Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,30

prayer, I laced my fingers on the inside of my hands to hide them.

Classic Clean’s approach to their clients’ houses was much different than Jenny’s. I’d instead become a nameless ghost, appearing either at nine a.m. or before one p.m., depending on the clients’ schedule and whether or not they wanted to be home, but not after. It was rare that I’d ever work after three-thirty. “You know, Mom hours,” Lonnie had said. “When the kids are in school.” I had to clean the house in a specific way, the exact manner and amount of time as the person before me, to prevent any differences between cleaners being noticed. I had to be diligent and have a sharp eye. Kitchen stovetops had to be impeccably polished, pillows fluffed each visit, and toilet paper folded into a little triangle the exact same way every time.

My initial training test was to clean the kitchen and master bathrooms in Lonnie’s and Pam’s homes, which I had absolutely no worries about acing. They both had pretty nice places, two-story houses in the woods. Not huge by any means, but not small, either. I followed Lonnie’s Kia Sportage to her place with my freshly stocked cleaning supplies, which had been meticulously inventoried and logged in my employee file. Two spray bottles, one container of powdered Comet, two sponges, one pair of yellow gloves, fifty white rags, two dusters, one Oreck vacuum, two mop handles, and so on. Lonnie instructed me to only use the products given to me and to return to the office for refills when I needed them. We’d chatted a little while she found all the items I needed to get started, and I mentioned needing to drop Mia off later that day to visit her dad for the weekend.

“Oh, yeah,” Lonnie said. “I know how that is, believe me, I know.” Her daughter had been ten when she’d remarried, she told me. “And Pam, you know, she went through the same thing. In fact, she started this business as a single mom. I bet you and her will have a lot to talk about.” Jenny had been a single mom, too. I wondered how normal it was for housecleaners to be displaced mothers, stuck in between the domestic work they did at home and seeking jobs that could pay a decent wage. The job seemed like nothing but a last resort.

Lonnie had me call the office from her home phone to officially clock in. “Hi,” I said once the outgoing message stopped and I heard a beep. “This is Stephanie Land, and I’m starting at Lonnie’s house,” I said before hanging up.

“No!” Lonnie said so earnestly I jumped. “You’re supposed to say the date and time!” Then she quickly seemed to correct herself. “Well, it tells the date and time after the message plays anyway. But you’ll need to do that every time you start and finish, and it has to be from their landline so it shows up on the caller ID. It’s just a way for us to keep track of things.” I nodded, my eyes a little wide. She’d said all of this to me before, when she’d given me my binder full of client sheets I’d been assigned to, but it had been lost with all of the other information. With all of these instructions, I got the feeling she had to repeat herself a lot normally.

Lonnie pointed me to her bathroom across the hallway from the small, box-sized kitchen. “Now the thing about this bathroom is you need to pay special attention to the countertops and the wall behind the sink.” Lonnie used a lot of hairspray, she said, as evidenced by the two cans of Aqua Net placed carefully on a mirror. “Everything else in here is pretty standard, you know, you got your toilet and bathtub and shower.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Just do your best and come get me later to check your work.”

Years before I got pregnant with Mia, I’d applied for the local branch of Merry Maids cleaning service, desperate for work outside of coffee shops. My first day was spent in the office watching four training videos; a blond woman wearing a hunter green polo shirt neatly tucked into khaki pants, who smiled as she put on knee pads while the smarmy female narrator said, “And how do we clean floors? That’s right. On our hands and knees.” I cringed, but part of the training video had proved