Widow's Walk

By Allison P. Boye

“So you want to know my business, Ms. Bradley,” Ms. Cross not so much asked but stated in a low tone as she ushered me into her office. She smoothed her pale grey hair, which lay in short, pragmatic waves close to her head, and wordlessly instructed me to sit.

“Well, about your business, Ma'am. I thought readers would have particular interest in its beginnings – how you built it from the ground up, virtually on your own. Why you chose to focus on cleaning products, to maintain a woman-centered staff. You are an inspiration to many, Ms. Cross.”

Ms. Cross leaned back in her leather desk chair, a sad smile flickering across her face. Her office was Spartan, all business and right angles save a handful of family photos adorning the shelves, mostly old snapshots of her and a young woman with the same shimmering blonde hair and pensive countenance. She sat silently for a long moment before speaking again.

“I'm an inspiration. I suppose that's good. I suppose that was part of the plan all along: to become a strong, independent woman who could help others do the same. And I suppose your readers want to know about how I balanced motherhood with work, battled the proverbial old boys network…”

“Yes. Absolutely.” I picked up my pen, poised for note-taking, but wondered how she could sound so dark about what my writer's instinct read as such a brilliant life story. She rose from her chair to pick up a wedding photo that the shadows of the room had veiled.

“That's really only part of the story.” She handed me the photo, framed in flimsy wood. I stared at the image of Ms. Cross, thirty years younger, posing in a plain beige suit and tight-lipped smile with a handsome man who appeared at least ten years older than she.

“I'm not sure I understand, Ms. Cross.”

“I know. But that's why I'll tell you. I probably shouldn't, but I will… so somebody might finally understand. Please put your notebook away.”

I did.

“I'm a widow, you know. Twice over. That man in the photo – that's Harold McIntyre, my second husband. He was nice-looking, wasn't he? Oh, how I adored that wavy hair of his, and those gorgeous suits he always wore. But I was so young then and it took so little to impress me. And I was all alone, trying to figure out how I was going to raise my daughter on a secretary's salary. Of course, times were a little different; I hadn't gone to college, married right out of high school banking on the promise that my husband would take care of me forever instead of getting hit by a car at twenty-five.

“I had gotten a job with Harold's office. He was a lawyer, on the city council, rich by my standards. He would sit on my desk and flash those white teeth, tell me how my eyes sparkled. That was acceptable behavior back then, you must remember, and attention from such a seemingly important man was the highest compliment a girl like me could ever hope for. So when he invited me to dinner, I accepted, even if I didn't like the way his hand would occasionally brush across my breast as he reached for his mail. And when he asked me to marry him, I accepted, even if I wasn't exactly in love with him. I thought I was lucky that a man as successful as Harold was willing to love me, already a widow and a mother. Everybody loved Harold, so why shouldn't I?

“My daughter Candace never really hit it off with him. She was only six when her own father died, so it was natural for her to miss him and be skeptical of another man who seemed to be taking his place. Then again, she had always been a moody child, quiet, unassuming. She would shut herself in her room for hours, reading the same old books over and over again, even when she was very young. She was ten when I married Harold, approaching those horrible teenage years anyhow. But above all I felt this desperate need to give her a good life. Believe me, there is no despair to equal the despair you feel when you have to lie to your child about why you can never take her to the movies, or why her only birthday gift is a thrift store doll with a dirty face and stained dress. So I married Harold, and that despair gave way to others.

“The three of us slogged along for several years. I kept the house immaculate; I must have scrubbed a million miles of tile and mirror. And I always made sure to dress myself up for Harold, curling my hair, wearing stockings – both of which I absolutely hated but which I assumed as somehow part of my ‘job.' He wasn't the most sensitive husband, but he wasn't the worst. He came home late a great deal of the time, sniped about dinner being cold, but we were a society couple and when we went out he called me his princess, put his hand on the small of my back as we walked through crowded parties. Candace and I never wanted for anything.

