Two Bowls
The ad was three lines long. Housecleaning help needed, one or two times a week, twenty dollars per visit. The address was in one of the older neighborhoods in the northeast part of the city, the kind where the houses had been built in the sixties and seventies and showed their age the way that people who have worked hard all their lives show theirs, not with neglect but with a kind of dignified weariness.
I answered it the same way I answered every ad that month, which was quickly and without particular hope, because I needed the money more than I needed the work to be meaningful, and twenty dollars added to the other money I was assembling from other jobs might be enough to cover the gap between my scholarship and my actual expenses. I was twenty-two, a third-year university student, and the phrase living on a tight budget did not fully capture the reality, which was that I tracked the cost of groceries by the item and had developed opinions about which ninety-nine-cent ramen flavors were worth eating and which were not. When I arrived at the address, a small adobe house on a street where the trees had grown large enough to arch over the sidewalk, a woman was sitting on the front steps.
She was perhaps in her early seventies, small and slightly stooped, with silver hair pulled back in a plain bun and hands that rested in her lap with the particular stillness of hands that have spent decades working and have finally been asked to rest. Her face held the expression of someone who had been waiting with the patience of a person who does not expect the world to arrive on time. “You are the one who called about the cleaning?” she asked as I approached.
Her accent was warm and specific, the Spanish of someone who had grown up somewhere in northern Mexico, the vowels round and unhurried. “Yes, ma’am. Diego.”
She smiled.
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