Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
On an unseasonably warm afternoon in late September, Del did something that she could not explain to herself and would not explain to others. In the months to come, when she considered the moment that changed everything, she would reach no conclusion as to why she did what she did. In the short term, it was stupid; but in the long term, it was nothing less than catastrophic.
The cleaning of South Elm started as it normally did. Del picked up the keys from the agency and checked the paperwork to see if there were any add-ons. Sometimes the owner wanted the fridge cleaned or the oven scoured. Other cleaners wouldn't do that sort of filthy work and tried to trade jobs, but Del didn't mind. She got paid fifteen dollars out of the agency's fifty-dollar fee for extras. On this occasion, a note indicated that she needed to change the sheets in the top-floor guest suite.
South Elm was fairly straightforward. She had cleaned it twice a week for more than a year without ever meeting the occupants, but she knew them from her intimate involvement with their stuff. The owner was a single mother with twin boys and, judging from her Japanese knife collection and elaborate home cinema, a serious amount of cash. They lived in a five-bedroom brick town house overlooking a small gated park.
As Del let herself into the house and went to the cleaning cabinet in the kitchen, she thought that the owner's man must be coming. She wasn't sure who he was, or the nature of his relationship to the homeowner or her sons, but she had picked up enough details to piece together the scenario. He visited every other month or so. Del was always asked to set up the guest bedroom for him, perhaps for propriety's sake, but at some point, he ended up in the owner's bed. His sheets were mussed but didn't have the stink of having been slept in overnight, and Del had found his plaid boxers bunched at the foot of the owner's bed.
Del took the bucket and cloths out of the cabinet and then removed the cleaning solutions and spray bottles from the drawer beneath the kitchen sink.
She started with a spritz around the living/dining area, which opened to a huge bay window that overlooked the park. Walking around in her socks on the wide-planked walnut floor, she wiped down Lucite chairs, straightened the photos on the mantel, and made sure that a pebbled glass whiskey decanter was centered on its platter. Then she started to clean the floor. Plunge, wring, mop, repeat. She liked this type of work because it allowed her mind to drift. Del thought about Night Must Fall, which she had watched on TV last night with her roommate, and wondered if they would get pizza for dinner. She moved to the kitchen to get to the good stuff, like the greasy stove hood filter. Putting on gloves, she filled the sink with Palmolive and hot water.
Later, with an hour left of the clean, Del leaned the mop against the wall on the third floor, across from the children's skylighted playroom, and felt a drop of perspiration roll from her throat down to her bra. Her chapped hands burned from being soaked in cleaning fluids. It was late afternoon, and the sun shot like a dart through the blinds at the end of the hallway and went directly into her skull. The turbo vacuum cleaner still roared in her ears though she had unplugged it at least twenty minutes earlier. And that was when Del did something she had never done before: she went through the house room by room, touching the owner's belongings as if they were hers. The silky pearl nightgowns that Del herself had tucked into the marble-handled chest of drawers, a toy aircraft carrier with guns that popped, a small gold compact that clicked open to reveal a cake of raspberry gloss. She touched her fingertip to the gloss, felt it melt to a semiliquid state, and pressed it to her lips. Then she turned on the tap, took off her clothes, and got in the tub.
Del wasn't cleaning the tub: she had done that already. She was submerging herself, a boiled lobster color to her skin. Just as she reached for the cork-topped glass container of bath salts, a woman with straight black hair appeared in the bathroom door, a crumpled paper grocery bag under one arm. The green tops of carrots hung limply from the bag.
Del expected screaming. It was the owner of the house, and she had never seen her cleaner before. But she didn't scream. She simply put down her bag, threw over a towel, and watched as Del put on her bleach-stained jeans and loose gray T-shirt. The woman was wearing a crisp white lab coat with her name stitched in blue above where her heart must be. Del had laundered that coat before. It had to be washed with like colors.
In silence they walked through the long white hallway and down the stairs, where Del slipped on her shoes and went to the door. She wanted to apologize, but the words didn't come. Shame pulsed through her body. The woman in the lab coat stood at the top of the brownstone steps and watched as Del retreated to her bus stop.
By the time Del got to the agency to drop off the keys, there was already an envelope on the desk with her name on it. It was her final paycheck with a yellow Post-it Note stuck to it.
On the Post-it Note were two words handwritten in black ink.
Get lost.
Chapter Two
There were several reasons Del did not plan to share the change in her employment status with her roommate, Tym. She needed to think through how she'd cover up her mistake.
Del and Tym had made a deal that her dirt-cheap rent was contingent on maintaining steady employment. There was no way she could afford to live anywhere else. Also, she was certain that she could find another job before he even noticed that she was around the apartment at unusual hours, such as all day long every day of the week.
Four years ago, on her twentieth birthday, Tym had brought a box of supermarket cupcakes to the apartment Del had shared with her father. Her father, Stan, had died several weeks earlier, and she had not been able to keep up with the rent. She had no experience with eviction and wasn't sure how quickly it would happen, so she had simply stayed inside the apartment, eating through her father's collection of spicy ramen, waiting for an authority figure to show up and kick her out.
By the time Tym arrived to check in on her, the utilities had shut off one by one. She was living in the dark, ignoring the huge pile of mail by the door.
Among her father's friends, she was well known for skipping out on jobs. It had become a joke. Since she moved in with her dad at age seventeen, she had worked at a restaurant, a café, a video rental place, and several temp agencies. Her longest stint had been a six-month placement at a dentist's office. She had liked that job: the dentist gave her a year's supply of toothpaste, and she always got to leave at exactly 4:30 p.m. But she got bored and irritated with the regularity of it, and one day she had simply stopped going in.
