One Woman's Trash

         It was my job, as it had always been, to carry the scraps out to the curb and wait for them to be gathered. It was not my job to watch, but some things couldn’t be helped. I peeked in through the kitchen window as Miss M chopped things into bits and pushed aside the odd ends. She would give those to me, later, and I would give them to the truckmen on Tuesday or Friday, whichever was next. I watched her scrape the chopped bits into a bowl and scrape the odd bits into a nicer, smaller trash bin inside, and I watched her ring slip off her finger and into the garbage.

         I had seen many things discarded before, and I had handed over a great variety of items to the truckmen, but I knew this to be a mistake. She wore this ring all the time, its diamond glinting in the light even when she drew me up to the curb in only her houseclothes and slippers. As she carried on chopping, I waited for her to notice the emptiness of her finger, and she never did. I had thought that to be the very end of it, sad as it might have seemed.

         She prepared the rest of her dinner, and she ate it in one of the two chairs in the room just past the kitchen. She sat in the brown one, and no matter how many times her hand brought food up to her mouth, she never gave it so much as an odd glance. I thought that she might’ve still felt the echo of the ring on her finger, the way I always felt after the truckmen came by. It was a ghostly emptiness that held almost no absence. She cleaned up her dishes, ghost of a ring still dancing on her finger, and went to take the trash out to me.

         I had anticipated this, since I saw how full the bin was while I was peeking, but I had not anticipated her pulling me over to the curb. I never learned how to tell when it was going to be a Tuesday or a Friday; I could only wait until she brought me over to my post. It was always exciting, if not a little draining, to know that the next morning would be the peak of my workweek, but this time, it was wholly dismaying. There was a ring inside that garbage bag, and I knew it did not belong, and I knew I could only watch as the truckmen tore down the street to take it away. Miss M went back inside and went away to bed, and my night was restless.

         In the morning, I watched again. I could not help myself. Miss M stepped into the main part of the house, the part I could see through the window, even from the curb, and she began looking very closely at the countertops. She looked several times over at the place where she had cleaned up her dishes, then disappeared somewhere into the house, probably to search elsewhere.

         When she stepped back to where I could see, she looked as dismayed as I felt. She looked atop shelves, under things I could not quite see, and back in places she had already checked. She searched between the cushions of the other chair in the room past the kitchen, the big blue one. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her sit in that chair, but when a man lived with her, Mr. M, he would sit in that chair for hours and hours, and she would sit beside him, in the brown one.

         I heard the sound of the truckmen coming down the street. The houses were set in a great big circle of road, and once the truckmen made it all the way around that circle, they would get to me, and they would take away Miss M’s ring, mixed up in her odd bits of dinner. I watched her search the same places again and again, looking distraught, and I wished she would think of how she had scraped her scraps into the bin. The truckmen went around, and around, picking up bins and taking what they had to carry. I thought of something I had seen before, and I peered into the house once more as Miss M sat in her chair, pondering.

         The truckmen trundled out of the neighborhood—they had been to every house. The sound of its heavy wheels passed through my house, Miss M’s house, and her head came up quickly from her hands. Miss M came rushing out the door, and I watched as she peered down either end of the street, checking if the trash bins were empty. All of them were, of course, but not me. I was still carrying every bit I had been given, except those which had spilled onto the driveway when I toppled myself over.

         It was not my job to watch or to meddle, and certainly not to spill myself into the street just before the truckmen arrived, but some things couldn’t be helped, and some things most certainly could.

         Miss M dropped down to the pavement on knees which were once much younger and dug into the bag that had spilled out onto the ground. She did not bother unknotting it, opting to tear through the plastic with her fingers. Miss M spilled chopped bits and torn papers and junk mail onto the driveway carelessly, and somewhere within it all, she found her big, shiny ring which must have meant very much to her.

         She slipped it onto her finger and sat on the ground for a while, clutching her hand to her chest. After some time, she sighed and heaved herself up. Miss M set to work picking up all the rubbish from the ground, and she set me right again so that I could carry it as I was meant to.

         “Spilled over,” she muttered to herself. “A pain any other time, but a miracle today. Toppled right over.” She moved things delicately with her left hand, the one with the ring on it, and she seemed to keep glancing over to check that it was still there.

         She rolled me back away from the curb and told me, “Next time, then.” That sounded fine to me. Next Tuesday, or Friday, whichever it was, I would be back to my job of carrying and waiting and passing along. That job was very far away, though, and so I let myself watch one more time as Miss M went inside, sat in that big blue chair that I never saw her use, and stared down at the ring on her hand for a long, long while.