Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

I went to Capital Camera this afternoon to buy slide jackets and talk to Mrs. P., the wife of the
owner. She’s from Smithfield and told me that her husband suffers from high blood pressure. “His
medication is thirty dollars a month!” she said.
Mrs. P. is very Southern. She calls everyone “honey” and wears half-glasses attached to a chain
around her neck. The front door used to be open all the time, but now it’s locked and gets unlocked
only when customers come—people like Dr. R., who came to drop off the film he’d shot in Europe.
He told Mrs. P. that his wife had gotten sick in Paris, and Mrs. P. said she knows all about sickness.
“My husband has high blood pressure, and the medication is costing us thirty dollars per month!”
Then she said that she was robbed last week. It seemed she’d forgotten to lock the door, and when
she turned around a man put his hands around her neck and demanded all her money. She said she
couldn’t believe this was happening to her and that she called him “sir.”
“I told him he was welcome to all the money and that I hoped he spent it wisely.” After she
emptied the cash drawer, he asked for a cord or something he could use to tie her up with. “I
promised him that if he let me be, I wouldn’t call the police,” she said. “So he didn’t tie me up and I
didn’t call them.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because I promised.”
“Can’t there be an exception?” I asked. “I mean, do you really have to keep every single promise
you make?”
She said no but that he could have returned or sent one of his friends to rough her up. “I considered
calling a private company and having them dust my neck for fingerprints, but I looked in the Yellow
Pages and didn’t find any such business,” she said.
November 4, 1983
Raleigh
I washed walls at Tracy’s today. Meanwhile, her maid Julia scrubbed the floors. Julia lives in the
Washington Terrace apartments and will not put up with any mess from the people she works for. “It’s
not worth the fuss,” she told me. “I will not babysit, and I will be paid extra for holidays, including
Labor Day and Memorial Day.”
After Tracy left, Julia called a number of people on the phone. To one person she described a man
she had seen wearing a built-up shoe. “No, girl,” she said to the woman she was talking to, who
apparently had questions about it, “you got to have a thing like that made special, and no, you do not
got one foot tinier than the other.”
On Thursdays Julia works for the people who live next door to Tracy, a couple with a dog named
Domino, who was not in his outdoor pen today. “You think he ran away?” she asked ten or so times
before knocking on the couple’s door and hearing him bark on the other side of it.
Aside from working for Tracy, Julia and I have WPTF radio in common. We both listen to Open
Line and agreed that Barbara needs to start putting some of her callers in their place.
November 19, 1983