For six years I quietly paid the water bill for the elderly woman next door.
Twenty-nine dollars a month, give or take. I never told her. I never told anybody.
I was certain she had no idea.
I was wrong about that, and I didn’t find out how wrong until the morning after her funeral, when her son showed up on my porch with an attorney.
Source: Unsplash
The House Next Door on Parcel Street
My name is Helen Mercer. I’m sixty-one, I retired three years ago after twenty-eight years as a high school librarian, and I’ve lived alone in the yellow-doored house on Parcel Street since 1997.
The house beside mine belonged to Ada Holloway.
Ada moved into that place in 1972 with her husband Leonard and never left it. When Leonard died in 2009, the house started showing its age the way houses do when there’s only one person and one income keeping up with it.
The rose bushes along the side went feral.
The second porch step sagged and then sagged more.
The light beside her front door burned out around 2016 and was simply never replaced.
But Ada would not go anywhere.
Forty-seven years of her adult life happened inside that house, and she intended to stay in it as long as her body would allow.
The Orange Notice I Took Off Her Door
In the spring of 2019, when Ada was eighty-three, I came back from the grocery store and saw an orange notice taped to her front door.
Water company. Account past due. Service subject to disconnection.
I stood there on her walk with a bag of groceries in each hand.
And I knew — I knew with total certainty — that Ada Holloway would sit in a house with no running water for a month before she would tell one living soul that she couldn’t cover a utility bill.
That woman would not accept a ride to the pharmacy without arguing about it for ten minutes first.
So I peeled that notice off her door and folded it into my coat pocket before she could see it.
That afternoon I called the utility company from my kitchen and paid the balance.
And then I kept paying.
Six Years of Twenty-Nine Dollars
Month after month after month.
