by Gail Sattler
“The label said it would make everything fresh and clean. It’s antibacterial.”
Bob swiped his hand over his eyes again, and resisted the urge to cough. “That could be, but I think you used a little too much.”
George looked up at him, her eyes as red as his felt. “The label said to use full strength on bathroom fixtures, and then diluted on wood and painted surfaces. So I did.”
He looked at the bottle, which was on the floor next to the toilet. Before today, he’d only used it once. It was now half empty.
He turned toward the shower stall. Part of him wanted to see how shiny she’d scrubbed the inside, but part of him didn’t want to open it, for fear of getting knocked out by the fumes.
Bob cleared his throat. “I brought supper. We should eat before it gets cold.” Or permeated with pine. He would never again feel the same about walking through an evergreen forest.
They walked to the kitchen area. The sink, counters and appliances were so clean they sparkled, but the smell of pine wasn’t diminished enough for Bob to want to expose his food to it. “Let’s go into my house. I have ketchup.”
He didn’t give her a chance to respond. He simply walked out, expecting her to follow, which she did. Once outside, he inhaled deeply. When he did, the sudden ability to draw in unscented oxygen made his head spin.
“We should leave the door open, to air the place out while we’re gone. We can keep an eye on everything from the kitchen.”
All she did was nod, so Bob continued into his house. “It’s kind of messy. I know I already said this earlier, but I wasn’t exactly expecting company today. It’s been a long, busy week, and housework isn’t my first priority.”
“That’s okay.”
Fortunately for Bob, he didn’t have to lead her past his bedroom. The only time he made the bed was when he knew in advance that his mother was coming. The first thing she did when she arrived was march to his bedroom to check that he’d made the bed. When he hadn’t, which was every time he wasn’t expecting her, she promptly lectured him. Now, he wished he’d listened to her.
George wiped her hands down the sides of her jeans. “If you don’t mind, I need to wash my hands. I can still smell that cleaner.”
He pointed down the hall, hoping she wouldn’t look into other rooms as she walked by. When she returned, she still smelled as if she’d been attacked by a pine tree, but he kept that thought to himself.
She joined him at the table, where he had already set a burger and fries in front of each of them, and poured them both a glass of milk. “I hope you’re hungry.”
George smiled weakly. “Actually, I’m not sure how I feel. I was so busy cleaning I didn’t think about eating. I hope I did it right.”
“I’m sure you did fine. Let’s pray now, before this gets completely cold.” He bowed his head, and said a short prayer, thanking God for both the meal and George’s new home, and he began to eat.
George sat there glassy-eyed staring at the burger.
Bob stopped chewing. “What’s wrong?”
She blinked and picked up the burger. “I feel so strange about this. You bought me lunch and now supper, and I don’t have any way to repay you. More than that, you’ve given me a place to stay, rent-free. I’ve never had to accept someone’s charity before, and I can’t say I like it very much. I wish there was something I could do to repay you.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t worry about it. I already told you it’s not a big deal. It’s not costing me anything for you to stay in my garage. Although, now that you’ve cleaned it up, we should call it an apartment.” He smiled.
She didn’t smile back.
“It’s okay, George. I’m sure there’s something you can do for me. How about if we make it your job to sweep up the shop at the end of the day?”
She shook her head. “No. You already pay me a wage for stuff like that. I want to do something else for you.”
“It looks like you did a good job cleaning the, uh, apartment. How about if you did some housecleaning for me?”
“Are you sure? I’ve never done this kind of thing before. I’m still not sure I did a good job.”
“I’m sure you did.” Even if she did use a double dose of the pine cleaner. Or maybe even a quadruple dose. They’d been away from the garage for ten minutes, and the pine forest still surrounded her. “Now eat your dinner. Good food makes everything better.” He grimaced. “My mother always says that. I can’t believe I’m repeating something my mother said.”
She gave him a weak smile, and finally took a bite out of her burger. “Is your mother a good cook?”
“Yeah. She makes the best osso buco in the world. My brother Tony runs an Italian restaurant, and even he can’t make osso buco like Mama. When she goes to his restaurant, she always ends up in the kitchen improving the recipes. I know that probably doesn’t sound very good, but once you meet my mother, you’ll understand.” As soon as he realized what he’d said, he snapped his mouth shut.
He had already crossed the line between business and personal too many times. He didn’t need to expound on his mother and her quirks. It was bad enough that he was with George now, in his home.
After eating half the burger, George laid it on the wrapper. “I’m sorry, but I can’t finish this.” She paused and pushed the burger away. “Actually, I don’t feel very good. At first I thought I was hungry, but now that I’ve eaten, I think I feel worse.” She covered her mouth with her hand, and made a little cough.
Bob frowned. “I wonder if it’s because you’ve inhaled too many fumes today. Maybe you should lie down.”
She shook her head and took a long sip of milk. “I shouldn’t need to do that. Josephine never has to lie down.”
“Josephine?”
