“That’s what my sister said. I’m not turning in a neighbor over laundry, Tom. I have to live next to that man Monday through Friday by myself. I’d like to still be able to borrow his ladder.”
He didn’t argue. He knows the difference between when I am thinking out loud and when I have landed.
“You’ll figure it,” he said. “You always do. Leave me something to do when you have.”
On Tuesday, on my lunch hour, I called a cleaner in Norfolk. I work the front desk at the dentist’s office in Albion, Tuesday through Friday, and one of our hygienists had her grandmother’s christening gown done there and swore by the woman.
“What was burning?” the woman asked.
“Household trash. Plastic.”
She made a small sound. “Plastic is oily. It gets down in the batting. I’d do it by hand, in the tub, flat. Three or four soaks. Eighty-five dollars. And I want to be honest with you, I can’t make promises on the smell, and I won’t make any on the pink. Those old pinks let go if you look at them wrong.”
“Eighty-five dollars and no promises.”
“That’s the truth of it. You could try airing it a week first. Sometimes air does more than I can.”
I wrote $85 on the corner of the desk calendar. Eighty-five dollars is groceries. But it was the “no promises” that sat on me. I kept thinking about the bluebird patch.
I aired it all week. Windows open on the north side, a box fan in the doorway. By Friday it smelled less like a milk jug and more like the memory of one.
Tom came in Friday at suppertime. He set his bag down, kissed me, and walked straight down the hall to the spare room without taking his cap off.
He bent down and smelled that quilt, this big man with his hands on his knees, and when he stood back up his jaw was working.
“I’m going over there.”
“Sit down, I have it handled.”
“Handled how?”
“I’m having Doris Hagen out for coffee Monday morning.”
He looked at me.
I watched him work it through. The fire chief’s wife. Monday morning. On the porch, most likely. I saw it arrive.
“Does Doris know why?”
“Doris knows I have her pie plate.”
He sat down on the edge of the spare bed, careful of the quilt, and laughed until he had to take his glasses off.
“You are your mother’s daughter,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’m having a friend to coffee. If Lyle doesn’t burn, we’ll have a nice visit and she’ll get her pie plate. If he waits till evening like I asked him, there is no harm done to anybody on this earth.”
“And if he doesn’t wait.”
“Then somebody besides me will have smelled it.”
That was the whole of my plan. I was only going to stop being the single person in Boone County who knew.
Sunday after church I caught Doris at the coat rack in the fellowship hall.
You would have to know Doris. She is seventy, built low to the ground, and she has run the funeral lunch committee at our Methodist church since before the carpet was changed. She has been married to Bud Hagen for forty years, and he has been chief of the volunteer department for twenty-two of them. She is a woman of firm opinions on ham, hymns and fire, in about that order.
She had brought a sour cream raisin pie to Mother’s funeral lunch two years ago, and I had never returned the plate.
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