One Dog Happy

Helping

1 0 4 When she got home from work—she liked to call it work, not baby-sitting—Ruthie would kneel at the edge of her bed and ask God to control her anger. She did this because she knew she had sinned, but she had a curiosity about her emotions that went beyond her desire for goodness. She could have asked Him to temper the curiosity along with the anger, but she didn’t. Instead she asked forgiveness in vague terms. “I’ve sinned in wrath,” she’d say, or “I’m sorry for my thoughts.” Then she would go to the kitchen and eat whatever she could find, usually without being hungry to begin with. Sometimes this was a continuation of what she’d started eating at work, depending Helping H e l p i n g 1 0 5 on how far she’d gotten: unbuttered popcorn if it was a good day, or frosting right from the can on a bad one. She’d graduated from the state university in Baltimore last May and had spent the summer getting a tan, memorizing scripture , and working on a résumé. When September came, she went to the mall and bought a navy suit and some leather-look pumps with a low heel. She then mailed her résumé to ten places from the newspaper, receiving no response. Before she could send another round, her grandmother needed an emergency gall-bladder operation, so Ruthie postponed the job search to care for her, cooking her meals and reading to her in the afternoons on the marble stoop of her row house, while her grandmother sat just inside the screened window, close enough to hear everything. Her grandmother liked to see Ruthie get the fresh air, she said. And for her help, her grandmother let Ruthie take all the money she wanted from the roll of bills she kept in a cardboard orange juice can in the cabinet. A month went by, then two. Ruthie continued to live with her mother, and expenses were few. She began to indulge herself: watching television, making cookies and eating the dough, even reducing her scripture study to just twenty minutes a day, during which she would often become distracted and pick up a magazine. Toward the end of the month, Ruthie tried on the suit and discovered that the skirt would no longer zip. Then nervousness set in; she couldn’t pick up the paper without feeling tense and sweaty. So she stopped looking and prayed to God to let her know what he wanted from her. It was her mother who found an ad for a “kind, patient person to care for cute child in wheelchair, sign language a plus.” “Do you mind if I call this number for you?” she asked Ruthie. She was a big woman with a smooth, low voice. She talked when she didn’t have anything to say, just so she could listen to herself. If you sat next to her in church, you couldn’t hear yourself sing. “Just leave it me, why don’t you?” Ruthie answered. It irritated Ruthie that her mother always went straight to the advertisement sections of the newspaper, as if the world and national news were nothing next to her own glossy little finds and bargains. “You think I can’t get a job by myself?” 1 0 6 H e l p i n g “I’m not saying that, dear heart,” her mother said. “It says, call for details.” She held up the paper and poked at it with a fat finger. “I thought I’d just ask what the details are.” “You don’t think I can call by myself!” Ruthie sat up and crossed her arms over her stomach. But her mother had already retreated to the kitchen with the paper in hand. The woman on the phone explained to Ruthie’s mother that she didn’t want live-in help, just someone to come during the afternoons and sometimes into the evening, if they needed to go out. Ruthie’s mother replied that this situation sounded good for Ruthie; she’d always seemed to get a kick out of helping people. Ruthie could start the job tomorrow, when she returned from New York. “New York!” Ruthie snarled, as her mother hung up the phone. “I didn’t want her to think you weren...