“Sorry?”
“That’s what they would tell us. In the army. ‘Police this area!’ your lieutenant would say, and woe to you if that area was not spotless. You ever heard of the white glove test? Your commanding officer would come and put on a pair of white gloves and run his finger along a shelf or a doorframe or what have you. You’d be on KP duty if he found any dust.” Vernon bent down to pull a box of trash bags out from underneath the sink. He was wearing nylon track pants and a plain white T-shirt that hung loosely over his narrow chest and stretched to cover the protuberant curve of his belly. “See, back then, sending a man to work in the kitchen was punishment.” His lip curled. “Not a hobby.”
Diana located a pair of rubber gloves and pulled them on. “If you bag up the trash, I’ll work on the dishes.” Most of the dishes in the sink were covered in layers of spaghetti sauce or lo mein noodles. The bowls contained the dried-up detritus of milk and cold cereal. That, plus takeout pizza, seemed to have comprised the bulk of Vernon Shoemaker’s diet in the wake of his wife’s death. Daisy couldn’t see any evidence of fruits or vegetables—not an apple core or a banana peel, or a hint of anything that had ever been green.
She had turned the water on as hot as it would go, added detergent, found a sponge, and started scrubbing as she made a mental list of everything they’d need to do before she felt comfortable enough to start cooking. The floors would need to be swept and mopped, the stovetop and counters sprayed with something disinfecting and scrubbed clean, and the refrigerator… God, she didn’t even want to think about the refrigerator.
“So you’ve been eating mostly prepared foods and takeout?”
“You ever go to Wegmans?” Vernon asked. She’d expected him to stand there and watch while she did the work, but, to his credit, he seemed to be doing a decent job of collecting and bagging up the trash. “They’ve got all kinds of ready-to-go stuff. For the working mothers, I guess.” He paused to unfurl another trash bag. “In my day, a mother stayed home with her kids.”
“Times have changed,” Daisy offered.
“Not for the better,” Vernon said darkly. “Okay, chief, what’s next?”
She instructed him to find a broom and a dustpan, while she loaded the dishwasher and ran it on its “sterilize” setting. Vernon started sweeping while she looked for some kind of cleanser to spray on the counters.
“Sometimes, I eat out,” Vernon said abruptly.
“Oh?”
“Yep. In Atlantic City, or at Foxwoods, I get coupons for the restaurants. I go to the diner.” He swept for a few minutes, then said, “Margie—my wife—she’d always want to go to the fancy places. The noodle place and the tappers place and what have you.”
“Tappers?”
“You know, the Spanish stuff. Little snacks.”
“Oh. Tapas.”
“Like I said. She’d wanted that, or the fancy Chinese place. I never understood paying twenty bucks for a plate of noodles with some kind of mystery meat, but it made her happy.” He tied a garbage bag shut. “Lots of Asians at the casinos, you know.”
“Mmm.” Daisy wasn’t touching that one. She wondered if Vernon Shoemaker knew that she was Jewish. “Did your wife gamble?”
“Margie? Oh, no.” Vernon went silent. Daisy finished wiping the counter closest to the stove. She held her breath and pulled open the refrigerator door, revealing the hellscape she’d expected.
“Can I have a trash bag, please?”
Vernon handed her a bag, peering over her shoulder as she started to toss half-empty packages of lunch meat. “Hey! Hey, that’s still good!”
Daisy showed him the package. “It expired three months ago.”
Vernon scoffed. “That’s a scam. All those expiration dates. It’s just companies wanting to get you to buy more food. Someone sent me an article about it.”
Daisy unwrapped a block of cheese, revealing a layer of green mold. She showed it to Vernon, who shrugged. “I bet you could just scrape that off.”
“You could,” she said, and dropped the cheese into the trash. “You won’t.”
“Fine, fine,” Vernon grumbled, as Daisy threw out Chinese-food containers and a desiccated lemon and poured a pint of curdled half-and-half down the drain.
“So what did your wife do in the casinos, if she didn’t gamble?”
“Oh, she’d shop. Watch people.”