by Daisy Jane
“I didn’t know you were going to move until now!” she shuffles a hand in front of her. “And, well, sometimes they party, and you know, that stuff is… out.”
Briefly I think of Scarface and get worried. “What kind of stuff?”
“You know, like coke and some pot sometimes. Empty bottles, nothing crazy,” she says, casually, like coke and pot are normal.
“I will be okay with coke and pot for $100,000 a year because I’m not insane, I know my morals can kick in after I windex drugs off glass tables for a few years. Besides, it would put me closer to going back to school.”
“Okay,” I say again, confirming I’ll do it, yawning, sinking back into the couch.
“Okay? That’s it?” Melody seemed a bit surprised she didn’t have to convince me more, but really, she’s right- it is a good idea. I’m not above cleaning houses. I just want to pay off this debt and move on. May as well see beautiful homes and spend time with my cousin while I’m doing it.
“Yeah,” I shrug off the afghan and rise to my feet. “I’ll get the ball rolling on this place this week. I’ll do it. I’ll move and be a maid, why not?” she rises and I pull her into a hug, which is hard because she’s taller than me but I manage. She feels warm and familiar, safe against my chest and safety is a feeling I realize that I’d been desperately needing.
Well, safety and um, money.
“Okay, yay, I’m excited. I’m going to step out and call my boss, call Donny and have him get his shit off the couch and you can come with me tonight, now that everything here is over here.”
She’s right, everything here is, for lack of better words, over.
Mom’s been gone for a week, equipment is given back, service is over, bills are piled and waiting. There aren’t many things in this house I hadn’t sold or pawned to make money for the mortgage and bills in the last year so I don’t have much to do.
Melody makes the calls she needs to make and comes back inside more excited than before.
“I knew it! They said as long as you pass the background check and have no problem signing the paperwork, then you can start in two weeks, after Mavis is gone. You can be on my route; we’ll be on the same service. It’s going to be awesome!” she’s thrilled and her excitement drifts from towards me, tingling in my toes, working its way to my belly. It’d been so long since I’d been excited for a new adventure, it felt good to have something to look forward to—even if it was slightly tainted.
“You’re really lucky, you know, if Mavis wasn’t leaving, you’d never get an in. The girls at the agency hardly ever leave, of their own volition at least.”
I do feel lucky with this job on the horizon. “What do I have to sign?” I’d only ever worked at the grocery store and there was no employment contract there. More of a “here’s your apron, you’re on camera, don’t steal” type of contract going on there.
“Legal stuff. An NDA, that’s the most important part,” she says, typing away into her phone. It’s a new phone, in a protective case, and I watch her manicured nails dance over the screen. I look at her dress—it, too, looks new.
“How much money do you really make?” I say, sizing her up, a smile on her face as she watches me do it. I know what she said but I’m in disbelief.
She doesn’t look up so she reads my skepticism as curiosity. “After tips, a lot. I’d be in culinary school; I’d own my own house and a car by now if it wasn’t for Donny.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s in a lot of debt. Not like your debt. He gambled it all away and then some.” She shrugs it off. I’ve not once heard her complain about the shitty apartment she lives in, either. And the way she describes it, it’s pretty shitty.
And then there’s her boyfriend.
Donny. Worked a handful of days in his entire life, stresses her out, spends her money (and puts them in debt, apparently) and keeps her from her dreams. I don’t press her on why she stays with him—clearly, she stays with him because she loves him, so why bring that up? I want better for her, but I am not one to meddle in someone else’s happiness.
“Well, I hope I can get the debt paid off and I can get back in school before I’m sixty years old,” I joke, though the fear of not being able to return to school is real. When we were younger, Melody and I had dreamed of going to culinary school together. The “real” Martha Stewarts, we said we’d call ourselves. “We won’t make all these weird things that real people don’t like! We’ll make stuff people actually want!” we’d said. Now, years later, the idea of culinary school seems so distant it could be a star in another galaxy. Untouchable, unreachable, almost make believe. I stuff it down and smile, staying positive, because that’s the only way to move forward.
