Chapter 15 of 15 · 7 min read
The Share
Fourteen rooms, twenty-eight thousand a year in tax, and a woman who had never owned anything deciding what a debt is for.
They came on the Sunday.
Rosa cooked tinga because it was the only thing she knew how to cook for six people, and because her mother had made it for the whole street in Puebla, and because it had never once been cooked in that kitchen in twenty-six years and she had decided that this was absurd.
Diane came at eleven and was put to work. Peter came at twelve with a bottle of wine that cost too much and an expression like a man arriving at a border. Margaret came last, at ten past, with the folder.
They read it in the kitchen, at the table, with the radio on the wrong station.
Diane read the first four pages and then couldn’t. Margaret read to the end of page eight. Peter, who had not read aloud since school and was bad at it, read the last three pages in a flat voice with his finger under the line, including the part about himself, which he got through by not stopping.
When he finished, nobody said anything for a while.
Then Rosa got up and turned the pot down, because it was catching.
Afterwards, when Diane had gone up to look at the blue bedroom and Peter had gone out to the garden to make a telephone call he had been putting off for a week, Margaret found Rosa at the sink.
“May I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
Rosa did not answer immediately. She rinsed a bowl, and set it in the rack, and rinsed another.
“Do you know what it costs to keep this house?”
“Twenty-eight thousand a year in tax,” Margaret said. “About nine in oil, if it’s a bad winter. The boiler’s a 1994 Weil-McLain.”
Rosa looked at her.
“Peter told me,” Margaret said. “In some detail. He was trying to frighten you with it.”
“He was.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes,” Rosa said.
She dried her hands.
“I have thought about it every night since November,” she said. “And I want to tell you what I decided, and I want to tell you before your brother comes in, because he will do arithmetic at me.”
“All right.”
“I am selling the house.”
Margaret did not move.
“Rosa — “
“Please. Let me say the whole of it.” Rosa folded the towel. “I am sixty-two. I have cleaned this house for twenty-six years and I love it and I do not want it. Do you understand the difference? I know every floorboard in it. I know which windows stick. I have carried a woman’s tray up those back stairs four thousand times.” She hung the towel on the rail. “It is not my house. It is the house I worked in. I would be a ghost in it, Mrs. Halloran, in a place where the only person I ever spoke to is dead.”
“Then where would you go?”
“Puebla,” Rosa said. “For a while. My mother is in a cemetery I have never seen. Then I do not know. Perhaps I come back. I have not had a perhaps in my life before and I would like to keep it for a while.”
Margaret put her hand flat on the counter.
“You know what I’m going to say.”
“You are going to say that you will buy it.”
“I’m going to say that I will buy it at whatever an independent appraiser says it’s worth, on any terms you like, and that if you’d rather sell it to a stranger I will not say another word about it ever.” Margaret’s voice was, as always, perfectly level, and it was costing her something. “And I’d like you to know that I’ve had that sentence ready since the sixth of January, and I have not said it, because there was no version of saying it that wasn’t a fifty-nine-year-old woman asking a housekeeper for her house.”
Rosa smiled slightly.
“You have said it now.”
“You asked.”
“I did.” Rosa turned around and leaned against the sink. “Mrs. Halloran, can I tell you the thing I have understood, that I do not think your mother understood?”
“Yes.”
“She wrote that the house is not hers. That it was built with your father’s money and so it belongs to my mother’s daughter.” Rosa shook her head slowly. “That is a beautiful thing to write in a letter. It is not true. My mother did not want this house. My mother wanted to be twenty-six years old and not have that man on the back stairs, and there is no house in the world that is that.”
The radio played something from 1974.
“Your mother could not give my mother her life back,” Rosa said. “So she gave her nine hundred dollars a month for eleven years and she gave me a room and a job and a wage, and at the end she gave me all of it, and every one of those things was the wrong size. Too small for thirty-nine years and much too big for me.” She spread her hands. “So I am going to make it the right size. I am going to sell it to you, and I am going to take what I need, which is not very much, and the rest is going to go where it should have gone in 1986.”
Margaret said, “Which is where?”
“There is a place in Bridgeport,” Rosa said, “for women who work in houses. Domésticas. They do English classes and they help with the papers and there is a lawyer one day a week. My mother had nobody like that. There was a man from an agency in Waterbury who said, in front of her, that if there was a problem he would switch her out at no charge.” Her jaw moved. “I have been to see them. They run on four hundred thousand dollars a year and they turn people away in November.”
“You’re going to endow it.”
“I am going to endow it,” Rosa said, “in my mother’s name, and it will say her name on the door, and in fifty years nobody will know who she was.”
She picked up the towel again, because her hands wanted something.
“And that,” she said, “is what I want the share to be for.”
Peter came in from the garden with his ears red from the cold and said that Doug Reiner had, in fact, taken his call, and that the conversation had been the worst nine minutes of his life and that he was going to have to go back down there in April, and that he was, apparently, having lunch with his ex-brother-in-law, which he intended to be sick about later.
Diane came down from the blue bedroom having found, in the bottom of the closet, a shoebox of photographs from 1984 and 1985, and in the middle of them, in a strip of four from a booth at a county fair, a young woman of twenty-seven with her hair pinned up, laughing, with a twelve-year-old Diane Vance in the frame beside her pulling a face.
Rosa held it for a long time under the kitchen light.
“That is my mother,” she said. “I have never seen her laughing.”
“Take it,” Diane said.
“It is yours. You are in it.”
“Rosa.” Diane put her hand over Rosa’s hand, around the photograph. “Take the picture.”
She left in June.
The sale closed on the fourteenth. Margaret paid the appraised value, which was higher than Peter had estimated and lower than Margaret had feared, and moved in alone in August, into a house with fourteen rooms, and slept the first night in the blue bedroom at the back, second floor, third window, because she could not face the front.
The Teodora Delgado Center on Fairfield Avenue in Bridgeport opened the following March with an endowment of one million six hundred thousand dollars, and a brass plate by the door with a name on it, and a photograph in the hallway of a young woman at a county fair in 1985, laughing, with a child beside her pulling a face.
Nobody who comes through that door knows who she was. That was Rosa’s condition and she was immovable about it.
Ellis Grange retired in November after forty-two years and told exactly one story at his own retirement dinner, about a woman who had come into his office in 1986 and asked him to keep a door open for a letter that never came, and he did not use any names, and most people assumed he had made it up.
Mrs. Bridget Cudahy died at Fairwood in Danbury at ninety-two. Margaret went. There were nine people. Margaret was the only one who was not a nurse.
And in the kitchen at 4 Harrow Lane, the radio stayed on the AM station out of Waterbury, because Margaret Vance-Halloran spent an entire Saturday in September with a screwdriver and a torch and her reading glasses trying to work out how the dial was fixed, and discovered a small brass screw driven through the mechanism from behind, into the housing, at some point a very long time ago.
Somebody had done it deliberately. Somebody had decided, once, that this station and no other, and had made it permanent, and had then complained about it for thirty-nine years.
Margaret sat on the kitchen floor of her mother’s house for a while with the back off the radio in her lap.
Then she put the screw back exactly where she had found it, and screwed the panel on, and turned it on, and left it.