Tym had known the whole story, and so when he told her in her father's dark apartment that she could come and live in the spare room of his place, he stressed that she would need to get a job and keep it. He wasn't a charity worker, and she wasn't a strong candidate for late adoption. She would need to behave like an adult. She agreed and went on various long-term placements for a temp agency before being hired as a cleaner.
Being a cleaner didn't appeal to a deeper calling, but what did? Not the dentist's office. Not the video rental place, either. She had worked steadily since she was thirteen, when she earned a paycheck at a jewelry store where she used a bent paper clip to dip necklaces into an electrified vat of blue ooze until they shone. Work existed to provide her with food and rent money, that was it. Keeping her expectations low was the key to a minimal level of life satisfaction. And for a while, she had been satisfied. Her father had become a friend, despite everything that had come before, and she became friends with his friends, too. It was a new period in their lives, and everything that had happened previously was safe so long as they never talked about it.
Now that she had been fired, she felt sure that she could find something else pretty quickly. Cleaning for a different agency. Maybe back to temping. Perhaps something steady, like managing a coffee shop. She would go out the next morning and begin filling out applications.
After leaving the cleaning agency with her check, she took a subway home. The car slipped underground into a dark tunnel. When it arrived at her station, a billboard advertising vacations in Mauritius distracted her. Where was Mauritius? How long did it take to fly there? What language did they speak? The cost of the flight was double what she had in her savings account. When she came out of the station, the sun was shining, and she forgot all about it.
"Home early," Tym said as she walked into the kitchen. Tym had buzzed gray hair and ropy calf muscles from riding a bike six days a week to his job at the drugstore. Del had never seen him wear pants; he said that he didn't feel the cold and that shorts were therefore the only appropriate year-round wardrobe item.
He had been one of Del's father's closest friends, along with Dave and Bruce the Moose. Her father and Bruce were dead now, and Dave had moved out west, so it was just the two of them, Del and Tym, holding down the fort.
It was sauce day. Tomato dotted the kitchen wall as well as the apron he was wearing, which had a life-size image of Michelangelo's David with a neck that ended at the top of the apron.
"I guess," she said, with, she hoped, an air of nonchalance. "Everyone's going on vacation next week and not getting their houses cleaned. I've only got a couple of my usuals."
"Weird timing, September. I would have thought people would take vacation in August, before school starts."
Del sat at the table, on a retro red chair that Tym had picked up off the sidewalk. "If you're really, really rich, those kinds of rules don't apply to you. Some of those kids probably don't even go to school. They probably have governesses, or whatever."
Tym dipped a wooden spoon into a pot of bubbling sauce on the range and tasted it. "Makes sense, I suppose."
He made a huge pot of pasta once a week and packed it into individual Tupperware containers to bring to his job where he worked as a photo processor. He didn't use a recipe and the ingredients never changed, yet he was always convinced that the previous week's sauce was better than the current version.
He offered the spoon to Del. "Taste this. Too much salt?"
She fanned the spoon, but even so the boiling sauce singed her tongue. "No."
"Too much meat?"
"Never. It's great."
"There's something," he said, turning worriedly back to the stove. "Something not quite exactly one hundred percent right."
He hummed as he stirred more oil into the pot. "Too much onion, maybe?" he mumbled to himself.
The phone on the wall rang. It was never for Del, so she didn't bother.
"Yellow?" Tym said into the mouthpiece.
He listened to the caller on the other end explain something. Maybe it was a sales call.
"She sure is." Tym held out the phone.
Was it the cleaning agency? The woman who owned the house? Feeling her color rise, Del took the phone. How was she going to cover this?
"Hi?" she said tentatively.
"Adela? Is that you?"
She didn't go by that name anymore. The voice was a man's and had the forceful positivity of a sales pitch.
"Who's this?"
"I thought it was you. Funny. You sound just like yourself. It's Greg. Cousin Greg. You'd never believe how long it took to find your number. If you were trying to hide, you couldn't have done it better." He chuckled as if he had said something particularly funny.
Greg was the youngest of the Murrow brothers. She hadn't seen him since her mother's funeral seven years earlier, when she was a senior in high school. Greg's father, Chuck, was her mother's brother. Del hated Chuck. She hated Greg a little bit less.
She didn't say anything, so Greg continued, like idiots always do. "Well, it's good to talk to you. It's been such a long time! I was just saying-seeing as I'm coming into the city-that it would be good to meet up. You know, catch up. I can't wait to hear what you're doing. Big-city stuff. I've got some business on Friday; d'you think we could meet then?"
"Friday," Del repeated slowly, as if thinking. "Friday I'm busy."
Friday she needed to steal a car and drive it into the ocean. Friday she needed to bring a match and a can of gasoline to the office of the White Pages so that no one could look up anyone's number ever again. Friday she needed to hijack a radio station and play Electric Light Orchestra on repeat for fifty hours until the feds broke in and shot her to death.
"That's alright," he offered genially. "I can do Saturday, too."
"Hm. Might be going out of town."
Tym was staring her down.
"Who is it?" he mouthed. He gestured wildly with the spoon, which flung tomato flecks on the wall.
"My mom was really excited to get back in touch. She said to tell you Auntie Jeanne says hi. We never get to hear anything about you. Adela! It's so funny to hear your voice again. Blast from the past."
Greg's mom, Jeanne, was alright. She always kept butterscotch candy in her purse. Jeanne had come over to visit Del's mother, Louise, even after things got bad and everyone else had left them to rot. Hearing Jeanne's name, Del felt a strange ache from somewhere below her rib. Tym was going into meltdown.
"Fine. I can do Friday. I'll move the thing I was supposed to do."