“You will. It will be great. And you know,” she slides the phone into her purse and pulls out a green marble square and opens it, blotting her nose with the pad inside. “Cleaning houses isn’t something to be ashamed of. Not when you’re making one hundred grand and promise to keep your eyes and ears to yourself.”
“That’s so much money, I can’t even believe it,” I nod, my mouth agape. Three years. I only have to do this three years and I can have mom’s entire debt paid off and my nest egg for school, whatever that ends up looking like. That’s not too long. I’ve already given two years, what’s three more?
Then I process what she’s said. “Wait, what’s an NDA? It’s not some weird sex thing, is it?”
“Non-disclosure agreement. The agency makes you sign one and sometimes clients even have their own that they make us sign, too. Like, we won’t talk about anything or anyone we see in the house. Can’t take photos, can’t talk about their homes outside of work, stuff like that.”
“Sounds serious,” I admit, wondering what type of clients are on the agency’s roster, to require such discretion. But then I would sign my soul over to the devil himself if I could make all that money in three years. Melody shrugs before stuffing her compact back into her bag.
“Eh,” she is now finger combing her hair and sliding her feet into her shoes. “The houses are beautiful, I rarely see the owners, and I’ve never had a problem. Just mind your business, clean and get paid!”
Standing, she smooths her dress and beams at me. “Let’s pack you up!”
Within five hours, the few items in the house we had were bagged and curbed, to be picked up by the local shelter. Though I wasn’t sure the needy would even want my mom’s old pots and pans, her couch and TV. But still, I needed the house empty.
Every possession I owned I packed into the biggest suitcase we had. On top of my limited wardrobe, I added my mother’s photo album of she and I during my childhood and her afghan from the couch before zipping it closed.
Standing on the walkway between the house and Melody, it feels metaphoric and I say a quiet goodbye and get into her car.
“This is a good choice,” she says to me, throwing the car into drive as dusk settles in around us.
“I think so too,” I say, throwing my mom’s old house one last glance before resting my eyes.
I never thought becoming a maid was the first step to a better life, but life is funny that way, isn’t it?
1
Britta
Grabbing the liner from the laundry basket, I lifted it up and cinched it tight before hoisting onto my hip and dropping it down the chute to the basement. Melody was down there unloading our caddies, putting away the various cleaners and unused towels. We had a routine in each house we worked at, an order in which we did things. It made work quicker and more efficient.
In this house, the house on the hill—as it so appropriately was built atop a very large hill—was my favorite. It was the easiest to clean, too, but that’s not why it was my favorite.
I loved the design.
Externally, the entrance at the bottom of the hill was a large, black iron gate with a keypad entry. You couldn’t even see the house until you’d made your way up the winding driveway. Lots of foliage, shades of viridian and various types of trees kept it hidden,
but after making it past the second gate, there it stood, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
Modern, rectangular shapes sitting seemingly haphazardly on top of one another, the home was nearly all windows, framed in white. Externally, columns of natural toned bricks were the only contrast to the white and it was flat on top, no standard roofline or visible chimney outlet. Inside the house was nearly all walnut wood, whites, and creamy bronzes. Windows and doors invisibly bled into one another, as they were all made of glass and furnishings were modern, with either sharp or completely fluid edges, the two ideas fusing together in a square, tall-backed couch sitting on top of a soft, shape-shifting long-haired rug. All marble floors throughout, the entire home was always perfectly in order. It smelled like fresh paint and new linens, though Melody told me she’d been cleaning it for years and it always smelled and looked exactly the same.
In totality, the house was, to me, perfect.
But there was more. Another thing that made it my favorite of the ten houses I worked each week. Though I’d never met, spoke to or even seen the owner, I found myself deeply curious.
