ways off now, but January ain’t but . . . two . . . four . . . six... ten pages away. Gone be here before we know it.” She grins.
“She said we have to interview at least twelve maids for her to consider it,” I say. The strain in my voice is starting to really come through.
“But . . . you ain’t got any other maids to talk to, Miss Skeeter.”
I clench my hands. I close my eyes. “I don’t have anyone I can ask, Aibileen,” I say, my voice rising. I’ve spent the last four hours poring over this very fact. “I mean, who is there? Pascagoula? If I talk to her, Mama will find out. I’m not the one who knows the other maids.”
Aibileen’s eyes drop from mine so fast I want to cry. Damn it, Skeeter. Any barrier that had eroded between us these past few months, I’ve just built back up in a matter of seconds. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry I raised my voice.”
“No, no, it’s alright. That was my job, to get the others.”
“What about . . . Lou Anne’s maid,” I say quietly, pulling out my list. “What’s her name . . . Louvenia? Do you know her?”
Aibileen nods. “I asked Louvenia.” Her eyes are still on her lap. “Her grandson the one got blinded. She say she real sorry, but she have to keep her mind on him.”
“And Hilly’s maid, Yule May? You’ve asked her?”
“She say she too busy trying to get her boys into college next year.”
“Any other maids that go to your church? Have you asked them?”
Aibileen nods. “They all got excuses. But really, they just too scared.”
“But how many? How many have you asked?”
Aibileen picks up her notebook, flips though a few pages. Her lips move, counting silently.
“Thirty-one,” Aibileen says.
I let out my breath. I didn’t know I’d been holding it.
“That’s . . . a lot,” I say.
Aibileen finally meets my look. “I didn’t want a tell you,” she says and her forehead wrinkles. “Until we heard from the lady . . .” She takes off her glasses. I see the deep worry in her face. She tries to hide it with a trembling smile.
“I’m on ask em again,” she says, leaning forward.
“Alright,” I sigh.
She swallows hard, nods rapidly to make me understand how much she means it. “Please, don’t give up on me. Let me stay on the project with you.”
I close my eyes. I need a break from seeing her worried face. How could I have raised my voice to her? “Aibileen, it’s alright. We’re . . . together on this.”
A FEW DAYS LATER, I sit in the hot kitchen, bored, smoking a cigarette, something I can’t seem to stop doing lately. I think I might be “addicted.” That’s a word Mister Golden likes to use. The idjits are all addicts. He calls me in his office every once in a while, scans the month’s articles with a red pencil, marking and slashing and grunting.
“That’s fine,” he’ll say. “You fine?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Fine, then.” Before I leave, the fat receptionist hands me my ten-dollar check and that’s pretty much it for my Miss Myrna job.
The kitchen is hot, but I have to get out of my room, where all I do is worry because no other maids have agreed to work with us. Plus, I have to smoke in here because it’s about the only room in the house without a ceiling fan to blow ashes everywhere. When I was ten, Daddy tried to install one in the tin kitchen ceiling without asking Constantine. She’d pointed to it like he’d parked the Ford on the ceiling.
“It’s for you, Constantine, so you don’t get so hot being up in the kitchen all the time.”
“I ain’t working in no kitchen with no ceiling fan, Mister Carlton.”
“Sure you will. I’m just hooking up the current to it now.”
Daddy climbed down the ladder. Constantine filled a pot with water. “Go head,” she sighed. “Turn it on then.”
Daddy flipped the switch. In the seconds it took to really get going, cake flour blew up from the mixing bowl and swirled around the room, recipes flapped off the counter and caught fire on the stovetop. Constantine snatched the burning roll of parchment paper, quickly dipped it in the bucket of water. There’s still a hole where the ceiling fan hung for ten minutes.
In the newspaper, I see State Senator Whitworth pointing to an empty lot of land where they plan