Chapter 11 - Children of Housekeepers

Ginger stood silently while his employer finished loading dishes into the dish washer.  He brushed his right hand over his close cropped red hair and exhaled slowly.  He marveled at her.  No one would have thought anything strange about hiring a housekeeper.  She made enough money, legitimate money.  No one would ever have suspected anything funny about her having a housekeeper.  But she didn't want one.

They had argued about it once.  To the extent their relationship allowed argument, he had argued  about it.  She talked about the one time when she was a little girl and the Lady of the house had her pearls go missing.  They were only missing for a couple of hours.  But somewhere in those hours the Lady had looked at her mother and she, a girl of five, had seen the look.  She had wondered if she had known what that look meant at five years old.

Or.

 Or had she merely filed that image - that memory - away.  Was it years later when she understood what that look meant?  As she remembers it now, she can't pull the indignity and scorn away from that look driven at her mother the housekeeper.  

He had sat quietly at that recollection.  She was connecting dots from her memory to her reasons for not hiring a maid that he could not see.  He was smart enough to sit quietly through the parts he didn't understand.  She had told him that his willingness to allow a silence to fall was one of the things she loved about him.  She saw it in play when she was telling this story of pearls and smiled at him.  "I never want to be the kind of person who simply misplaces something and demeans another with just a look.  Having someone at my beck and call in my own home?   That could do that to me.  Know your weaknesses, Ginger, and take steps against them."

That had closed the conversation on that day.  But Ginger's mother had been a maid too.  That money had but bread on their table when he was a child.  He asked her about that.  Her weaknesses denying a livelihood to others.  She had bit her lip and sat silently for a time.  "Interesting" was all she had said.

A week later Ginger was put in charge of finding four young ladies who were looking for work cleaning homes.  They were each given the homes of three widows of limited means.  Ms. Wetta picked up the tab for all 12 homes to be cleaned.  Ginger had smiled at her when she had given him the assignment.  None of the bosses in London would have ever spent money in this way.  He did some digging.  The widows were of police officers, firemen, and such.  He smiled.  There must be an angle, he thought.

It was going well until two of the widows began to complain of things going missing from their homes, their purses.  Ginger was tasked with searching their homes for the missing items - older women could make the mistakes of the elderly, after all.  He was discreet.  They never knew he had been in their homes.

 He was next tasked with searching the home and the person of the young woman accused.  He found the things she had not pawned yet and then worked his way out from her home to each pawnshop along the way. She had gone to all the trouble of going to pawn shop that was the fourth farthest from her house.

He made his report to Ms. Wetta.  She asked him to tell her about the girl.   He laid it out as best he knew it and then answered her follow up questions.  The girl was from a lower middle class family.  Not much in the way of luxuries but not hurting either.  She had made good grades in the school but the family had made no provision for college.  She sang in her church choir but did not get any solos.  She liked to dance.  She would go to the bars in Houston and two step with the 10 gallon hats she found there.  Pretty girl but not strikingly so.  

Ms. Wetta nodded to all of this and finally inhaled deeply and exhaled as the judgment had been reached.  "Crush her left ankle.  She never walks again without a limp, Ginger.  If she ever again takes a step without a limp, you go back and crush it again.  Am I understood?"

"Yes ma'am," he answered with a clear voice.  He had tried once, in shock of one these coldly delivered pronouncements, to simply nod his head.  She had not allowed that.  Clarity did not allow that.

 "Ginger?"  He paused and waited for whatever was to come next,"She can keep the job as long as the things are returned to the widow.  Have one of the other girls cover for her while she recovers."

But that was years ago.  Today he stood quietly while she finally finished the last dish.  "So he got into the game the way we expected, eh?"

"Yes, ma'am," he answered as he took his seat across from her at the kitchen table.  "I barked at him pretty good but he let it roll off him.  Even made a joke about the little window being an 'affectation.'"

"Never use a ten cent word when you can wedge in a five dollar one, that's my boy."

They both smiled at that.  Ginger went on to tell the tale of how the boy and Clay Diamond had stripped a small fortune off the others at the table before turning on one another.

Ms. Wetta sat and listened closely and never again interrupted him except to offer him a cup of tea, which he refused.  She sat back down with her own cup of coffee.  Ginger had not seen any tea but was certain, based on her offer, that if he had said he had wanted tea, it would have appeared.

At the end of the story she sat back in her chair and lifted the coffee cup to her lips and having never taken a sip, sat it back down.  "Diamond busted him?"  Ginger nodded.  She shook her head.  Actually sipped her coffee and shook her head again.  "He let Clay Diamond take every single cent?"

"He needed a lesson in humility, you said so.  That's why you let this play out.  It will do him some good," Ginger volunteered.

Ms. Wetta sipped her coffee.  She smiled as she looked into the dark black liquid.  And then she laughed.  She laughed long and loud and hard.  "What the hell, he earned it.  He truly earned it."  And she laughed even louder as Ginger sat quietly.

End Chapter 11