TO DO: Be introduced to Momly (like, for real)

I HAD NEVER talked so much at dinner, but I was going on about Becca’s house, how beautiful it all was, and how Becca’s room was nothing like I expected.

“Stars everywhere. It was like being at the science center or something,” I explained. “And did y’all know rocket scientists were real?”

Momly laughed and Uncle Tony joked me, talking about, “It don’t take a rocket scientist to know rocket scientists are real, Patty.” I admit, he got me.

I tried to explain to Maddy what constellations were, telling her they were stars connected in the sky to make pictures. She said her teacher told them about constellations before, which of course made me go in on her teacher’s daughter. Bony McPhony and her cousin, Lie-Lie. All this time I’d been thinking about Taylor and TeeTee like they were some kind of royalty, when really they were just . . . regular girls pretending to be something they not. Cornballs.

“But you don’t know, maybe they have fathers that are doing well?” Momly suggested, her voice tired.

“Come on, babe,” Uncle Tony cut in. “If I hit it big, you think you’d decide to be around all them snotty noses—matter fact, snotty, snotty noses—every day?” Then he quickly added, “Not you, Maddy. And I’m not trying to be mean, but . . . come on, y’all know what I’m sayin’.”

“Well, how exactly do you plan on hitting it big?” Momly threw one of her zings that sound too sweet to be a zing, which makes it zingier.

“Oop!” I yelped, just to get Uncle Tony back for the rocket scientist burn.

“And also,” Momly added, “Tony, you know me better than that. There’s nothing I love more than a snotty nose. Snotty or not.”

After dinner, I wanted to help Momly with the dishes, sensing how tired she was. Uncle Tony had cleared the table and was now helping Maddy get ready for bed. She was probably talking his ear off about going to the farm in the morning. I couldn’t wait to hear what she thought of it, only because I remember when I went—every school in the city goes to the same one. Maybe it’s because they got so many cows, and that’s cool, but milking cows might’ve been the grossest thing I’ve ever done. I mean . . . yeah. It’s up there.

I ran the water in the sink.

“Oh, don’t worry about the dishes, Patty. I’ll take care of them in a minute,” Momly said, now bending down, sweeping nothing into a dustpan.

“I got it.”

“No, it’s okay,” she insisted. But I was already squirting green liquid soap on everything.

“Seriously, it’s fine. I can do it.”

Momly didn’t say nothing to that. Just emptied the dustpan in the trash, then put the broom back in the kitchen closet. She snatched a hand towel from the oven handle.

“Then I’ll dry.”

I scrubbed each plate, then handed it over to Momly, who wiped it, then put it back up in the cabinet. We did this over and over again with dishes and silverware, until there was nothing left but cups.

“I just can’t believe those girls,” I went on, handing Momly a glass. Just couldn’t get over it.

“I can.” She set the glass down. “I knew a lot of girls like that. Shoot, I was almost one of them.”

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.”