by Sarah Graves
This made me feel better, suggesting as it did that I wasn’t the only one frightened of my soon-to-arrive housekeeper.
“I saw Deke while I was out on my walk,” Ellie went on, “and he said the moose was standing on the beach at the foot of Clark Street, having a drink out of the freshwater spring by the ruins of the old sardine cannery.”
She got out two cups as the coffeemaker finished spitting and chuffing. In my old house there is no such thing as a level surface, so no matter where you put it, that coffeemaker always sounds like the steam boiler on a locomotive.
“Deke said it was quite a sight,” Ellie added, getting out the cream and sugar, “with the seagulls out there taking morning baths in the freshwater pools, and this moose among them.”
My heart softened briefly as I pictured this. But then the reality of what I was facing washed over me again.
“Ellie, we’ve got to . . .” I gestured desperately. The task I’d been dreading was already bad enough without the moose mess. “We can’t just sit here. She’s going to . . .”
Ellie poured the fragrant coffee. “Yes, I suppose she is. Any minute, too,” she added uncomfortingly.
“But what do you suggest? I guess we could lock the door,” she continued, “and pretend we’re not here, except that you decided to give her a key of her own in the first place.”
Drat, so I had. Because what good is a housecleaner if you actually have to be in the house all the time that he or she is cleaning? Or so I’d believed back in the days before I’d gotten to know Bella Diamond.
“Go on, drink your coffee,” Ellie told me. “Think of it this way: What’s the worst she can do?”
“Egad.” At her question I nearly choked on a swallow of the hot liquid. “She can break up my marriage, alienate my son, hurt my dad’s feelings, and destroy my life. That’s what she can—”
“Wah!” In the maid’s room, the baby woke up and emitted the short, piercing yell she used as a distress signal whenever she forgot all the colorful profanity her dad’s friends had taught her.
Ellie went to check, came back carrying the infant. “I guess I shouldn’t have bothered putting her down. I almost forgot we’ve got to go to a pediatrician’s appointment. It’s just a regular checkup, but . . . oh, Jake, I’m so sorry to leave you with all this!”
“Never mind.” I went to the door with her. “No sense both of us dealing with Bella’s wrath. I’ve got to talk to her, anyway.”
It was the confrontation I’d been fretting over. “So this’ll just give me a good excuse to . . .”
But then I stopped, hearing myself. “An excuse to talk with my own employee; how gutless is that? You’d think that she was a hurricane about to make landfall.”
But Ellie wasn’t fooled. She’d met Bella, too. “That’s fine to say now, Jake, but you just wait. She may not be a hurricane, but she’s definitely a force to be reckoned with. Don’t underestimate her.”
Not a good thought; too bad it was so chillingly accurate. Certainly it hadn’t taken long for Bella to blow an ill wind through my house.
Outside, I followed Ellie down the porch steps, avoiding the rotten one that had been threatening me with a broken ankle for months. Two-by-eights, I thought automatically; a hammer, nails, and a bucket of porch paint.
Then I paused, captured abruptly by an island summer day as fresh as a newly finished watercolor. Maple leaves gleamed in the lemony sunshine. Late tulips massed amidst the last of the yellow daffodils in the dooryards of graceful old wooden houses up and down Key Street. Fat purple lilac blooms basked in the soft June warmth, and in the shade by the porch the last of the hyacinths clustered shyly between lush green patches of moss.
A snarl of engines made me look up. Above, a pair of vintage biplanes from the aviator’s club at Quoddy Airfield drew lazy 8s on the paintbox blue sky. The long white banners ribboning behind them read WELCOME TO EASTPORT!
Meanwhile my house loomed comfortingly behind me, an 1823 white clapboard Federal with three full floors, a two-story ell, forty-eight tall green double-hung windows, and three red brick chimneys. Despite missing shutters, decrepit porch steps, and the many other repair challenges the massive old dwelling continued regularly to present, my home was as fundamentally solid now as it had been for nearly two hundred years.
