Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,89
I had been tracing the words on a piece of paper as I spoke, but at the last line my fingers froze. I sat, trembling and waiting.
“I’ll see what I can do and get back to you,” she said. Within an hour, she called back with an offer that would pay off my loan and give me just over a thousand dollars to use toward a new car, in addition to lost wages. I tried to stay formal in thanking her, but I wish she could have seen my smile after I hung up the phone. I hadn’t smiled like that in such a very long time.
I’d been watching online classified ads for days, but a good car for twelve hundred dollars was hard to find. Then, there she was. A little Honda Civic wagon. 1983. Light blue. Travis and Mia came with me to check her out. An older couple who owned a detail shop had put in a couple thousand dollars to get her fixed up for their nephew. They’d rebuilt the engine, replaced the brakes, and put new tires on her. The nephew decided he didn’t want the car, so technically he was the one selling her. She purred. She had a manual transmission. She’d been owned by a couple who’d saved the original paperwork they’d signed when they bought her new off the lot. I offered $1,100. They took it. Mia and I named her Pearl, the shiniest thing to come out of a dark situation.
Pearl handled our daily commuting decently well, and the relief of having her made my stress level drop immensely. My schedule, thankfully, was still full, and a good distraction. If I had an open afternoon, I filled it with a private client. I posted about my cleaning services in local mom groups on Facebook instead of Craigslist, after I began receiving too many responses asking me to clean naked or in a sexy maid costume. The first time it happened, the man framed it as helping me out. As if cleaning wasn’t degrading enough.
After paying for gas to drive to work, my take-home pay from Classic Clean was a little more than half of what I got paid an hour. After the canceled clean at the Weekend House, I tried to keep my commute to less than forty-five minutes and stopped accepting new clients that were reaching outside my radius. But Lonnie insisted I take a new one. “It’ll be worth it,” she said. “They’re really nice.” The new client had a large home, custom-built with detailed woodwork and river rock. I cleaned it only a few times and thought of it as the Loving House. To get there, I drove up a winding single-lane road through tall evergreens. On top of the hill, where the house was, I could see the farmland nestled in the valley below. The husband and wife were home when I cleaned. Photographs of their adult daughter and her children covered the fridge and shelves. The spare bedroom off the kitchen seemed constantly poised for their return.
The husband greeted me at the door, eager to help me carry in my supplies. A fluffy golden retriever wagged its tail and sniffed at my feet. I removed my shoes and smiled at the wife, who smiled back from the chair I rarely saw her leave. Lonnie, in telling me the history of the Loving House, said the husband had cared for his wife full-time through a long illness. I thought it was cancer or something else serious, maybe terminal. The TV was always on, blaring Dr. Oz or home improvement programs. But when the wife spoke, her husband rushed to turn down the volume. I had trouble understanding her; she spoke so quietly and with a slurred voice. Her husband would feed her lunch and then carry her to the hallway bathroom afterward.
They’d traveled together for much of their marriage, choosing to have a child later than most. Their living room shelves were lined with drums, wood carvings, stone statues of elephants, and mountaineering books. Whenever the husband spoke about their life, he would gently ask his wife if she could recall the happy memory. If she did, he smiled with such kindness and love that I ached a little for their life.
The first time I cleaned their house, I went over the expected hours it would take to clean. The kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been detail-cleaned in a long time, and it took extra time to scrub