at my reflection at all, ignoring the aching muscles that grew more to a constant burn throughout the day, sometimes shooting pain or tingling sensations down my limbs. After weeks of the same movement—from start to finish, at the same time, in the same way, every other week—I stopped having to think about what to do next. Movements became routine, automatic. My muscles became tight and trained. The movement and house routines were like a much-needed mindless respite when every other aspect of my life was one difficult decision after another that had been even harder. I guess the escape had gotten a little too mindless, so that I wound up in shit.
The Chef’s House was one I envied, with its view, yard, trees that dropped apples to rot in the grass before the landscapers mowed over them. I wanted their back porch with its matching polished wooden furniture and maroon cushions. I imagined the lazy afternoons they must have had on the weekends—the shrimp on the grill, the chilled rosé wine in stemmed glasses, sipped under the striped canopy that rolled out from the side of the house. It seemed like a dream; and these people, with their hallways lined with paintings of scenes from Paris, got to live it every day.
Their kitchen counters were piled with food, and the neatly arranged tins of fancy cookies made my mouth drool. At Christmas, their decorations had been impeccable. I’d stopped to inspect the Christmas tree ornaments. They had every year of this Hallmark series called “Frosty Friends,” which my mom had collected for the years my family spent in Alaska. Mom gave them all to me after the divorce, but about half of them went missing in all the moving around. When I saw the ornament from 1985, our first Christmas in Alaska, I gingerly cupped it in my palm, remembering my mom unwrapping the red kayak with the Eskimo child and dog to let me put it on the tree. Christmas was half a year away now, and I realized I wasn’t even sure we’d be able to fit or afford a tree big enough to hang ornaments on in our studio. Mia was usually with Jamie for Christmas, since I always got Thanksgiving. I wanted so much for her to have a life where the same exact ornaments went on the tree every year. Traditions so small they’d gone unnoticed when I was a child, and now they were all I wanted for mine.
A third of the time I spent at the Chef’s House went to floors. Sometimes I shuffled to my car a little bent over with one hand on the bottom muscles near my spine. I wasn’t a stranger to pain, but being hunched over for hours cleaning took its toll. My spine curved like a question mark; it had put me in the emergency room several times. I had to be careful not to upset it, and I popped 800-milligram doses of ibuprofen around the clock if I did. My latest mistake at work had been bending slightly to pick up the edge of a couch to push it closer to a wall. It felt as heavy as my car. The muscles in my back, prepared to lift something light, snapped back like a released rubber band and stuck. For days, I gritted my teeth through spasms, losing sleep from the pain. I couldn’t handle painkiller pills very well. They made me loopy and sick, like I was half drunk.
When I saw the counters of the Chef’s House starting to fill with large prescription pill bottles of hydrocodone, it was almost tempting to pocket a few. Prescription pills littered the bathroom countertops and the medicine cabinets of most of the houses I cleaned, but this one had giant bottles in almost every room, going from full to empty in the two weeks between my visits.
Lonnie and I never spoke of the secrets the empty houses revealed. Most of my clients had sleep aids, ones for depression and anxiety, or pain. Perhaps because my clients had easier access to doctors or health insurance plans with a generous prescription medication clause built in; perhaps access to medical care created a default to prescriptions as a solution. Though I could get coverage for Mia, I made too much money for me to receive Medicaid, so I couldn’t see a doctor about chronic back pain or lingering sinus infections and coughs. Mia, thankfully, had always been covered, so I