the way you’d tell someone the time. “The house is too big for one person. But I’m too stubborn to leave it.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And I meant it.
“It’s a lot of dust,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
She looked at me over her reading glasses.
“I called your references,” she said. “Your old boss at the dental office said you once drove forty minutes to return a patient’s wallet he’d left in the waiting room. Your neighbor said you watched her dog for two weeks and wouldn’t take any money.” She folded her hands on the table. “And
you cried in a parking lot and apologized for it. People who are going to steal from you don’t usually apologize for crying.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Whitaker.”
“Thursday,” she said. “Nine o’clock.”
That first Thursday, I was so nervous I got there at 8:40 and sat in my car at the curb for twenty minutes so I wouldn’t be early.
Mrs. Whitaker had left a note on the kitchen counter. It was written on thick cream-colored paper in perfect cursive.