And that encouraged me. But Ellie’s next comment didn’t.
“Don’t let Bella push you around,” she warned as she and Leonora departed. “Or mark my words, the next couple of weeks will be hell on wheels.”
Which they were anyway, but not for the reason either of us thought.
Back in the house, I turned away from the moose mess and instead decided to fix a fritzed light switch in the hall while I awaited Bella. That way, there was a chance that I might be electrocuted before she arrived.
Although not a very good chance, since I did shut down the circuit breaker in the cellar before I began. After that it was only a matter of removing the switch plate, pulling the old switch and removing the screws holding the wires to the contacts, attaching a new one, and shoving it back into the wall before replacing the switch plate to complete the procedure.
So while I worked I had plenty of opportunity to think about (a) how hugely reluctant I was to confront my errant housekeeper, and (b) why I had to.
The main reason being that the night before, my husband Wade Sorenson had waited until after dinner and then—astonishingly, for him—laid down the law.
“Jake, she follows me around the house with a whisk broom, waiting for me to shed skin cells. Or hair follicles. Whatever.”
Wade took a deep breath. “When I get home from work I never know what to expect. What I do know is that I practically have to strip down to my birthday suit before I come in, or she gives me the evil eye.”
The evil eye wasn’t what I gave him when he stripped down to his birthday suit. But he was serious, so I’d kept quiet.
And in the next moments I’d realized just how very serious he was. “Wade . . .”
He’d put a hand up, stopping me. “She takes the beer bottle out of my hand, rinses it, and cleans the label off to put it in the recycling bin before I’ve even finished drinking out of it.”
After a swallow of wine he continued. “She goes into my workshop and sweeps the wood shavings off the floor. I was,” he emphasized, “saving those wood shavings.”
Broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, Wade had blond brush-cut hair, blue eyes, and a square, solid jaw whose muscles flexed just the tiniest bit when he was angry.
The muscles were flexing. “I know, it was fun for you to have a housekeeper, Jake. And I enjoyed it, too. I thought it was wonderful. At first.”
Sure, who wouldn’t? After I won a full month of her services at the same church fair where I had bought the crystal lemonade pitcher, Bella had arrived and cleaned the house so thoroughly you could see what color the woodwork was, except in the places where she had scrubbed every bit of the paint off.
“I even liked it when she laundered all the curtains, washed the windows, and steam-cleaned every one of the rugs,” he went on inexorably. “Though I believe I might have preferred that she not do it all in one day,” he added.
Sorrowfully, I had to agree. Between bleach for the curtains and ammonia for the windows, not to mention chemicals that boiled in steaming jets from the nozzles of the rug-cleaning machine, we were all nearly gassed right out of the place.
“But Jake,” Wade said, “this morning she walked into the bathroom without knocking, took my razor away from me, and dipped it in some evil-looking antiseptic solution. And when she did it I hadn’t even gotten done shaving!”
“Oh, Wade,” I moaned. “I’m very sorry. That is really too much to bear.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed firmly, looking down at his hands. They were big, calloused hands, permanently stained and work—battered. “I hate to say it, but it was the last straw.” His tone brooked no.
Wade is Eastport’s harb
or pilot, which means he guides freighters in through the treacherous rocks, channels, tides, and currents with which our harbor is so plentifully furnished. When he isn’t doing that, he restores old firearms in his workshop, upstairs in the ell of my old house. And in his spare time he does things like help reshingle George and Ellie’s place.
“But that’s not all she’s been doing,” Wade went on, looking regretful but determined.
Very determined. “She’s been into Sam’s room. She put his sneaker collection through the washer. And his baseball caps.”
Horror pierced me. “Wade, you can’t wash a baseball cap! It won’t stand up to the . . .”
“Yeah.” Wade looked grim. “The sneakers are bad enough. It takes a kid years to get a nice, grotty patina on a sneaker, not to mention the holes which I’m afraid she has mended neatly, and the laces which she replaced. But the caps . . .”
