come to feel a part of, even the ridiculous ritual of watching Jerry Springer—everything would be ruined. Just days before, she’d worked up the courage to swat Trip’s hand when he’d made a joke about her pants—Why so many pockets, he’d demanded, what are you hiding in there? First he’d patted the pockets at the sides of her knees, then those at her hips, then, when he’d reached for the ones on her rear, she’d smacked him, and to her smitten delight he’d said, “Don’t be mad, you know I love you,” and put his arm around her shoulder. With her mother there, though, she would never dare such a thing, and neither, she suspected, would Trip.
Mr. Richardson, too, found the new arrangements awkward. It was one thing, he thought, to hire a housekeeper; it was another to hire someone they already knew, the mother of one of their children’s friends. But Mrs. Richardson, he could see, felt it was a generous gesture, so instead of arguing, he made a point of speaking to Mia on her first morning in the house.
“We’re very grateful for your help,” he told her, as she pulled the bucket of cleaning supplies from under the sink. “It’s a huge, huge help to us.” Mia smiled and reached for a bottle of Windex and said nothing, and Mr. Richardson cast about for something else to say. “How do you like Shaker?”
“It’s quite a place.” Mia sprayed the counter and swept the sponge across it, corralling crumbs into the sink. “Did you grow up in Shaker, too?”
“No, just Elena.” Mr. Richardson shook his head. “I’d never even heard of Shaker Heights before I met her.” Their first week at Denison, he had fallen for the ardent young woman collecting signatures around campus to end the draft. By the time they graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they’d been suspicious of ideas: he’d grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he’d been sure the world could be better. It was why he’d been so eager to leave, and why he’d been smitten as soon as they’d met. Northwestern had been his first choice; he’d been turned down, had settled for the only school that let him leave the state, but once he’d met Elena it had seemed, to him, like fate intervening. Elena was determined to return to her hometown after school, and the more she told him about it, the more willing he was. It seemed only natural to him that such a place would have formed his principled fiancée, who always strove for perfection, and he gladly followed her back to Shaker Heights after graduation.
Now, almost two decades later, well settled in their careers and their family and their lives, as he filled up his BMW with premium gas, or cleaned his golf clubs, or signed a permission form for his children to go skiing, those college days seemed fuzzy and distant as old Polaroids. Elena, too, had mellowed: of course she still donated to charity and voted Democrat, but so many years of comfortable suburban living had changed both of them. Neither of them had ever been radical—even at a time of protests, sit-ins, marches, riots—but now they owned two houses, four cars, a small boat they docked at the marina downtown. They had someone to plow the snow in the winter and mow the lawn in the summer. And of course they’d had a housekeeper for years, a long string of them, and now here was the newest, this young woman in his kitchen, waiting for him to leave so she could clean his house.
He recollected himself, smiled bashfully, picked up his briefcase. At the doorway to the garage, he paused. “If working here ever stops suiting your needs, please let me know. There will be no hard feelings, I promise.”
Mia soon settled into a schedule: she arrived in the morning at eight thirty, soon after everyone had gone off to work or school, and would be finished by ten. Then she would go home to her camera, returning at five o’clock to cook. “There’s no need to make two trips,” Mrs. Richardson had pointed out, but Mia had insisted midday was the best time for her photography. The truth was that she wanted to study the Richardsons both when they were there