go and don’t look back. Live a life without these plaid skirts and ruffled tops. You’ll be free!”
Once, Martha had gone out for margaritas with Wally and his boyfriend, Anthony. Anthony had called J.Crew a “preppy hell,” and Martha had been beyond insulted. She’d thought that Wally would be too, but he just laughed and so she tried not to show how hurt she was, since she liked Anthony and he was generally very pleasant.
“You’re right,” Martha said. She deleted her name from the schedule and felt a little thrill. One second it was there and the next it was blank. “You are so right.”
AUNT MAUREEN’S FRIEND LINDA, who ran the caretaker business, had been thrilled to hear from Martha. “You’re perfect,” she kept saying during the interview. “You’re just the kind of person we look for.”
Martha was flattered. Linda explained how their client base was “wealthy and sometimes high profile.” She whispered this sentence, as though someone were spying on them. These people wanted a higher-level caretaker than was usually offered, and it took the right kind of person to fill that job.
At dinner that night, Martha told her family all about the company. “It sounds pretty amazing,” she said. “Which is good, because it’s going to be a long trek back to nursing.” She sighed and put her fork down.
“One step at a time,” Weezy said. “You’ll get there.”
MARTHA WAS SENT ON AN INTERVIEW on the Main Line in Villanova, which was almost forty minutes away. Linda explained that this was a new client, a family that needed someone to stay with their father on the weekdays. “It can be tricky to navigate a new client,” she said. “Often the patient doesn’t feel that he needs the extra care, and the family is uncomfortable about the whole thing. Tread lightly.”
Martha kept repeating that to herself as she drove to the house. “Tread lightly,” she said. She wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but it sounded important and sort of tricky. She could handle it.
Martha set out early to get to the house, afraid that she was going to get lost even though she’d printed out the directions and had a GPS in her car. She figured she could just sit in the car and drink her coffee if she was early, but when she pulled up to 24 Rock Lane, she didn’t think that was such a good idea. It was the biggest house she’d ever seen, and since there were only about three giant houses on the block and each one of those houses had an enormous driveway, hers was the only car on the street. If she parked there, they’d probably report it to the police.
She drove down the windy road once, then around the block and came back to the house. She was only about twenty minutes early, which wasn’t too bad. It would just show them that she was punctual, so she pulled into the semicircle driveway and parked her car.
When Martha rang the doorbell, she heard a deep and echoing chime ring through the whole house. She waited at the door for about five minutes, and just when she was about to ring it again, the door swung open. Standing there was a woman in her mid-forties, wearing dark slim jeans and a light pink button-down shirt. She had long blond hair that hung straight down her back, much longer than women her age normally wore it, but somehow it looked just right. She was very slim—almost bony—but in an attractive way, Martha thought.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “I’m Ruby.”
“That’s my dog’s name,” Martha said.
“Really?” Ruby didn’t smile. “My real name is Ruth, but no one ever calls me that.”
“That’s my cousin’s girlfriend’s name.” Martha couldn’t stop herself from saying these things. They just kept coming out. Ruby just nodded, like this was a fact she already knew.
“Would you mind taking off your shoes?” Ruby made an apologetic grimace, and Martha saw that she had a gap between her two front teeth, like that actress whose name she couldn’t remember. It seemed a strange thing, to have such a glaring orthodontic disaster on that face. Surely they had money for braces in this family. How had that been overlooked? Martha slipped off her shoes and prayed that her feet wouldn’t smell. She wished she’d painted her toenails, but she didn’t know that she’d be baring her feet in this interview.
“It’s just that the nurses have said that any dirt in the house