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Agatha’s Point of View
Concetta gathered the women.
I don’t know how she did it. I didn’t hear a bell or see a messenger. But by seven the next morning, they were there — fifteen of them, then twenty, then thirty — filing up the path with brooms and mops and buckets and bottles of vinegar and blocks of beeswax wrapped in cloth.
Concetta stood at the front door of my house and pointed, and they went in like a company that had drilled the maneuver.
They scrubbed the stone floors on their hands and knees. They beat the dust out of curtains that hadn’t moved in fifty years. They washed windows until the glass disappeared and the olive groves poured into every room.
One woman — I never learned her name — spent an entire morning on the kitchen sink with a pumice stone and a bar of soap until the basin went from brown to white and she stood back and nodded once, as though it had personally offended her and she had settled the matter.