“Our housekeeper. She’s very thorough. The house smells so nice and clean when she’s finished every day. She always has Daddy’s clothes freshly pressed so they’re ready for him in the morning. Daddy likes to get into a warm shirt in the morning.”
“Morning? She irons in the morning? You mean you had a live-in housekeeper?”
She blinked a few times. “Of course…”
Bob ran his fingers through his hair. He felt as though he’d been living in another universe light years away from George’s world. “George, I’ve never even had a housekeeper, never mind a live-in person. I also wash my own floors and clean my own bathroom and do my own laundry.”
“Why don’t you send your laundry to the service that does the shop?”
“We don’t have a service. On Saturday, Bart takes the bag of dirty coveralls home, and his wife washes everything for us. If you were wondering about who empties the garbage cans and washes down the bathrooms, Bart and I take turns. We alternate weekends.”
Her face paled suddenly. As much as he didn’t like housecleaning, Bob didn’t think the concept was that abhorrent. He accepted it as something that had to be done. He and Bart saved quite a lot of money doing what they did, because both tasks were expensive to contract out.
George covered her mouth with her hand, and her complexion turned gray. “I really don’t feel well.”
Before Bob could blink, she turned and ran down the hall. The bathroom door slammed, and she started to retch.
Bob pushed the remainder of his burger into the center of the table. Suddenly he wasn’t hungry anymore, either.
When everything became quiet in the bathroom, Bob walked down the hall and tapped softly on the door. “George? Are you okay now? Can I come in?”
The door didn’t open. “I’m so sorry. Please go away.”
Bob didn’t go away. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sick as an adult, but he clearly remembered his mother taking care of him when he’d had the flu as a child. Having someone who loved him care for him when he was down made the experience a little less horrible.
He seriously doubted George’s father would have taken care of her. And while Josephine sounded like an efficient housek
eeper, that’s exactly what she was—paid help. For now, George didn’t have the option of either one of them. The only one she had was him.
He wiggled the knob, and it turned. “At the count of ten, I’m coming in. Ten. Nine.” Shuffling echoed from the other side of the door. “Eight. Seven.” The doorknob moved, but since he was holding it firmly, he knew the lock button wouldn’t work. A grumble came from the other side of the door.
“Six.” He slowed his counting.
The toilet flushed.
“Five.”
The water ran, and he could hear splashing and the frantic pumping of the soap dispenser, which reminded him that it was almost empty.
“Four.”
“I give up. Come in. But you’re not going to like what you see.”
He opened the door.
George stood beside the sink, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her shoulders hunched, and her eyes big and wide as she stared up at him.
“Are you okay?”
Her lower lip quivered. “No, I’m not okay. I don’t think I’ve ever been less okay in my life.” Her eyes welled up, and one tear spilled over onto her cheek. “I’m such a failure. I can’t even do something simple like clean a bathroom without making myself sick. How pathetic is that?”
Bob stared at George. He pictured her as she had been on the day she walked in to apply for the job—poised and self-confident.
She wasn’t like that now. Not only did she look defeated, she looked alone, and she was. Her father had abandoned her. He knew George had a sister, but she hadn’t gone to her for help. As a tomboy, George probably didn’t fit in with the other single women in her social circle, it hadn’t appeared so at the banquet.
She really had no one to turn to besides him. The revelation was startling and heartbreaking. The expression poor little rich girl had never meant anything to Bob until now, and it put the verse, “What you do for the least of these, you also do for me” in perspective.
He’d given her shelter, but it was only his garage, which he wasn’t even using. In a way, having her live there gave him the benefit of added security. No one would break into his storage area in the middle of the night with someone in the building.
He fully intended to buy her meals until payday, but that was as much for his benefit as for George’s. Spending time together away from work when they went out for dinner together every Thursday night had made him realize how much he missed female companionship. George, unlike the other woman he’d dated, understood what he meant when he talked a little shop. He also could enjoy himself with no risk that anything more was going to happen than a pleasant evening. She knew his schedule and his obligations, and knew that the reason they were together was simply a weekly escape from routine. Thursday nights had become another routine, but one he enjoyed.
It suddenly hit him that they would no longer be enjoying Thursday dinners together. Up until now, George had insisted on paying every second time. Now, he refused to accept her money. She couldn’t afford it, and he doubted she would accept more charity from him.
In a way, he was almost working on Tyler’s manipulative scale. Bob was her boss. And a happy employee was a productive one. So helping George out ultimately helped him financially.
What George really needed right now was a friend who had nothing to gain by knowing her, and he couldn’t make that claim. But he supposed that anyone else in his current position would probably give the poor girl a hug.
He started to step forward, but stopped. He didn’t want to frighten her and he had her cornered in the small bathroom.
Bob remained in the doorway and extended his arms toward George. “Come here,” he said softly.
Her lower lip quivered, and she came forward, but instead of throwing herself into him the way he expected a distraught woman would, she only leaned her forehead against the center of his chest. Fortunately, she didn’t cry, which was good. If she had, he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
The only thing he could think of was to rest his hands on her shoulders, which he did. “Everything will be fine,” he mumbled. “You just need to give yourself more time.”
