Clara stepped into the bathroom without knocking, carrying a small, bright pink bar of soap that smelled of artificial gardenias. She set it directly on the white porcelain ledge of the tub, her silver watch ticking against her wrist as she adjusted the band.
“There is a dampness in here, Evelyn,” Clara said, her voice high and light. “Almost like mildew.”
“It is just the autumn air coming through the vent,” I said, my fingers rising to pat my collarbone.
“Maybe your old routine isn’t quite keeping up with things anymore, Evelyn,” she said, leaning over to sniff the corner of the sink.
By noon, the eighty-two dollar water bill sat between my son and me on the yellow formica kitchen table. Arthur kept his hands wrapped around his mug, staring down into the black coffee as if the answers to his mortgage were written in the grounds.
I rubbed the inside of my forearm, where a persistent, dry heat had begun to crawl under my skin.
“Clara says you spent two hours scrubbing the baseboards yesterday,” Arthur said, his eyes remaining fixed on the table. He reached up to rub the back of his neck, his collar looking slightly too large for him.
“The house requires cleaning, Arthur,” I said. “I have kept it this way since your father died.”
“She only wants to help,” he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, defensive tone he used whenever his wife was in the next room. “Maybe you should let her take over the heavier chores.”
The wind off the lake was turning the maple leaves brown by three o’clock when I sat on Jean’s glass-enclosed porch. She poured chamomile tea from her brown ceramic pot, her movements slow and steady.
“You are tearing at your wrists, Evelyn,” Jean said, pulling her glasses off to polish them against the sleeve of her gray cardigan.
“It is just dry skin,” I said, pulling my sleeves down to cover the red patches. “The seasons are changing.”
“Your skin is thinning now,” Jean said, squinting at me through her clean lenses. “It reacts differently to harsh products than it did ten years ago. What are you washing with?”
“Just what is in the shower,” I said.
At nine o’clock, the hum of the bathroom fan sounded louder than usual in the empty house. The skin across my cheeks and neck felt tight, like wool that had been washed too hot and stretched to its limit.
I picked up the pink bar of soap Clara had left on the porcelain ledge. It cost three dollars at the corner drugstore, but the floral perfume of it seemed to fill the entire small room, masking the familiar scent of old wood and clean water.
I reached into the vanity drawer, pushed aside my hairpins, and slid the pink bar deep into the back corner under a stack of washcloths.
I stared at my reflection, rubbing the angry red patch on my collarbone, wondering why my own home suddenly felt so uncomfortable.
By nine the next morning, the steam from the shower had coated the mirror in a thick, gray film. I reached toward the wooden rack for a dry washcloth, but my fingers met nothing but cold, empty pegs.
Clara stepped into the bathroom doorway, her silver watch ticking loudly in the small space as she adjusted the metal band. She reached past me, picked up the blue cotton towel I had used the night before, and draped it back over the rack with a neat, practiced pat.
“That one is perfectly fine for another day, Evelyn,” Clara said, her voice rising in that high, sweet register she used when she wanted to be helpful.
