Excerpt from The Latecomers by Helen Klein Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She sang out as she always did upon approaching Mr. Hollingworth's room.



"Your breakfast, Mr. H. Our Thisbe did her best for you this morning!"

The door was kept ajar and she pushed it gently with her elbow, already drawing in her mind the shape of the coming day. She would get Mr. Hollingworth properly propped on his pillows, taking care to keep his chest upright to avoid the danger of food falling into his windpipe, and while he was eating and reading papers magnified by a hand glass as big as his head, she'd go downstairs to the pantry to finish mixing beeswax and vinegar and then set to polishing the wood in the library. Friday was cleaning day. This schedule - Monday for wash, Tuesday for ironing, and so forth - was the same one she'd learned back in the class on practical housekeeping at St. Ursula's. More and more houses were shaking off this old system in favor of letting housekeepers decide for themselves what to do, but Bridey kept to the old schedule, finding that it allowed her to do the work most efficiently, especially important now that there was only one person left in the house to do it.

The sheets didn't stir. How could he have slept through the noise from below? As she neared the bed, she guessed that the extra sleep would be good for him. He slept little these days; he complained about the sleeplessness almost as much as the pain. Maybe Young Doc had given him a sleeping draft when he'd come to mix his dosages last night. The medicines were a new treatment he'd started giving Mr. Hollingworth after Old Doc died last year. It seemed to be working.

She settled the tray on the bedside table. His head was turned to the wall. Perhaps he'd taken sick in the night. Had he acquired a fever? She stepped forward to feel his forehead and when she touched his skin, she felt a coldness, a lack of charge, and when she bent over his face and saw his staring eyes, she apprehended - first in the hairs on her forearms, then in the hairs on the back of her neck - that Mr. Hollingworth wasn't sleeping. He was dead.

She drew back suddenly, knocking the tray off the table, sending the plate and pot and creamer and vase clattering to the floor.

"You all right, Miss Molloy?" Mr. Tupper called from downstairs.

Bridey didn't answer. She couldn't believe Mr. Hollingworth was gone. The fits of blindness had ceased. Mr. Hollingworth had regained some energy, enough to take a constitutional around the house with her every so often. He'd improved enough for Sarah and Edmund to go on their long-planned anniversary trip. But now -

Bridey sank to her knees, crossed herself, and prayed, gazing at the man he had been. Mr. Hollingworth had been kind to her. He had been a kind man. He had taught her to swim. He had saved her life and the life of her son.

She heard Mr. Tupper's tread on the stairs, then in the hallway. She turned to see him bowing his head. Mr. Tupper was a big man. His head reached almost to the top of the ceiling, but he wasn't bowing his head because of that.

"God rest his soul," he murmured.

Bridey went to the window and drew back the curtains. She lifted the sash, just in case it was true that an open window eased the flight of the soul.

She turned back to the bed and pulled the sheet over Mr. Hollingworth's face. The sheet was splattered with coffee, but that didn't matter. She gathered what had been dropped, returned what she could to the tray, and asked Mr. Tupper to help her make calls. She was afraid of the telephone.

Watching her step as she balanced the tray she carried, she led Mr. Tupper down to the telephone table, a little round pedestal under the stairs, and he lifted the receiver and asked the operator for Young Doc. Doc was at the hospital now, but his office girl would give him the message.

She then told Mr. Tupper to ask for Vincent's school. For Hannah's bridal home in Litchfield. For Benno, who would be at the factory.

Excerpted from The Latecomers Copyright © 2018 by Helen Klein Ross. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved.