I ran water in the last glass, then turned the faucet off. “What you mean?” I asked, handing her the final cup.
“I mean, I remember when I first went to that school. To Chester.” She dried the glass and set it on the counter. Then she folded the towel into a square, placed it on the counter as well.
“Wait. You went there?”
Momly smirked. “Yeah, a long time ago. I told you that.” Had she? I didn’t remember ever talking to her about going to Chester. Actually, if I’m being honest, I don’t really remember talking to Momly about anything. At least not about her. Didn’t realize that until that moment.
“I mean, maybe you did, but I don’t remember.”
“Uh-huh. Well, in case you missed it . . . I grew up in the country. Not too far from the farm I have to drive Maddy to tomorrow morning. And when I was ten, my parents split up, and my father pretty much disappeared. My mother had to figure out how to support us, now that we were on our own, so she ended up applying to be the custodian of Chester Academy. And because she was an employee, I got to go there for free.”
I had no idea. I mean, about any of it. I didn’t know Momly went to Chester. I also didn’t know her mom was a janitor.
“Did you like it there?”
“Ha!” she yelped, then continued, “No. No, no, no. Shoot, the only reason we sent you and Maddy there is because I know the education is excellent. But, for me, I couldn’t stand it. Not at first. I mean, listen, I’m a poor girl from the sticks who ended up in a fancy city school. And what made it worse was after classes, I couldn’t just go home like everybody else. I had to hang around with my mother, help her clean floors and bleach toilets. Of course, eventually my classmates found out, and then the jokes started. They called me names like Emily Mop Bucket, stuff like that. A few of the girls would even purposely leave trash around, or spit their gum out on the floor, because they knew after school my mother and I would have to clean it up.”
“Stupid hair flippers.” I murmured, chewing on the words.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just . . . did it . . . like, did it ever get better?”
“Better?” Momly humphed. “Eventually. I mean, first I tried to fit in. Tried to find another poor kid to pick on to take the attention off me. But all the kids I went to tease ended up becoming my friends. And after that, school got better for a while. But there were other things that happened that made it tough again.”
Uh-oh. “Other things like what?” I asked. Momly crossed her arms.
“Well, halfway through my seventh-grade year, my mother had a massive stroke. The whole left side of her body was basically paralyzed. So she couldn’t do the job anymore. Luckily, my grades were good, and they pitied me, so the school let me stay through the eighth grade for free. But . . . that was hard. And I . . .” Momly drew in a breath, then continued. “And I, um, I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I decided I would just keep doing her job, which I couldn’t do because I was twelve years old, so obviously the school couldn’t let me be the custodian, plus they had no idea I was helping my mother in the first place. So they ended up bringing on somebody else. A man named . . . Mr. Warren.” She paused, giving me a second to catch on.
“You mean, Mr. Warren, Mr. Warren?” Mr. Warren, her favorite patient?
“Yep. Mr. Warren, Mr. Warren.” I had never seen Mr. Warren, but in this moment, I wondered what he looked like back then. Probably real tall with big crusty hands, a rough beard, a beanie on his head or one of them old-men hats with the kangaroo on the back. Maybe even chewing on a straw or a toothpick, a fat wallet in his back pocket, full of receipts and no money. Something like that. Like Coach, if Coach had hair on his face and was a janitor. And was tall. So . . . maybe not like Coach. But . . . yeah.
“Mr. Warren’s been the sweetest old man alive since back then,” Momly continued. “He’d let me show up for work with him after school, and he’d say I could sweep here, or scrub there. Light work compared to what my mother had me doing, but it was all I needed to make me feel like I was honoring her, y’know, and like I wasn’t completely taking a handout.”
I nodded. All of this made perfect sense to me. “But where was your mom?”
“We had to put her in a home. I went to live with an older cousin who’d moved to the city for college. She was really too young to be taking care of me, but we didn’t have any other family, so . . .” Momly shrugged.
“Yeah.”
“But I saw my mom on weekends.” Momly picked at a cuticle, gave it a tear. “Then one day I showed up after school ready for my daily task, and Mr. Warren said that he didn’t have anything for me. And when I asked him why not, he said because he didn’t have a task nearly as important as the one I was avoiding. Wait . . . that’s not exactly what he said. What he really said was”—Momly held her finger out and screwed her face to imitate an old man—“?‘Folks who try to do everything are usually avoiding one thing.’?”
“And was he right?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest.
“Was he right?” Momly picked up the last two glasses from the counter, held them up to the light—no spots—then put them up in the cabinet. “He definitely was. But I didn’t know it at the time. I mean, I was twelve, and couldn’t figure out how to deal with the fact that my mother wasn’t the same, y’know?”
“Yeah.”
“And guess what? That old man is still teaching me stuff. Even the other day, when he was sort of out of it, going on about buffing the floor”—Momly’s face brightened, laughter trapped behind her lips—“all I could think was that he thinks he can do things that he just . . . he just can’t anymore. In his mind, he’s strong enough to push a buffer. But you know? If he really wants to clean that floor, we can do it together. And that’s okay.”
TO DO: Get there (there’s nothing else I can do)
THE NEXT MORNING Momly dropped me off, but only me. Maddy had spent the whole ride telling me how milking cows didn’t scare her, and how if the milk don’t come out like it’s supposed to, she’ll just pick the whole cow up and shake the milk out of it. Yep, farm day had finally arrived.
“Have fun,” I said, climbing out of the car at the exact same moment Becca was walking between Momly’s car and the car in front of us. We did a weird wave thing, and then I turned back to Maddy. “You getting up front?” I asked, not really serious, but Momly cut me off anyway.
“No, Patty, she is not,” she said with an unusual snap. Momly ain’t have no funk in her. No sit down. No finger point. No talk-through-teethness. None of that. But she didn’t do the Maddy-in-the-front-seat thing. Maddy could kick the front seat all day, every day, could put a hole in it and everything, and Momly would be cool. But not this.
“Come on, Momly. Please? I did it yesterday,” Maddy begged. Momly turned around in her seat, looked Maddy in the face.
“You’re not old enough yet, sweetheart.” That little bit of snap was gone and she was back to sweet Momly, even though she was still saying no.