Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,26
third or fourth time, like Mia did when she knew I was tired and might give in.
“No,” I said bluntly.
“Then I’m gonna see if I can ride with Tracy,” she said, opening the door, rushing to the car behind me as it started to back out.
I never mentioned Angela’s behavior to Jenny. I kept my head down and didn’t complain, humbled and grateful to have found a job. But I also needed more hours. Jenny spoke about her employees in a caring way, and I got the feeling that Angela had been cleaning with her for a long time, possibly the longest of any of us. I wondered what the story was, why Angela had fallen to the place she had. I wondered that about all of my coworkers. What had happened to bring them here, to this place of cleaning toilets for so little money?
“She used to be one of my best employees,” Jenny told me once on a rare occasion that it was just the two of us driving to the next job. Her voice softened. “She’s going through a hard time. I feel for her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.” But I most certainly did not. In the houses Angela and I cleaned together, she’d mosey around, looking through magazines and cupboards, while I’d go at almost double speed. After a while, my fingers began to crack along the sides. I reeked of ammonia, bleach, and that powdered shit we sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming.
The winter weather hung with a dampness that filled my lungs. A few weeks into the job, I came down with a horrible chest cold; I tried my best to hide it with cough drops and cold medicine, but it kept getting worse. One morning, as Angela and I turned down a gravel driveway to a navy-blue house neatly nestled in the woods, I had a horrible coughing fit. It was so bad it felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Oooh,” Angela said with a morbid sort of interest. “You’re sick, too?” I tried to take in a deep breath, but I might as well have been doing it through a wet washcloth. I looked at her, annoyed, obviously sick. “Maybe we should call Jenny,” she said. “These people inside are old. I don’t think we should clean their house.” Angela pulled out her phone and started looking for Jenny’s number.
She turned her back to me and walked a few paces away. Before I could stop her, she’d already dialed. I waved my hands at her and shook my head and mouthed, “No,” but she continued to talk to Jenny.
“Stephanie’s really sick,” Angela said in a lowered, raspy voice, similar to what a kid does to get out of school. “And I think I might have caught it, too.” She held the phone to her shoulder and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, frowning when she saw it was empty, and threw it into her cleaning supply tray.
I didn’t want to lose a day’s pay or call in sick as a new hire. I needed this job and didn’t want Jenny to think I was a slacker. Angela ignored me as I got out of the car and stubbornly started to unload my supplies. “Thursday afternoon would work great for me,” Angela said, looking at me with a huge smile, giving me a thumbs-up, happy to have the rest of the day off. “Great,” she said into the phone, still smiling, forgetting to change her voice so she sounded sick. “Okay, we’ll talk to you then.”
“I told you not to do that,” I said when she came over to join me at the back of the car. My head started pounding. I’d explain this to Travis, knowing he’d be upset to find me home early. But I felt the sting of a lesser paycheck even more. “I can’t miss work. Do you not understand that?”
“It’s okay, girl,” she said, lifting her near-empty tray of supplies back into my car. “There will be more work tomorrow.”
We drove the rest of the way to her house without speaking, and I reached over to turn up the radio to keep it that way. Angela moved her head to the music, drumming the tops of her legs a little. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t stressed about missing out on those wages. There were questions I wanted to ask her about her kids and living situation, to get a better picture of what