I couldn’t afford to lose this one.

Marta set her rag on the butcher-block kitchen island, where she’d been cutting out homemade biscuits, then hooked the hangers—I’d bundled them just like the dry cleaner would have—over the door to a formal dining room half the size of my house. I’d been in there once. The Turners’ cloth napkins probably cost more than my whole wardrobe.

Mr. Turner owned the factory that made the Church cassocks—official robes—for most of the region. I found that ironic, considering the illicit work I was doing on his daughter’s clothes, but I refused to feel guilty. The Turners’ monthly tithe would feed my whole family for a year.

“They’re all here?” Marta unzipped the garment bag to inspect my work.

“Same as always. Five blouses, five pairs of slacks, all starched and pressed. That raspberry stain came out too.” I picked up the sleeve of the first blouse to show her the bright white cuff, and when she bent to study the material, I took a can of beef stew from the shelf at my back and slid it into the pocket of my oversized jacket.

“Good. Here’s next week’s batch.” Marta straightened and gestured to a bulging brown paper bag sitting on the tile countertop. “Sarah cut herself and bled on one of them….” She opened the bag and lifted the stained tail of a blouse at the top of the pile. “I told her blood won’t come out of white cotton, so she’s already replaced it, which means you’re welcome to keep this one. The stain’ll never show with it tucked in.”

“Thanks.” I mentally added the secondhand blouse to the small collection of school uniforms my sister and I actually owned.

Marta rolled down the top of the bag and shoved it at me, and when she turned to open a drawer beneath the counter, I slid another can of stew into my other pocket. My coat hung evenly now, and the weight of real food was reassuring.

“And here’s your cash.” She pressed a five and a ten from the drawer into my hand, then ushered me out the back door.

I grinned in spite of the cold as I jogged down the steps, then onto the Turners’ manicured back lawn, running my thumb over the sacred flames printed in the center of the worn, faded bills. That fifteen dollars put me within ten of paying this month’s electric bill, which wasn’t due for another week and might actually be paid on time, thanks to my arrangement with Marta.

Every week, Mrs. Turner gave her housekeeper twenty dollars to have Sarah’s school uniforms cleaned and pressed. Every Monday, Marta kept five of those dollars for herself and gave the rest to me, along with that week’s dirty clothes. Sarah had two full sets of school clothes. As long as she got five clean uniforms every Monday morning, Marta didn’t care what my sister and I did with them until then. So we laundered them on Monday afternoon, wore them throughout the week to supplement our own hand-me-down, piecemeal collection of school clothes, then laundered them again over the weekend in time to deliver them fresh and clean on Monday morning.