Sam owned a baseball cap from every major-league game he had attended throughout his life. And a ball game was his father’s way of bonding with Sam—to my ex-husband, the phrase personal relationship might as well’ve been written in Urdu—so by now Sam had a substantial and possibly even a valuable collection.
And anyway, it was valuable to him. “The bills on those caps didn’t take well to the hot water,” Wade reported unhappily.
Oh, lord. “They can be restiffened. I can open ’em up, put in new linings,” he’d gone on. “I think I can, anyway. Lucky the colors didn’t run. But at the moment the whole bunch of them,” he finished ruefully, “need baseball-cap Viagra.”
Fortunately Sam hadn’t noticed them yet. A sophomore at the University of Maine in nearby Machias, my son was home from college but had already begun a summer project at the local boat school, so his eye for details around his room wasn’t as sharp as usual.
Also, he had a new girlfriend soaking up his spare time and concentration. I drank some wine, unsure whether I was unhappier about the caps or about the girlfriend. I knew how angry Sam was going to be about the precious headgear.
But Sam’s new romance was becoming a worrisome problem, too. Then I looked at Wade’s face, so gently insistent. He was being awfully nice about this. And suddenly I was afraid I knew why.
“That’s not all, either, is it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’m not even so sure I should tell you this part.”
His general habit is to repeat the good things and shut up about the bad. “But the other morning,” he continued, “I overheard her telling your father that if she’d known there was going to be a dirty old man around here, she might not have taken the job.”
I gasped as Wade added, “I think he dropped a cigarette ash on the cellar floor. That’s probably what got her going.”
“You’re kidding,” I managed. “I mean you’re not kidding, are you? Bella really said that?”
The only person allowed to smoke cigarettes in my house is my father, and then only in the cellar. But the point is, he was allowed to smoke down there, he is as much a part of our family as Sam or Wade or I am, and I didn’t know what the heck she was doing in the cellar, anyway.
A hot little flame of fury sprang to life in my heart. “What did he say?”
Wade chuckled. “He called her a sourpuss. He said if he’d known she was going to be around here he certainly wouldn’t be, and he asked if there wasn’t a lemon around somewhere that needed a good sucking, preferably at someone else’s house.”
Which meant my dad had managed to give as good as he got. But I still didn’t like the sound of it, suggesting as it did the very thing I tended chronically to worry about: that if he were provoked sufficiently, the old man might just take off.
And not only the old man. “Jake,” Wade said.
Here it came. I braced myself. I could straighten things out with my father, who’d dealt with much worse and was a tougher old bird than any housekeeper could possibly be. But . . .
“Jake,” Wade repeated quietly, “if Bella’s going to stay for another couple of weeks and things with her don’t change, I might just think of locking up the shop and taking a sabbatical down to the house on Liberty Street.”
My heart plummeted. “That way,” he went on, “you can still have what you want, and I can have . . .”
A moment’s peace, he didn’t have to finish. Wade had kept his own little house when we got married, on a bluff overlooking the bay. Every so often he went down there to smoke cigars, drink brandy, and play poker with his firearms-collecting buddies.
I didn’t mind. For one thing I didn’t particularly want a coffee can full of cigar stubs on the dining room table. But Wade had never fled to the Liberty Street house to escape something at this one.
Until now. “Maybe I should fire her,” I said. “After all, the house is already so clean you could build microchips in it.”
In the flickering gleam of the candles on the table, the vintage champagne brocade curtains shone spotlessly and the windows gleamed against the deepening evening. The tiled hearth glimmered before a stack of white birch logs, the mantelpiece sparkled as if newly painted, and even the gold-medallion wallpaper had been gone over with a damp cloth so its antique design stood out crisply against the background of faded cream.
“I did have a few other things for her to do. She said she liked gardening as much as indoor chores, and the yard needs a spring cleaning.”