I’d never met the man living in the house on the hill. Still, though, I had grown very curious and extremely interested in him over the last few months.
I was embarrassed of the fact that I seemed to be developing a crush on a stranger; I didn’t even tell Melody. She was my cousin, closest friend, coworker—pretty much the only person my life. And I hid the crush from her. I don’t really even know why I hid it from her. She was a romantic at heart, she wouldn’t have teased me about it. But still, I just couldn’t.
My interest in the man living in the house on the hill all started about two and a half months ago, a little after I’d first started this job. I was emptying the bin in the 3rd floor office and a piece of paper fell stray, the words on it facing up, staring at me.
I didn’t want to read them, those words written so clearly and perfectly in sharp black ink. But before I could crumple up the paper, my mind had cheated me and I’d absorbed them. I couldn’t stop myself.
I remember my first vacation
I remember my first heartbreak
I remember my first drink
I don’t remember my first kiss
I remember everything
It was a poem, I guessed, and though I didn’t know what it was about or what it was for but something about those few sentences grounded me to that office—right in that spot with the empty bin in one hand, the crumpled paper in the other. From that moment on, I couldn’t help but be drawn to him. And ever since that morning, my body stood on pins and needles when I cleaned that house, both dying to and utterly terrified to meet him.
The man who wrote the poem. The man who remembers everything, except his first kiss.
I’d imagined him so many ways. Short and soft with no hair or a big fuzzy man bun, moon faced or crooked toothed, greasy smile, silk jogging suits with gold pinky rings. Any possible way that I imagined him felt wrong. It felt off. And a part of me knew there was a very real possibility that I’d never know who he really was, as Melody told me a few times that in the years she’d been doing her job, there were plenty of homes where she never met the owners, or even saw them. I knew the house on the hill could be one of these.
Still, I fantasized about the man behind the poem. Even three months later.
2
Britta
I was on edge as I pulled the sheets on the bed, tucking them tightly around the edges. He didn’t want us to change the sheets, Melody had said. Honestly, I wasn’t sure he even wanted us to make his bed but since I had to send the towels from the second floor down the chute anyway, I figured I’d check if his room was open and needing any services.
I’d only ever been in his room once before. Usually, his door was closed and, in our business, a closed door contractually meant “do not enter”. Though we’d all signed non-disclosure agreements, there were still clauses added to the contracts that told us how to determine when a space was off-limits, and that was almost always dictated by a closed door, or something hanging off the doorknob. As I continued to fluff his pillows and make his bed, I remembered back to the first, and only other time, I’d been in that space.
His door was open, so I relayed the information down to Melody using the house intercom. She’d replied that if it was open, we needed to at least check if the room needed servicing, like a vacuum, or an obvious mess to be cleaned. The green light from her let loose the butterflies in my belly—finally, I get to go into the bedroom of the man who remembers everything but his first kiss. The poem still excited and intrigued me, though I wasn’t sure I completely understood it.
It was dark with the floor to ceiling walls of glass covered by an ash-colored curtain that seemed to fall straight out of the ceiling. The smell of amber aftershave hung in the air and though I’d still not seen him, my pulse zoomed. That’s what he smells like. My nipples pebbled under my white button up, and I inhaled—deep and slow—trying to commit his scent to memory. Looking around the room, I noticed everything was, as the entire home was usually is, neat and tidy. The bed was made, the closet doors were closed, the bathroom lights all off. My breathing grew heavy despite my racing heart, and suddenly I wondered if he had accidentally left the door open. As curious as I was about him, I did not want to invade his privacy. Nothing in here needed any housecleaning services, he probably left the door open on accident. Instantly I left the room, not wanting to be caught in there by him.
Whoever he was.
It was strange because though I didn’t know him at all, but I was aware of him. I supposed he could be a grouchy old troll, for all it concerned, but the idea that he wasn’t a troll kept me going. I needed something to keep me going while trying to repay this insane debt. A silly crush is harmless enough.
