Then I reached the bottom.
There was a note written in my handwriting on a hospital napkin.
Mrs. W — Susan lands at six. I’m sleeping in the chair. I’m here if you need anything. You’re not alone. — C.
I couldn’t even remember writing it.
Margaret had saved it for four years.
My eyes filled with tears.
“Why did you save all this?”
Margaret took off her glasses.
“When my husband died, people visited for about a month. They brought food. Sent cards. Checked on me.”
She looked outside toward the oak tree.
“Then everyone went back to their own lives.”
She paused.
“And I was alone in a house with forty-two windows and nobody to look out of them with.”
She told me she had actually intended to sell the house years earlier.
Then she found my handwritten cleaning card.
“You came on Thursday. You cleaned my oven.”
I laughed through my tears.
“And you put every picture back exactly where it had been.”
She touched one of Willa’s drawings.
“Then your daughter came and counted the windows. I had lived here for forty years and had never counted them.”
Margaret smiled faintly.
“I called Susan that night. I told her, ‘My house has forty-two windows.’”
Susan had replied:
“Mom, you sound happy.”
Then Margaret’s expression shifted.
“When I fell in the bathroom, I was in terrible pain. But I kept thinking something.”
“What?”
“Tuesday.”
She paused.
“Then Wednesday.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“And then I thought, Carly comes Thursday.”
She took both of my hands.
“You were the one thing in my life I knew would happen every week. You never canceled. You never arrived late. You never took anything. You ate lunch in your car because you were afraid of leaving crumbs.”
She squeezed my hands.
“You thought you were just my cleaner.”
Then she shook her head.
“You were never just my cleaner, Carly. Not for one Thursday.”
We both cried.
After a while, Margaret composed herself.
“There’s one more thing.”
She picked up the shoebox lid.
Taped beneath it was a white envelope.
On the front, written in her perfect cursive, were two words:
For Willa.
My heart began pounding.
“Open it.”
Inside was a bank statement.
