora, she said. If you’re watching this. And I expect you are, because my boys will make sure of it. I want you to know something.
It’s not a gift, honey.
It never was mine to give.

Chancellor Pruitt ruled from the bench.
The court finds that the Grantor possessed full testamentary and contractual capacity. The court finds no evidence of undue influence. The court finds, in fact, that the Grantee had no knowledge of the conveyance until after the Grantor’s death. The deed recorded in Deed Book 2847 is valid. The petition is dismissed.

She looked at Thurston.
“Mr. Lockridge,” she said. “I’ll add something. Not as a ruling. As a woman who sat at your mother’s bridge table for thirty years when I was a girl.”
Thurston looked at the table.
“Your mother told my mother something once,” Chancellor Pruitt said. “In 1985. At bridge. My mother told me years later.”
She took off her glasses.
“She said, The worst thing about money, Margaret, is that it teaches you to stop asking where it came from.”

The developer pulled out of the Pecan Hollow deal in February.
Without the thirty-eight acres and the road frontage, they couldn’t get the entrance permit.
Thurston lost his deposit. Two hundred thousand dollars.
Bertram stopped calling Carlton.

Carlton came to see me in March.
At the tenant house.
I’d moved in in February. Patricia helped me. Alfreda’s Dwayne and his boys carried my furniture down the gravel lane on a Saturday. Mama’s bed went back in Mama’s room. Under the window. Where she could smell the pecans.
I gave up the rent on East End Street.
I don’t pay rent anymore.

I made coffee. In Mama’s old percolator. I made biscuits. Mrs. Lockridge’s recipe. Buttermilk. With sorghum.
We sat at Mama’s kitchen table.

“I owe you an apology,” Carlton said. “For the back door. For not opening the screen. For we won’t be needing you.”
“You were getting me away from your brothers.”
“I was,” Carlton said. “But I didn’t have to say it like that. I didn’t have to hand you a check through a crack in a door like you were a delivery boy.”
He looked at his coffee.
“I’ve been doing that my whole life,” he said. “We all have. Through the screen. Without opening it.”

“Your mama told me to write don’t cash this on the back,” he said. “She made me practice the handwriting. Small. In pencil. So my brothers wouldn’t see it if they looked.”
He almost smiled.
“She said, Elnora won’t cash it. She’ll put it on her refrigerator and look at it every day until she gets mad enough to turn it over.”

I thought about it.
I looked out at the pecan grove. At forty-one trees. At the creek. At the north slope where my daddy’s tractor rolled.

Carlton nodded.
“Thurston’s developer called me last week,” he said. “They want to make you an offer. For the thirty-eight acres. They’ll pay a million two.”

Carlton looked at me.
“You could live anywhere,” he said. “Florida. A condo. Never scrub another floor.”

“Mr.—” I stopped. “Carlton. Do you know what my great-granddaddy said? When Horace Lockridge tried to buy it?”
Carlton shook his head.
“He said it was his granddaddy’s land,” I said. “And he’d die on it.”
I looked at the pecan trees.
“Horace wrote it in his letter,” I said. “Your mama read it.”

PART 8