Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,54

with carrot sticks on the side. She served instant coffee that we’d nimbly sip out of teacups with cream and sugar packets and a silver spoon to stir. It all felt like tea parties I’d pretended to have with my grandma when I was a child, and I told her so. Wendy smiled, then waved her hand to brush it off. “It’s good to use the fancy teacups while you still can,” she said. Her hands shook enough to make the cups rattle on the saucers that were etched with pink flowers.

Wendy’s house was filled with glass cases displaying knickknacks, photos of her children and grandchildren, a portrait from her wedding day. Wendy caught me gazing at it once. I had been staring at it, thinking how young she and her husband looked, wondering how it is that people can suddenly become so old, how they stayed in love for that long, their heart and body growing together. She smiled and pointed to a glass bouquet of red roses, which sat on the shelf next to their wedding portrait. “My husband always wanted to make sure I had red roses,” she said, and I felt an odd sensation of both envy and tears.

Wendy’s house was such a typical “grandmother house” that being there made me ache for family or my own grandmother. The kitchen counters were filled with cookbooks and piles of papers—grocery lists and green smoothie recipes. She drank her coffee with packets of imitation sugar and had a basket of them next to the coffeepot, which always seemed to be turned on.

Wendy’s house was, compared to my others, easy. I wiped down the counters, cupboards, and floor; dusted and vacuumed; and cleaned the half bathroom downstairs. She insisted on doing the one upstairs herself.

There was a spot on the floor in her kitchen, near the end of the bar, where the linoleum had been worn down and chipped away. I asked her about it once during our lunch together, and she said that was where her husband had sat to smoke cigarettes. She grimaced at the memory. “I always hated it,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. I nodded, thinking of Travis’s muddy boot tracks across the kitchen floor. “But it’s important to not let those things get in the way,” she said, smoothing her white cardigan over a pin-striped shirt.

“It did for me,” I said. She looked up at me, her white hair nearly glowing in the afternoon light like a halo. “My boyfriend and I broke up recently. We’d been living together for a little over a year. My daughter’s only three and…they were close. Now we live in this tiny studio apartment I can hardly afford.” I picked up my cup to drink the last gulp of my coffee and to hide my red cheeks. Saying those words all together like that not only made me ache with grief, it made everything real, like it was actually happening, and not just some nightmare we’d found ourselves in.

Wendy was quiet for a few moments. “I need a lot of help around here,” she said, getting up from her seat at the table. She collected her dishes, and I jumped up to do the same. “You can leave those there. Come with me.”

I followed her upstairs, past the mechanical seat she used to traverse them on her “bad days,” as she called them. She didn’t seem to get many visitors, and it made me wonder if she put on nice clothes and did her hair for me. I hadn’t been upstairs, except once or twice to vacuum the stairs. Her bedroom was to the right of the landing, where she slept with her portly, snoring white dog, who knew to ring the bell by the sliding glass door to be let out. When she opened the door to the guest bedroom, light flooded into the hallway where we stood.

Dozens of shoe boxes, plastic containers, and rubber bins lined the walls. There were still more containers balanced in stacks on top of the bed. Wendy sighed.

“I’ve been trying to sort things into piles of what goes where,” she said. “Because of the cancer.” I nodded and looked at everything she had been doing. “Most of the things for my son are in the garage—the tools and all of that. But my nieces and nephews and their children will want a lot of this.”

I admired her as she pointed to the piles, telling me what would be