Free Nine Women by Shirley Ann Grau Page B

pleased, she thought, were they to know that.) “To our summer,” she said to their hazy haloed faces, “to our summer here.”
    Oh yes, my friends whose last name I cannot remember, I am truly glad to see you. I appreciate your kindness and your friendliness.
    I am truly glad to have had this day, one of my dwindling supply, to have had the sun and the bitter sea taste in my mouth. I am glad to have my favorite drink and to hear its ice cubes rattle.
    She lifted her glass again, higher, so that the umbrella’s bluish stain poured through it.
    And this sun-spoiled, sun-streaked ragged umbrella over my head—how beautiful it is to me there, where soon enough there’ll be only earth.
    Until then, though, the days, how they shine, how they shine.

HOUSEKEEPER
    Y ES, I WAS HOUSEKEEPER THERE, five days a week, for nearly nine years. And there was grief and sadness at the beginning as well as the end, I’ll tell you that.
    I started work a month or so after my husband died. I didn’t really need the money: I had his pension and the income from two rental properties we’d managed to buy over the years. But I just couldn’t sit home and be grieved by ghosts and wet the floor with tears.
    When they heard, my children got very upset. All of them—Alec and Marty and Crissie—who never agreed on anything in their lives, they all agreed that I mustn’t work. No, Mama, they said by phone, by letter. No, no, please no. Alec, my oldest, even came to see me, came all the way across the country to tell me it wasn’t decent for me to do housework.
    “If there’s anything you want, Mama, just tell us. We’re all doing very well, we can give you anything you want.”
    I started to say: Give me your father back, healthy and laughing.
    But I couldn’t say that, not to those brown eyes glistening with confusion and worry. So, because he was my child and I had had years of being patient with him, I tried to explain politely and carefully.
    “I understand, Mama,” he said. “We all understand that you want to be busy, to do something, to get out. Do you know that Mr. Congreve is looking for somebody to help in his office?”
    So Alec had been talking to the minister, not telling me anything about it. That was typical Alec, he just had to organize things. But not this time.
    You see, I figured I’d done my bit for the church over the years. I didn’t think I owed it anything. And I didn’t intend to spend my days typing notices and mailing out newsletters with all those other widows. Relicts, my grandmother used to call them.
    Alec, I told him, you are a nice boy and a good son, but this is none of your business. I have done housework all my life, only this time it’s going to be for pay and not for family.
    So that was that, though he never gave up trying to get me to change my mind. And he told everybody that working was just a passing fancy of mine, that it wouldn’t last.
    Well, it did last, like I said, for nearly nine years. My first job was my last and only one. And that was because I found Dr. Hollisher.
    He lived in one of the cottages on the beach at Indian Head Bay, a nice little house with wide screen porches all around and oak trees towering overhead, reaching right across the roof. It was so shady and cool in summer, he hardly ever used air-conditioning. Of course it was chilly and damp during the winter rains, but they don’t last long.
    His name was Milton Eugene Hollisher, so it said on the National City Bank checks he had ready for me every week, waiting on the hall table, same place every time, one end tucked under the big brass hurricane lamp. He never once gave me my check directly, hand to hand.
    He told me he was retired. I heard somewhere, at church maybe or at the grocery, that he’d been a psychiatrist at the big VA hospital at Greenwood, but I don’t know for sure. He didn’t talk about himself.
    We got on just fine. He was one for putting things plainly and I always did like to have everything