Even if I were to meet him, I’m a maid. His maid.
He’s clearly a wealthy, mature, intellectual man. He wouldn’t even see me.
After making his bed, I dusted the lamp on his night table, lifting the empty whiskey glass to wipe away the ring. Had it been whiskey he was drinking last night? Quickly, I glanced around me to make sure Melody hadn’t come upstairs then, quietly, privately lifted the glass to my nose and inhaled. Faint, but yes, it was whiskey. Probably really expensive stuff, too, because it didn’t smell like alcohol and I knew from my mom that the expensive stuff was smooth. “Virtually tasteless,” she’d say in a titled grin.
I put the lid back on the laundry bin and held the glass to my chest as I made my way down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen.
“Mel?” I called for her, but we were nearing the end of our four hours, so she was probably on the second floor, finishing cleaning the home gym—the room she liked to end on. She said it made her motivated to work out after we got off work.
I stood at the sink, waiting for the water to get hot. It always warmed quicker if I turned it up so I pushed the handle, causing the stream of water to intensify.
“I remember my first vacation, I remember my first heartbreak, I remember my first drink, I don’t remember my first kiss,” I spoke the words out loud, watching the water in the infinity pool ripple in the calm spring breeze outside as I slid the glass under the stream, letting it fill and run over, repeatedly. “I remember everything.”
Mulling over his words again, I wonder if they’re about a lost love. Did he have a broken heart? Or was it simply about something else—maybe it was about sex, maybe he’d not been with a woman in years. Maybe he was a recluse who hadn’t left his house and had all these anxieties about returning to normal life. Maybe that was what it was about. Maybe the first kiss was symbolic for life or something.
I’d thought of this scenario before. I’d thought of many scenarios. But the fact of the matter was simple—I didn’t know much about him other than he liked whiskey before bed and lived alone. And that just wasn’t enough information to decipher a small poem that I probably shouldn’t have read in the first pla
ce.
“I don’t remember my first kiss, I remember everything,” I say it again, getting lost in a daze as the pool rippled, running over its seamless edge.
“What did you say?”
A thick, deep voice surrounded me, making me spin. The wet glass came with me and slipped through my fingers. Before I could really look at him, my eyes followed the crash of the glass shattering on the marble between us.
It’s only broken glass between us but it feels metaphoric.
“I’m so sorry!” I gasped.
I dropped to my knees and began collecting pieces of shattered glass into my apron, apologizing on loop, my skin bright red from my blazing humiliation. I wanted to look at him, to see the man I’d been blindly fantasizing about for months. But I wouldn’t let myself look until the glass was picked up. I broke a glass! It probably cost more than everything I own! Mortification filled me as I scooped the shards off the tile, two large hands with thick knuckles suddenly in front of mine.
“I’m sorry I startled you.”
His voice sent a vibration through my body and into my thighs. Discreetly as possible, I took a quick deep breath and followed the bend of his wrist up his arm, traced his shoulder and found his face.
This is him. The man who writes about poems about life and changes his own sheets and drinks whiskey before bed. And lives in this insanely cool mansion.
I didn’t know I was holding a piece of glass so tightly that the palm of my hand was split down the center, blood swimming down my forearm.
And he didn’t notice right away, either.
3
Britta
I was speechless as I devoured every inch of him.
Neatly trimmed beard, sandy colored hair with some white peppered throughout, his eyes were a fusion of chocolate and amber, made more intense by his coffee-colored brow line glasses. Glasses, one of the scenarios I’d not considered. The way his shirt stretched across his shoulders and chest; I could tell that he took care of himself. My heart raced and I felt a hard lump in my throat as I tried to simultaneously swallow it down and apologize for the glass, again, for the fifth time. I found it hard to make my voice loud. I found it hard to breathe. My legs suddenly felt like butter on a hot pan and I’m very certain there was a stirring under those hideous khaki work shorts I was wearing.