“Our new life was no longer about scraping by, at least not in terms of money and security. I had a closet full of designer clothes, a house full of mahogany furniture. Candace went to private school at Harold's insistence; he wanted the best for her, just as I did. I thought I had finally found the life we all deserved.

“And then one day, Harold was dead.

“I was putting away groceries, and there he was, lying on the yellow kitchen linoleum, wearing his nice blue suit pants and white shirtsleeves, his head bent to one side. Did I say that it was a dark and stormy day? I should have started with that, since it seems that all bad things really do happen when it's dark and stormy. Harold looked so peaceful, somehow. A kitchen chair was on its side, but he wasn't bloody or grotesque – just still.

“I had knocked over a jar of mayonnaise as I knelt down beside him. I remember the gash in the floor that it caused and thinking that it was messier and more violent than Harold's death. I knew he was dead as soon as I touched him, but I called the paramedics anyway. I suppose I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to be a widow again.

“The paramedics came roaring into the house fifteen minutes later, and then Harold was gone. A heart attack, they said. As simple as that. Why else would he just keel over, all neat and tidy? And certainly nobody would want to hurt him. It was absurd to think that some disgruntled client or constituent had done him in. He was just a tax attorney, for God's sake. And that was that – no questions asked. Nobody seemed to care that he was healthy as an ox, just like the rest of his family. The only problem Harold ever had with his heart was that it was cold.

“More than anything, I was so thankful that Candace had not been there to see Harold dead. Never had I been so happy that she played field hockey. I always worried about her playing that sport – so violent. Girls could lose fingers, you know, not to mention all the bruises Candace always came home with, and which I mentally catalogued as evidence of the danger to which I thought she was subjecting herself. She had a fresh bruise right on her forearm that afternoon. When she returned from practice, the ambulance was gone and I had already restored the kitchen. I sat her down and told her what had happened, that Harold was gone and we were on our own again. She was silent, stoic even, but held on to me so tightly I thought we would both break into a million pieces.

“Candace and I tried to restart our lives, just as we did after her father died. I went about the business of keeping up our momentum. If dust began to gather on us, we might begin to sink. I may have been a widow once more, but that time we were somewhat more fortunate, since Harold had provided well enough for us. I thought if I could pack things away, make the house seem somehow normal again, moving on would be easier for us both, but especially for Candace. And God knows, cleaning had become my specialty.

“I scoured every inch of that kitchen as if it were a measure of my own life. I took toothbrush to grout; I bleached everything in sight. Every appliance glistened. I even emptied out the refrigerator, scrubbing the shelves down with baking soda and vinegar until my eyes watered, and tossing out any food that reminded me of Harold – his rib eyes, his coffee, his pastrami and potato chips. And it seemed as if the cleaner the house got, the lighter both Candace and I felt. When my onslaught took me to the cabinet beneath the laundry sink, I had almost forgotten why I was cleaning in the first place. So when I found the rat poison at the back of the cupboard, shoved behind the detergent and my stack of dust rags instead of next to the fly paper and ant spray, it meant nothing to me.

“It meant nothing until I began clearing out Harold's bureau in the bedroom. I had saved that task for last; it was the most personal, the most painful. I didn't look forward to boxing up his shirts and sweaters, smelling his cologne on the collars as if he were still in them. But I was on a mission, and I knew that waiting wouldn't make the job any easier. One by one, I sealed up his beautiful suits in ugly brown boxes, and with them I felt as if I were sealing away part of my soul, not because Harold was my soul mate, but because nobody can bury two husbands and remain untouched.

“As I reached into his bottom drawer and lifted out his undershirts, I saw a flash of color. Pink. I paused. Harold never wore pink the way men do today. And I was vigilant about separating the colors in the laundry. I reached into the back of the drawer again, and this time I pulled out a pair of pink panties with eyelet lace. I knew exactly what they were. They belonged to Candace.

