The instructions were on a yellow legal pad, held to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lobster.
Mornings: Feed Samson (dry food, blue bowl, one scoop). Water the ficus and the two spider plants. Check that the back door is latched — it sticks.
Evenings: Samson gets wet food (half a can, cover the rest and refrigerate). Lock the front deadbolt — you have to lift the door slightly. Set the thermostat to 62 before bed.
We'll be back the 14th. Thank you, Ellen!
That was eleven years ago.
The lobster magnet had lost its paint on one claw. The handwriting had faded at the edges but Ellen could have recited it all from the order her hands moved through the kitchen each morning.
Samson had died in the third year. She'd buried him under the pine tree and gotten another cat from the shelter — a calico she named Samson, because the instructions said Samson and she wasn't ready to cross anything out. The second Samson died in the seventh year. The current Samson was a gray tabby who didn't look like either of the others.
The ficus got root rot. She replaced it with another ficus, which also got root rot, and then with a pothos, which thrived. The spider plants had multiplied into seven. She still watered them in the same order as the original two, the five offspring inserted into the sequence by proximity.
The back door didn't stick anymore. She'd fixed it in the fourth year with a plane and some sandpaper. But she still checked the latch every morning, placing her palm flat against it and pressing, the way you'd check a sleeping child's forehead.
The front deadbolt had been replaced when she'd lost the keys in the eighth year. The new one turned smoothly, without lifting. She still lifted the door.
She'd had the thermostat replaced when the old round one started reading twenty degrees high. The new one was digital. She still set it to 62.
The Harmons had gone to Portugal. There had been emails the first year — cheerful, apologetic, always ending with just a few more months. Then the emails came every few months, then once a year, then the Christmas card without a return address that arrived in the sixth year and not at all after that.
She paid the mortgage from a checking account the Harmons had set up for household expenses. When the balance got low, more appeared. She didn't ask.
A neighbor once asked how long she was staying.
“Until they get back,” she said.
The neighbor looked at the garden Ellen had terraced along the south side, the retaining wall she'd built from fieldstone, the new gutters, the repainted trim.
“You've done a lot of work for a house-sitter.”
Ellen looked at the house. She'd never thought of the work as separate from the instructions. The instructions said to check the back door. The back door needed a new frame. The frame needed paint. The paint meant choosing a color, which meant looking at the trim, which meant noticing the gutters. One maintenance led to another the way one spider plant leads to seven.
“The instructions are pretty thorough,” she said.