Who Needs Clean Dishes?
by Patricia Dutt
Hilda stood outside her pickup, scanning the property and the cute two-story house. Banked against the stone walls were towers of plastic bins and cardboard boxes. On the lawn, five pallets of river stone. Hilda waited, listening to the gentle sound of a creek.
“Projects I never got to,” a man said as he opened the front door. He had a slight stoop and wire-rim glasses wrapped thickly above the bridge of his nose with black electrical tape. “Come on in. I’m Kyle.”
Inside was a DIY-erected loft in the living room, jammed to the cathedral ceiling with broken furniture and boxes, while below, narrow pathways wove among the drum sets, guitars, and turntables. There were PA amps, their eviscerated insides spread out on sheets of cardboard. Along the walls stood an upright Heller Piano (New York, vintage 1899), two B-3 organs and cabinet-sized radios from the 1940s. The bedrooms upstairs? More instruments. The kitchen counters were piled with coiled wire, motherboards, and microphones. Heaps of mail, and a tower of dishes needing to be cleaned.
Hilda paused, her role being to organize and purge, not to judge.
“It can’t be easy living here,” she said. Hilda, who was just over five feet, was dressed to work in black T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a red kerchief to keep her hair back.
“Not easy at all.” Kyle almost smiled. His wife had died ten years ago, he said, and his children were busy with their own children. “I should have at least opened the mail.”
Hilda shrugged.
Kyle adjusted his wire-rim glasses and said, “You can probably tell I was a sound guy.”
“Yes.” Then Hilda tossed out the usual beauty in the eyes of the beholder, the mind’s enormous creative energy, time being money, and so on. Then they got to work.
***
It took a month of “Don’t even try eBay . . . give it away . . . freecycle it,” along with the welcoming maws of two dumpsters, but Hilda and Kyle emptied the house. Today was their last lunch together, a ritual they’d shared since first meeting one another.
As usual they sat on the woodsy bank beside his creek. Hilda ate a cheese sandwich with sauerkraut and drank green tea while Kyle satisfied himself with pretzels and a Mountain Dew. It was the creek and the tiny waterfalls, he told Hilda, that sold them on the house, because there was always music. Even in winter, you could hear water trickling beneath the ice.
Their third night in the house, their young daughters slept over at a friend’s. Kyle set up a table and two chairs on the creek’s slate slabs where the water was shallow, and the current just strong enough to feather your ankles. It was summer. A breeze slowly turned the leaves of maples and tall oaks to one side, then the other, while woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatted. Goldfinches tee-yeed. The water’s movement along the smooth rocks kept the beat. At the table’s center on a white linen cloth was a bowl of linguini, a bottle of wine, and two crystal glasses. Kyle had set out rose-patterned dishes, his mom’s cherished Syracuse china, glazed plates that shimmered as the sun passed overhead.
His wife wore a sleek, knee-length, sky-blue dress that matched the blue of her eyes. Kyle rolled up the legs of his gray suit and took her hand, and they walked carefully, barefoot, down the slope until he felt the water, cool on the soles of his feet. It was that part of the summer when crickets sang their hearts out night and day. They just could not stop.
“Some things you never forget,” Kyle said.
They went back inside the stone house to finish. From one of the remaining dozen boxes Kyle pulled out a rose-patterned plate. “That’s all that’s left,” he said, handing her the plate. “I don’t know why, but I think you should have it.” Kyle thanked her from the bottom of his heart, then he walked away, saying he needed to be alone. He was still sitting down by the creek, his shoulders hunched, staring, when Hilda left.
***
On her way home Hilda stopped at the re-use store intending to get rid of the dish. She knew what happened to people who kept things. She opened the pickup’s door and snagged the rose-patterned plate, feeling its heft, the raised roses, and damn it if it didn’t bring her back to high school, summers when she stood behind a counter at a lunch shop in a rundown building in downtown Buffalo. She took orders, grabbed the egg-and-bacon sandwiches from the dumbwaiter and the roast beef sandwiches from the sandwich board, and added bills in her head and made change on a push-button, cast-iron cash register. The manager, a hardworking short man who defied the Catholic Church (he lived with a divorcée), hired people who didn’t fit into the normal categories, like Rosie, a thin woman in her fifties. She wore black cat’s-eye glasses that were always askew and smudged, and often misted with steam from the dishwasher that gurgled and spat as Rosie pushed racks of dishes through. Rosie would cry out, and Hilda would never forget the music in her voice: “Clean dishes! Clean dishes! Who needs clean dishes?” Her skinny arms in her short-sleeved, white starched uniform, and her goofy, crooked smile. Asking.
Patricia Dutt’s short stories and flash fictions have been published in The Louisville Review, Deep Overstock, Stone Canoe, and other literary magazines. She also writes Sustainability Notions (https://substack.com/@persistentpollinator). Find more information at patriciadutt.com.
