See You Sunday
The woman three doors down from my old flat kept her kitchen door open with an iron. It was an old black one, the kind you heat on a stove. She said she'd never ironed a thing with it in her life. Every Sunday from four it sat on her step and held the door, and anybody on the road could walk in for a cup of tea.
This was years ago, when I worked shifts at the supermarket. Her house was the end one of the row, and the kitchen door was round the side, up a short path. From the pavement you could see straight in: a kettle, a table, a pile of newspapers on one chair, mugs that didn't match, and people round them.
On Sundays I did the early shift and came off the bus about four, so I walked past that door most weeks for three years. I knew some of the faces. The man on the corner, the one who watered his hanging baskets every evening, was at her table most Sundays. I nodded at him and kept going, because nobody had asked me in, and I was waiting to be asked.
Then one Sunday in November it rained hard enough to come through my jacket by the chip shop, and the man on the corner saw me from her table and waved me up the path with a biscuit still in his hand. I went in. I was wet.
She put a towel down for my shoes and a mug in front of me, and asked if it was raining where I'd come from. I'd come from the bus stop, as she could see. She asked everybody that. Most of us had come from a few doors down.
I said I hadn't liked to come in without being asked. The man on the corner laughed and said she'd never asked anybody, not in all the years he'd been coming.
She never invited anybody. She just never shut the door.
At her table I thought about my own flat. In three years nobody had come round, because I was waiting until it was tidy, and it never was.
After that I went most Sundays the rota let me. Some weeks there were two of us and some weeks nine, and when the chairs ran out somebody sat on the step. Nobody moved the newspapers. If you missed a Sunday she never asked where you'd been. She got another mug down.
That spring a lad moved onto the road with a box of tins and nothing to open them with. Somebody told him to try the house with the open door. She lent him her tin opener and told him to bring it back Sunday. He brought it back on the Sunday and stayed for tea. After that he came most weeks. She had another tin opener in the drawer. I saw it once, looking for a teaspoon.
Nobody was ever told to go home. About six she ran the tap and started on the mugs, and we took the hint. She said "See you Sunday" to each of us with her hands in the water.
The next autumn I got an office job across town and a place nearer it. On my last Sunday I told her, which I'd been putting off for a fortnight. I'd half expected some kind of goodbye. There wasn't one. She poured my tea and asked if it was raining where I was going. At six she ran the tap, and the others went, and I went last. "See you Sunday," she said, with her hands in the water.
