Joy looked at him, tilting her head. The candlelight had a way of erasing her wrinkles and making her appear younger, more like the woman he first saw when he took that job at Central High School years before and noticed her lifting boxes from her trunk and asked if she could use a hand. Behind her, those bathing suits still rustled on the railing while down below that truck was backing up to leave, releasing a series of automated warning beeps as it went.
“I know you can’t help forgetting,” Joy said, her pale eyes going damp with tears, “but we’ve had this conversation before, Charlie. Dozens of times, in fact. Last time, it ended with you screaming and breaking things. I found it quite frightening, all that pent-up rage I never knew you had, so I don’t want to go through that again. Now, I need you to try hard and keep this thought in your head instead, because it will make things easier and be more pleasant for you than those other thoughts: I like being a snowbird—and you like it too.”
“No more driving for me,” he told Tünde as she stood before him still in Joy’s art room at the house on Arnold Street. He shook his head and sent that memory sailing away like those bathing suits had done later that night when the wind picked up and blew them from the railing so they seemed to dance in the air a moment before falling to the parking lot below. “Can you sit with me for a bit?”
“Sit? No. You pay me to clean. Now I must do, then go to other jobs.”
Tünde left the room, and Charlie lingered behind for a while until he could not bear the silence any longer. That’s when he carried The Pig to the kitchen and set it on the table. He began picking through the bags of groceries, ultimately making himself a roast beef sandwich with mayo, then swallowing the pills Tünde had dumped in his Tuesday compartment, chasing them with a sugary soda he did not recall writing on the list of things for her to buy. After that, he went in search of her, with the notion that he may as well take advantage of the company while there was another person in the house.
The narrow bathroom beneath the stairs—that’s where he found her. She wore Joy’s yellow cleaning gloves, which made her hands appear daintier than he knew them to be. Kneeling before the toilet, Tünde scrubbed with the same brute-force she brought to the kitchen table earlier. The woman did not so much as lift her head when he appeared in the doorway. Still, Charlie asked if she minded his sticking close by while she cleaned.
“You worry I break something?”
“No, not at all.”
“You worry I steal something, like your wife thought me to do?”
“It’s not that.” And then, once more, he found himself admitting to something he had only ever told The Pig: “I’m just lonely without her around. She was the only person I ever loved. She took care of me. She understood me, at least until the last few years.”
If Tünde had taken in those words spoken from the deep well of his broken heart, she didn’t indicate as much. She gave a slight shrug, and then flushed the sudsy water down the toilet before turning her attention to the floor. And when she was done with the floor, she clomped up the stairs to the bathroom there. Next came the bedroom, where she ripped the sheets from the bed and carried them to the wash, before remaking it with fresh linens. At last came the dusting, which took her and Charlie all over the house and required a great deal of time since things were dirty after so many months with nobody home. Eventually, the wash was done and folded and the furniture polished and the air smelled like ammonia and bleach and all clean things. Tünde carted the smaller rugs to the patio out back, and Charlie watched from a window as she used a broom to beat them with the hardest of wallops. The rugs released what sounded like a pained grunt with each and every whack. After she returned inside to put them back in their places, she unpacked the last of the groceries, and then tackled her final bit of work: mopping the kitchen floor. As Charlie watched, he couldn’t help but think it was just like the old days, with Tünde in her trancelike state pushing the dirty gray strings of that mop around.
“You were always so good at ignoring those kids,” Charlie said after a long while, speaking his thoughts out loud without quite meaning to do so.
“What is this you are saying now?” Tünde asked.
She had finished mopping by then and was peeling off the yellow gloves, exposing her big, knuckly hands and chewed fingernails.
“I was watching you clean and thinking how you used to shut out those kids and all the bullshit they would pull back at that school. Like calling you that stupid name.”
Tünde draped Joy’s yellow gloves on the sides of the bucket she had just emptied. “They had name for you too,” she said.
“I know they did. But unlike you, I could never tune it out. Their nastiness used to eat away at me. I think that’s why I let a lot of anger build up inside over the years without even realizing it. Anyway, like I said, you handled them better than me.”
“Maybe not so much as you think,” she told Charlie. “Reason I was fired was for finally teaching one his lesson.”
“What did you do?”
“I guess you don’t read Providence newspaper. Big story few years back. I was like celebrity in this city. Well, bad celebrity. I choked one of those kids.”