"Hey! Hardworkin' man!"
It was the old white woman from next door. She was standing behind their picket fence, holding a plate with a checkered cloth over it.
"Look at this!" she said.
Dutifully he went over to the fence and waited for her to pull away the cloth with a theatrical gesture. It was a loaf of hot fresh bread, and even though he was more thirsty than hungry, and too hot to wish for anything but cold food, there was no resisting the yeasty smell of the stuff.
"I don't know why that smells so good to me," he said. "My mother never baked bread."
"Jesus had to tell us not to live by bread alone because if we had our druthers we'd try," she said. "We also got stew, which I know is too hot to sound good to you right now, but you need something to stick to your ribs. And we got lemonade."
"I'm in no shape to be decent company, ma'am," said Don. "There's no water working in the house yet and I'm filthy as a fieldhand."
"I've sat at table with fieldhands before," she said, "and there's nothin' to be ashamed of in it. Now don't give me no argument. I seen you lock that door, so you can't pretend you ain't done working for the day."
"I just couldn't put you out." He almost told her that he had to get some laundry done, but stopped himself in time—the mood she was in, she'd snatch the laundry right out of his hands and insist on washing it herself.
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. "If I ever seen a hungry man it's now, so what are you afraid of, that we'll talk you to death? Maybe we will, but we won't make you talk, so you can just shovel in the food and pour lemonade down your throat and pay us no heed, we're used to that since we hardly listen to each other anymore."
Don laughed in spite of his effort to keep a courteously sober face.
"There," she said. "Besides which, if you got no water in that house then you sure as hell need to pee."
That was the clincher and she knew it. She turned her back on him and was halfway to the house before he'd straddled his way over the fence. "Beg pardon, ma'am," he called out to her, "but I'll go around the back way so I don't track this mess through your front rooms."
She called over her shoulder. "I'll have the back door open before you get there, unless you run."
He didn't run and she was as good as her word. If the bread had smelled good, the smell in the kitchen should probably have been a controlled substance. The black woman—Miss Judy?—was sweating over the stove, but she smiled at him as he came in though she didn't have a free hand even to wave.
"I hate to put you to so much work," he said.
"We were going to eat no matter what," she said. "And we were going to have to cook it ourselves, too, so you didn't cause us to do a thing we weren't planning to do anyway. Now go wash those arms up to the elbows, boy, and maybe wash your face while you're at it."
Once he saw the dainty guest towels, he had no choice but to scrub his face and neck and hands and arms for fear that if he didn't wash well enough, he'd mar the perfect cleanliness of the towels. And while he was at it, he took them up on the offer of a toilet. He had a copious bladder but its capacity wasn't infinite, and he was glad when he was done because he could stop thinking about how his first kiss since his wife left him was in a bathroom during an inspection tour of the plumbing fixtures. This bathroom might have been romantic; the other one should have been condemned. But the ways of love are hard and strange... he had read that somewhere, in one of those books he ended up wishing he hadn't read.
When he got out the kitchen was empty of people and the pots and pans were empty of food. He had brushed himself off on the porch, but he was still embarrassed about coming in to the dining room, what with the carpets and the plush upholstery.
"Don't be shy," said the white woman, who was pouring lemonade from a sweating silver pitcher into three tall glasses.
"You're going to have flecks of grass and weeds wherever I sit."
"Then it's a good thing we know how to clean house, isn't it," said Miss Judy. She had just set down the tureen of stew and was folding up the dishtowels she had held it with as she carried it in. "Let me see your hands."
He walked in and dutifully showed them, palms and backs. He half-expected her to demand to see his neck and behind his ears, but instead she picked up a huge serrated knife and told him to slice the bread. "It's fresh so slice it thick."
Don was good with tools and he got the knack of working with hot bread on the first try. A smooth back and forth, but only light downward pressure so you didn't mash the soft part of the bread. Before he had a chance to ask where to stack the slices, Miss Judy had one of the bread plates right to hand and he flipped the slice deftly onto it. A moment later three thick pats of butter were melting into the bread, and the same happened with the next two slices.
Only when they all sat down did Don get a chance to glance around the room. The china was elegant and fussy, and so were the knickknacks and doilies on every surface in the room, but the overall color scheme and style of furniture were not exactly grandmotherly. It was so plush in red velvet and mahogany that it looked for all the world like a bordello. Naturally, he kept this observation to himself. Maybe this was the only decorating style that could be agreed on by a white woman whose accent made her from Appalachia and a black woman who had the eastern flatlands in her speech.
"It occurs to me," said the white woman, "that you never mentioned your name."
"I think the introductions have been lacking all around," said Miss Judy. "I'm Miz Judea Crawley."
Ah. So "Miss Judy" was definitely a name for only her housemate to use. She'd be either Miz Crawley or Miz Judea to him. He took a guess, deciding on the more affectionate title. "I'm honored, Miz Judea. I'm Don Lark."
"And this is Miz Evelyn Tyler," said Miz Judea.
No correction, so his use of her first name had been acceptable. He smiled at the white woman and said, "Honored to meet you, Miz Evelyn."
"Don Lark," said Miz Evelyn. "What a lovely name. Like the first birdsong of morning. Dawn. Lark."
She said the words as if they were music. Don found it disconcerting. What had been a source of schoolyard teasing now sounded charming. Maybe he had finally grown into his name.
"I got to say, you ladies take neighborliness farther than I ever saw before."
"Then it's a sad world," said Miz Evelyn, "because we've hardly done a thing."
"Folks can't be too neighborly," said Miz Judea.
That was a philosophy that Don knew wasn't true, at least not for him. And while he knew it was ungrateful of him, for the sake of the next year's work, he had to lay down some boundaries. "I got to tell you, ladies, I'm not a very neighborly kind of guy. I'm sort of... standoffish."
They glanced at each other. "That's all right," said Miz Judea. "Standoffish is fine."
Miz Evelyn chimed in cheerfully. "In fact, that's sort of what we—"
"Hush, Miss Evvie," said Miz Judea. "That's for later."
For the first time it occurred to Don that maybe there was more here than gregarious old ladies giving a lesson in kindness and manners to the whippersnapper working next door.
Miz Judea lifted the lid off the tureen and steam rose up into her face. She sat a little straighter, closed her eyes and breathed it in. "You smell that?" she asked.