I'm Russell Pate, I'm fifty-five, and I run the maintenance crew at a bowling alley off Route 9 outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. Three guys under me, one of them my brother-in-law, which is its own headache. My wife Donna took a job in January cleaning offices downtown for a property management outfit called Brennan & Shaw. Six days a week, nine dollars an hour, and the woman who hired her — a property manager named Carol Winkler — told her straight out: "Do good work and maybe there's a bonus in it for you." Maybe. Not a number. Just maybe.
I told Donna that math doesn't work. Nine bucks an hour, six days, that's barely four hundred a week before taxes, and she's spending twenty-five dollars in gas just getting there and back because the bus doesn't run that route anymore. I said she'd be better off staying home, picking up the grandkids after school, saving us the sitter money. She looked at me like I'd slapped her.
"Four hundred a week is still four hundred a week, Russ. And there's no shame in it."
That's what she said, standing in the kitchen in her coat, lunch bag already packed, and I didn't have a good answer for her. I just didn't like it. Didn't like the six days. Didn't like that a woman named Carol Winkler could dangle a maybe-bonus over my wife's head like a carrot and Donna would smile and say thank you.
So here's the thing nobody at that bowling alley knows: four years ago, I was the one who got laid off first. Not Donna — me. The alley cut back to part-time hours during the slow years, my hours got gutted, and for about eight months I was the one sitting home while Donna picked up shifts at a diner on Scranton Carbondale Highway. I remember exactly what that felt like, coming home at two in the afternoon with nothing to do and no paycheck to show for it. I remember my brother-in-law, the one who now works under me, making a comment at a cookout about how some men "just coast." I never forgot that. So when Donna takes this cleaning job and I open my mouth to tell her she's worth more than nine dollars an hour, I'm not really talking about her. I'm talking about that summer, about the diner smell on her uniform, about feeling like less of a man at my own kitchen table.
I didn't say any of that to her. I just said, "It's beneath you," which is a stupid thing to say to someone who's trying to help keep the lights on.
Donna started in February. Tuesdays through Sundays, off on Mondays, which she said she didn't mind because Mondays are dead anyway, nobody wants anything on a Monday. She'd leave the house at five-thirty in the morning, before the sun was even thinking about coming up, and she'd come home around three smelling like industrial floor cleaner and that lemon stuff they use on glass doors. Her hands got rough. She started keeping a tube of Bag Balm — the stuff for cow udders, if you can believe it, cheapest hand cream that actually works — on the kitchen windowsill next to a chipped mug that used to hold pens and now holds loose change.
About six weeks in, Carol Winkler called a meeting for the cleaning staff. Four women, all of them over forty, standing in a conference room on the third floor of the Brennan & Shaw building while Carol stood at the head of the table in a blazer that cost more than Donna made in a month. Carol told them the building had failed a client walkthrough — some tenant complained about the restroom on the second floor — and that "performance bonuses were being reconsidered going forward." Donna told me that night, at the table, not looking up from her plate. "Reconsidered going forward." Six weeks of six-day weeks, and the maybe had already turned into a no, dressed up in office language.
I wanted to drive down there. I'll admit that. I wanted to find Carol Winkler and ask her what exactly a woman makes that lets her stand in front of four grandmothers and talk about reconsidering a bonus they were never promised in writing anyway. Donna wouldn't let me. She said, "You'll make it worse. You always think you're fixing something and you just make it worse." She wasn't wrong. That's basically what happened with my brother-in-law at the alley — I tried to fix a scheduling dispute and ended up not speaking to the man for three months.
So instead I kept my mouth shut and watched her keep going. Up at five, home by three, Bag Balm on the windowsill, six days a week, for four hundred and change before taxes. I started doing something I didn't tell her about. Every Friday when she handed me her pay stub to put in the folder where we keep our bills, I copied the number into a little notebook I keep in my truck. I wanted proof, I guess. Proof of what, I don't know. Proof that I was paying attention, maybe. Proof that this woman was carrying something and I was just standing next to her watching.
In May, the dishwasher at our place died, the one that came with the house, older than our marriage. Four hundred and ten dollars for a new one at the Lowe's in Dickson City, installed. Donna looked at the receipt and said, "That's basically what I made in a week." Not bragging. Not complaining either. Just saying it, the way you'd say the weather. I stood there holding the box for the old unit, waiting for the delivery guys to haul it off, and I felt about two inches tall.
That's when I stopped arguing with her about the job.
Here's what changed my mind, if you want the real answer and not the easy one. It wasn't the dishwasher. It was a Sunday in June when I drove down to pick her up because her car was in the shop — transmission, three hundred and eighty dollars, don't get me started — and I got there twenty minutes early and sat in the parking lot of the Brennan & Shaw building watching through the glass doors. Donna was on her knees scrubbing a baseboard in the lobby, and there was another woman next to her, younger, maybe thirty, and they were laughing about something. I couldn't hear what. My wife, fifty-two years old, on her knees on a Sunday afternoon, laughing. Not performing it for anybody. Just laughing, with a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other.
I realized sitting in that parking lot that I'd spent five months feeling embarrassed on her behalf, and she hadn't asked me to feel anything on her behalf at all.
It's September now. Donna's still at Brennan & Shaw. Carol Winkler never did bring back the bonus talk, and nobody expected her to — Donna says the women on the crew joke about it now, call it "the ghost bonus," like a myth you tell new hires. What did change is that in August, one of the tenants on the fourth floor — a dental practice — asked Carol specifically for Donna to clean their suite twice a week after hours, paying an extra forty dollars cash each time, off the books, straight to her. Nobody arranged that. Donna did that herself, just by doing the work and being the kind of person a dentist's office manager remembers by name.
She still keeps the Bag Balm on the windowsill. I stopped keeping the notebook in the truck — didn't need it anymore, I think I just needed it in the beginning, when I was more worried about what the job said about me than what it was doing for her.
Last week my brother-in-law made a crack at the alley about Donna "cleaning toilets for pocket change." I didn't argue with him. I just told him the toilets paid for the dishwasher he ate off of at Thanksgiving, and the new transmission in the Corolla, and that if he wanted to say something else about it he could say it to her, at dinner, to her face, with the Bag Balm sitting right there on the table between them. He didn't say anything else about it.