“At that moment, fragments of memory and questions I never knew I had began swirling in my head and came together into a horrifying awareness. The rat poison. The bruise. Candace wasn't at field hockey practice that afternoon Harold died; she couldn't have been because it was raining. And if she wasn't at practice, the new bruise on her arm had to come from somewhere else.

“When I found Harold on the kitchen floor, I was so stunned that I never bothered to question why he was home so early, half undressed. When I cleaned up the broken jar of mayonnaise, I thought nothing of the freshly washed coffee cup draining on the counter in the middle of the day, or the dirty paper towels in the garbage, or the tidiness of the scene in general. And when Candace embraced me when I told her of Harold's death, it was an embrace marked by fear and relief, not sadness and desperation.

“At once everything made sense. I knew why Candace never warmed up to Harold. Her moodiness had nothing to do with pre-teen angst. She was right to hate him for what he was doing to her, and I should have known. I sunk down onto the bed, clutching the horrible pink fabric, and there was Candace standing in the bedroom doorway. She knew that I knew what she had done. All I could say to her was that I was so sorry. I could never say that enough.

“Candace told me exactly what had happened that afternoon Harold died. Her field hockey practice cancelled due to the rain, she came home early from school to find Harold waiting for her. Why he wasn't at work, neither of us was sure; perhaps he had expected her when the rain began, or perhaps he simply took the afternoon off. Regardless, he knew I always ran errands on Wednesday afternoons and used the time alone with her to his advantage, grabbing her arm, shoving her onto the couch. I can't bear to imagine what happened next, what had been happening for years. I was so stupid.

“Something inside Candace cracked that day. She was no longer a little girl desperate for approval, even though her mother was. Harold's end came in the form of rat poison she mixed into his coffee; she cleaned up any mess that she could, washed the cup, and tried to make the rat poison inconspicuous in the cupboard. She was lucky for the first time in her life when nobody bothered to question Harold's death.

“Of course, I never told anyone what I had discovered or what Candace had revealed to me. It was my fault. My poor girl. She never reported Harold because she felt nobody would believe her, not even me; Harold was a pillar of the community, after all, and like a fool I was preoccupied with material things and making him happy. I had made a mistake in believing our life ended the day Candace's father died, and started again the day I married Harold. I had instead handed my daughter right over to a monster in exchange for wall-to-wall carpet. I decided never again to put either of us in that position just for a meal ticket. Never again would I depend on someone else for our well-being.

“And that is when we were both born. That is when the story you really came to hear began. I made the decision that Candace and I would rely only on ourselves from then on. I had no college degree, of course, and I didn't want to go back to being a secretary; that's how Harold had entered our lives. The only other skills I had were vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, mopping. For a while I cleaned houses for the people who used to invite me to parties, and I didn't care. Eventually I started my own cleaning service company with the money I saved and the money Harold left us. I felt that we had suffered for that money, and we should turn it into something good. I wanted to make the company a foundation that other women could use to become self-sufficient the way I had. So I hired as many women as our funds would allow – women who were poor, single, uneducated, broken. I figured women had been cleaning up after others for centuries, and we deserved to capitalize on that. And we have.

“So now you know all there is to know about my business, Ms. Bradley. Probably more than you wanted to know. But I've grown so tired of pretending that my success simply grew out of business savvy, because that certainly wasn't what inspired me. My daughter inspired me, and now at least one person knows that.” Ms. Cross took the faded wedding photo and placed it deliberately back in the corner of the bookshelf without even a glance in its direction.

“I think I understand now, Ms. Cross,” I said as I rose from my seat and she led me to her office door. “But just one more question, if you don't mind. Why do you keep that photo in your office?”

“So that I never forget why I'm here.”

I nodded silently.

“I trust you will tell nobody, write nothing about Candace?” She gripped me with her dark eyes.

“Of course not. Your story was really quite dull, after all.” I smiled and held her gaze, handed her my notebook, and walked out.