I let out my breath. I didn’t know I’d been holding it.

“That’s . . . a lot,” I say.

Aibileen finally meets my look.“I didn’t want a tell you,” she says and her forehead wrinkles. “Until we heard from the lady . . .” She takes off her glasses. I see the deep worry in her face. She tries to hide it with a trembling smile.

“I’m on ask em again,” she says, leaning forward.

“Alright,” I sigh.

She swallows hard, nods rapidly to make me understand how much she means it.“Please, don’t give up on me. Let me stay on the project with you.”

I close my eyes. I need a break from seeing her worried face. How could I have raised my voice to her?“Aibileen, it’s alright. We’re . . . Together on this.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, I sit in the hot kitchen, bored, smoking a cigarette, something I can’t seem to stop doing lately. I think I might be “addicted.” That’s a word Mister Golden likes to use.The idjits are all addicts. He calls me in his office every once in a while, scans the month’s articles with a red pencil, marking and slashing and grunting.

“That’s fine,” he’ll say. “You fine?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Fine, then.” Before I leave, the fat receptionist hands me my ten-dollar check and that’s pretty much it for my Miss Myrna job.

The kitchen is hot, but I have to get out of my room, where all I do is worry because no other maids have agreed to work with us. Plus, I have to smoke in here because it’s about the only room in the house without a ceiling fan to blow ashes everywhere. When I was ten, Daddy tried to install one in the tin kitchen ceiling without asking Constantine. She’d pointed to it like he’d parked the Ford on the ceiling.

“It’s for you, Constantine, so you don’t get so hot being up in the kitchen all the time.”

“I ain’t working in no kitchen with no ceiling fan, Mister Carlton.”

“Sure you will. I’m just hooking up the current to it now.”

Daddy climbed down the ladder. Constantine filled a pot with water.“Go head,” she sighed. “Turn it on then.”

Daddy flipped the switch. In the seconds it took to really get going, cake flour blew up from the mixing bowl and swirled around the room, recipes flapped off the counter and caught fire on the stovetop. Constantine snatched the burning roll of parchment paper, quickly dipped it in the bucket of water. There’s still a hole where the ceiling fan hung for ten minutes.

In the newspaper, I see State Senator Whitworth pointing to an empty lot of land where they plan to build a new city coliseum. I turn the page. I hate being reminded of my date with Stuart Whitworth.

Pascagoula pads into the kitchen. I watch as she cuts out biscuits with a shot glass that’s never shot a thing but short dough. Behind me, the kitchen windows are propped open with Sears, Roebuck& Co. catalogues. Pictures of two-dollar hand mixers and mail-order toys flutter in a breeze, swollen and puckered from a decade of rain.

Maybe I should just ask Pascagoula. Maybe Mother won’t find out. But who am I kidding? Mother watches her every move and Pascagoula seems afraid of me anyway, like I might tell on her if she does something wrong. It could take years to break through that fear. My best sense tells me, leave Pascagoula out of this.

The phone rings like a fire alarm. Pascagoula clangs her spoon on the bowl and I grab the receiver before she can.

“Minny gone help us,” Aibileen whispers.