Which was putting it mildly. “But,” I went on, “she can’t be disrupting this household, your life, or Sam’s belongings. And she certainly can’t go on insulting my father.”
The consequences of firing Bella wouldn’t only be unhappy for me. Probably everyone else in Eastport already knew about her peculiarities and wouldn’t hire her. Still . . .
“She just isn’t worth everyone being upset around here. And especially not you.”
Wade would cheerfully have done the housework and gardening, his share and more. But at the moment the port was busy and so was the gun business, and when you’re self-employed like Wade you’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.
Besides, once George Valentine’s roof was completed, George would be coming here to help Wade scrape and paint this place.
Wade rubbed his chin. A patch on his left jawline was still stubbly from where Bella had taken his razor away from him.
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think you have to go that far. I think you should talk to her. Lay out the situation, make sure she knows she’s the employee around here, not you.” A grin creased his face. “Although I realize it’s not going to be as easy as it sounds, considering that it’s Bella.”
I felt my shoulders slump heavily at the prospect. So far my conversations with her had been like juggling chain saws, dancing in quicksand, or both.
Mostly both. “Don’t worry,” I said, not sounding convincing even to myself. “After I talk to Bella, I’ll go leap a few tall buildings in a single bound. One each, I mean. A bound for each building.”
Or a build for each bounding. Whichever; I’d been slugging the wine down pretty steadily since our conversation began.
Because mostly Wade’s reaction to this kind of inconvenience was a shrug of indifference. He’d grown up here in Eastport in a knockabout family whose notion of riches was a couple of nickels rubbing together; he understood real hardship.
So to him, household annoyances were mere speed bumps on the highway of life. But once in a long while something was important enough for him to make a fuss over, and then he stood his ground.
Which was how I knew I would have to rein in my unruly housekeeper, fast. Wade hadn’t exactly delivered an ultimatum; he never did. But he’d just made it very clear that if I didn’t summon up a little spinal fortitude, consequences would follow.
Mostly the consequences would consist of me feeling that I’d disappointed him. That plus the notion that I hadn’t stood up for my dad when the chips were down.
And along with anything at all having to do with failing my son Sam, these w
ere the things that could sit me bolt upright out of a sound sleep at night, sweating and shaking.
“I could talk to her if you want me to,” Wade offered kindly after a moment.
Wade once stepped into a fight on the street in front of Eastport’s Mexican restaurant, La Sardina. The two brawlers were (a) bigger than Wade, (b) meaner than Wade, and (c) brandishing sharp knives. But not much later the three of them were sitting inside at the bar together, drinking Dos Equis and debating whether the Sox had a chance at the pennant.
He never told me exactly how he did it, and I never asked. I just knew that for a strong, silent Eastport guy, my husband had a way with words and in a crunch he was willing to use it.
But . . . “No, thanks,” I said after a minute.
I looked around at the remains of the dinner he’d come home and cooked: fresh grilled salmon with mustard mayonnaise, wild rice with scallions and baby mushrooms, and a salad of romaine lettuce and plum tomatoes with Wade’s special homemade dressing.
It was one of the few evenings off he’d had in weeks. “Bella’s my responsibility,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Your choice,” he conceded, then began clearing the plates.
“Don’t do that,” I protested, jumping up, too. “You cooked. The least I can do is the dishes.”
Leaning down, Wade touched his head to mine, pressing his forearms to my shoulders while holding a plate in each big hand.
“Tell you what,” he said into my ear, his voice starting up a delightful little rumble somewhere in my chest. “We’ll do ’em together. Later we’ll go out, look at the stars, take another bottle of wine along with us, and maybe fool around a little.”
He kissed my earlobe tenderly. “That suit you?”
Oh, boy, did it ever.
Chapter 3
Hello? Anyone home?”
Bella Diamond’s distinctive voice, like a cross between a broken harmonica and a rusty hinge, startled me from my memory of the previous evening.