«My Late Employer’s Daughter Slapped Me Across the Face at Her Garden Party, Ripped Off My Apron and Dumped a Pitcher of Lemonade Over My Head While Her Husband Filmed It…»
The White Apron
I am 66 years old, and for 28 years I was the housekeeper of one house.
I came there at 38, with a suitcase and a recommendation. The owner was a widower, a kind, stubborn old man with a bad hip and a very big garden. He had a wife who had died young and no children of his own, only a stepdaughter from her first marriage, who lived in another city.
I cooked for him and ironed his shirts. In the last three years, when his heart began to fail, I slept in the room next to his, and I got up four or five times a night.
He died nine weeks ago, in his own bed, with my hand in his.
I cried in the pantry. That house had been my whole world.
His stepdaughter came to the funeral for an hour. She is 48, with a husband who sells yachts, and she carries herself like a woman who has never waited for anything. She did not speak to me. She looked at my black dress as if it were a stain.
Last Saturday, she held a garden party in his garden. I mean his garden, the one where the old man grew his roses. Sixty guests, a caterer, a string quartet, white tablecloths. She said it was «a celebration of his life.»
She told me to serve. I did. I put on my black uniform dress and the white apron, because she asked me to wear it, and I carried trays all afternoon, through a garden I had watered for 28 years.
I had been told something two days earlier, and I had told no one. I thought I would wait until the guests had left.
At about four o’clock I was standing on the stone patio with a tray of glasses in both hands, next to the drinks table.
She came up behind me with her husband, in a white linen suit.
She slapped me. An open hand, across my face, so hard that the tray flew out of my hands and every glass crashed onto the flagstones.
«Get back to the kitchen, you filthy servant!»
She screamed it in front of her guests, and the quartet stopped.
My cheek was on fire.
She grabbed the strings of my white apron and ripped it off me, in one pull, the way you tear a bandage off a child. Then she picked the glass pitcher of lemonade from the table, and she dumped the whole thing over my head.
It was cold, and it was sticky, and it ran into my eyes and down my uniform dress. I could taste lemon. My legs gave way, and I sank to my knees on the stone, in the broken glass.
«Please, I served him for twenty-eight years!»
I said it with my voice breaking, trembling, soaked, with sixty people watching.
Her husband was standing by the drinks table with his phone in his hand. He was filming. He was laughing.
She threw my apron into my face.
She laughed over me, and I knelt on the stones with my hands shaking in the lemonade.
For 28 years I had never raised my voice in that house. Not once.
And then something in me, on that patio, finally came loose, and I did something nobody there expected.
I stood up.
I got up off my knees, with lemonade running down my face and glass in the folds of my dress. I took one step, and I took the empty pitcher out of her hand, and I threw it back at her, hard, the lemonade left in it and all. It splashed across her white linen suit from collar to hem, and the glass shattered at her feet.
She shrieked. She looked down at herself as if she had been shot.
«He left me this house!» I said. I had never heard my own voice so loud. «Your stepfather left this house to me!»
What the Lawyer Said
Two days before the party, the old man’s lawyer had telephoned me. He is a careful, gray man who had known my employer for forty years. He asked me to come to his office. I sat in a leather chair with my handbag on my knees, and he read me the will.
The old man had left me the house. All of it, the garden, the roses, the furniture, and a further $20,000, «in gratitude for twenty-eight years, and for the last three, which she gave me when no one else did.» His stepdaughter was left $40,000 and his wristwatch.
The reading had been on the previous Thursday. She had not attended. She had sent her husband a message saying she was «too busy to read through a lot of legalese,» and she assumed, as she had always assumed, that the house was hers.
I had asked the lawyer whether I should tell her. He said the formalities would take another week and that it would be better if I waited. I decided I would wait until the guests had gone.
The Patio
I had never seen a garden party like that silence. Sixty people with glasses in their hands. A violinist with his bow in the air. The caterer, at the back, with one hand over her mouth.
The stepdaughter said I was lying. She said it twice, then louder. She said I was «an opportunist,» that I had «worked on a sick old man,» that she would have me removed.
An old gentleman stepped out from the guests then. He was the lawyer, who had been invited, and who had been standing by the roses with a glass of water. He walked up to the stepdaughter and said, in a polite and ordinary voice, that the will had been proved, that the house was legally mine, and that the party was being held in it with the permission of its owner.
Her husband lowered his phone. The video was already on it. He did not look at it again.
What Happened to the Party
Nobody left at once. They stood about in small groups, not looking at each other, the way people do when they have laughed at the wrong moment. The quartet put away their instruments. The caterer began to clear the tables without being asked.
A woman whom I had served for years came across the patio and picked my apron out of the broken glass. She folded it, and she gave it to me with both hands.
I went inside and washed my face. When I came out, the garden was nearly empty.
What I Did
I gave the stepdaughter 30 days to collect her belongings from the house, which is what the law allows. I did not want her out in a week, and I did not want her humiliated further. She had done that to herself.
The $40,000 her stepfather left her was paid in full, through the lawyer. I would not touch it. It was not mine to withhold.
She did not apologize. Her husband did, in a letter, in two lines. I put it in a drawer.
Months Later
I have not changed the house much. I sleep in my own old room, next to his. I have opened the other bedrooms, and I rent two to students from the university, who bring me flowers on Fridays. The roses are in bloom.
The white apron hangs in the pantry. There is a lemon stain on it that will not come out. I have decided to leave it.
If you had given your life to a house, and been slapped in it, would you have waited until the guests left to speak?