He felt her shake her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything I do is wrong. And then when I think I’m doing something right, it backfires in my face. I can’t even clean up without getting sick from the cleaner.”
He massaged her shoulders with his thumbs. “That’s just inexperience. You didn’t know and you used too much. Next time, put only a little on the sponge, and you’ll see that it goes a long way. You also picked the worst job first. I don’t know why you didn’t do the dusting and vacuuming before the bathroom.”
“The bathroom was smaller, so it looked easier.”
“Actually, it’s not. Vacuuming is probably the easiest household chore.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it before.”
Bob froze his movements. “You’ve never vacuumed?”
“Well, once. When I was a child, one day I thought it would be fun to help Josephine, but Daddy saw me with the vacuum and took it away. He told me never to do that again, that I wasn’t a housekeeper, I was an Ecklington. And of course, when I was a teenager, I grew out of wanting to help Josephine really quickly.”
“Uh…do you at least make your own bed?”
“Of course not. But I wouldn’t talk about not making the bed, if I were you.”
A smile started to tug at the corner of Bob’s mouth. The George he knew was back. “You’ll do fine. You just need some help to get started. If you want, I can show you what to do.”
He felt her nod again. “I’d really like that,” she said, and as she spoke, she moved forward. Her hands fell to the sides of his waist, then started to inch to his back, but suddenly she stepped backward, covering her mouth with both hands. “I’m so disgusting!” she said between her fingers. “I have to go brush my teeth. One day, I’ll pay you back for everything you’re doing for me. I promise.”
Before Bob could tell her that wasn’t necessary, she squeezed between him and the door, and ran down the hall. The back door opened, closed and all was silent.
Chapter Eleven
Georgette slathered a layer of Bob’s mother’s homemade strawberry jam on her toast and took a big bite.
“Did you sleep okay last night? Most people don’t sleep very well the first night in a new place.”
She swallowed while she nodded, then sipped her coffee. “This is so delicious! Yes, I did. I slept great.”
She’d truly slept like a log. Last night she’d wiped down the bathroom with water four times to get rid of the residue of pine cleaner, but this time, she went outside to clear out her lungs periodically. With the door open to air the place out, she’d vacuumed, dusted and even scrubbed out the insides of all the cupboards with dish soap.
At midnight, she dug through the boxes only long enough to find what she was going to wear to church that wouldn’t need to be ironed, then dropped herself on the futon, more exhausted than she’d ever been in her life. She wasn’t aware of a thing from that point on until Bob knocked on the door and told her it was time to get up for church.
Georgette checked her watch, knowing that they had to leave in a few minutes for Bob to be on time to practice with his friends before the service started.
She sipped her coffee quickly, enjoying common coffee as she never had in her life. More than feeling awkward in new surroundings when she woke up, she keenly felt the absence of a coffeemaker. And coffee filters. And coffee. And cream. And food.
The only thing she did have was a mug, but it was at work, which didn’t do her any good.
There were so many things she needed, but the $3.37 in her wallet wasn’t going to go very far.
She would have to pawn her expensive watch, even though she knew she would only get a fraction of its original price. The only other thing she owned of any value was the truck, and it would take too long to sell in its present condition. She could have mone
y in her pocket from the watch Monday morning.
“Were you warm enough with that blanket I left for you? When we get back from church I’ll give you some dishes and stuff out of my cupboard this afternoon, to get you started.”
“I can’t take your dishes.”
Bob grinned. Georgette nearly choked on her current bite of her breakfast. The little crinkles that appeared at the sides of his eyes made him so attractive she stopped breathing. He always looked good in his customary attire of jeans and T-shirt, but today, dressed in black slacks and a neatly pressed blue cotton shirt for the more formal service, he was handsome in a different way.
“Sure you can. Technically, I really only need one plate, and so do you, if the dishes are washed and put away after every meal. I have a set of eight, so I can certainly spare a couple of sets of plates and cutlery. Besides, it’s only a loan.”
She didn’t want to accept any more charity from him, but she was helpless not to. “Only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Except you’ll still be very limited as to what you can do. I only have one toaster, so if you like toast for breakfast, I’ll give you a key for my house and you can come in after I leave in the morning. There are probably a number of other things you need that can’t wait until payday on Friday, so I’m going to give you an advance on your paycheck.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I won’t advance the whole thing, but I can give you a portion.”
She looked again at her watch, which she now could keep, at least temporarily. “You have no idea how much I appreciate that.”
“I know. Monday morning, pay yourself out three days. That should keep you going until Friday, when you can have the balance.”
She finished the rest of the coffee in her mug, then set it down on the table, keeping her hands clasped around it. “I don’t understand why you’re being so nice to me. Not that I don’t appreciate it, because I do. It’s just that no one has ever treated me like this before.” Not wanting to say so, she didn’t understand his motives. Everyone always wanted something, and she was actually costing him money, with little or no chance of repayment, at least not for a very long time.