Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,29

the wall that read “$8.55 an hour,” which was Washington State’s current minimum wage. “We gotta start you there while you’re training,” she said. “But it goes up to nine after that.” That would be $18,720 dollars a year if I eventually worked full-time, which wasn’t possible to achieve. The company’s policy prevented working more than six hours a day. Any more than that and employees would risk injury from fatigue, she said. I would also not be paid for travel time. Jenny had factored in the hours I spent driving from one house to the next in my pay, giving me a buck or two extra per day. With the new job, I’d spend sometimes as much as two unpaid hours a day driving from job to job, then have to wash the rags I’d used for work at home with my own laundry detergent, along with the black Classic Clean t-shirts with a tiny red bird embroidered next to the company name.

Lonnie didn’t seem to mind my standing there, studying the calendar, while she continued to explain their system. Many houses were two- or three-hour cleans. A few took four hours. Some took six. Each house I’d be assigned to came with a printed sheet, detailing each room and the instructions for cleaning it and how long that should take. She pulled one out to show me. Most rooms had added notes to warn cleaners of loose tiles, to dust in places often missed, and where clean bed linens were if the client forgot to set them out. Everything not only expected of me but also what I needed to expect was meticulously detailed in black-and-white. There’d be no late-evening conversations, planning through text. If I wanted, I could plan ahead and know that three months from now on the second Wednesday of the month I’d be changing sheets at one house before driving three miles to the next. It hadn’t struck me how much I’d needed this sort of stability, this dependability; I almost hugged Lonnie. I had to hide the tears welling in my eyes.

Lonnie called me the next day. I’d just finished cleaning a house with Angela and sat in my car impatiently while she finished inside, trying to ignore a real possibility she was taking something that wasn’t hers.

“You checked out,” Lonnie said. “I knew ya would, but we have to check these things.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, wishing I could tell her how happy it made me to see them doing that.

“Are you available to come in this afternoon to get some things?” she asked. “Pam the owner’s not around, but I can get you all set up and ready to go. Then maybe we can head over to my place—it’s just down the street from here—and I can train you a little by cleaning my bathroom and dusting around a bit.”

I tried to absorb what she said. So that meant I was hired. And I’d start working that afternoon. I had a job; a real job with paystubs and a regular schedule. “Yes! That sounds great!” I said, suddenly breathless, almost yelling. Lonnie laughed and told me to swing by the office after noon.

Growing up, I spent Saturday mornings deep-cleaning the house. Mom wouldn’t change out of her bathrobe until it was done. I’d wake up to the smells of pancakes and bacon or sausage wafting into my bedroom, George Winston’s piano music playing. After breakfast, we’d all get to our various predetermined and reluctantly agreed-upon duties. Mine was bathrooms. For a while it had been the only one I shared with my brother, but my skill was so great and Mom praised me enough that I wanted to do the master bathroom, too. Mom would brag to her friends about how well I could clean a bathtub, so much that my chest filled with air as I stood a little taller.

Appearances had always been important to my mother. “You’ll just get it dirty,” she said to any clothes I wanted that were white. I wasn’t allowed to paint my nails when I was little because she said whenever she saw girls with chipped nail polish it looked trashy. One Saturday night that I spent at my grandparents’ around age five or six, I watched Grandma paint her toenails and fingernails a deep pink before she carefully painted mine, even though I told her it would make Mom mad. At church the next morning, whenever we had to fold our hands in