Patricia
My name was Mindy. Mindy Black. I had to remember that.
Sometimes I meander in my thoughts. Or speech. It doesn’t matter, though, because when I have to or when I like what I’m doing, I can concentrate. Like when I’m reading.
Or when I’m hunting.
Getting to Brenda Phillips’ house required some maneuvering. Uber was out of the question. I had a credit card in Mindy Black’s name, but I didn’t want to push the chances of it being denied. And, frankly, whoever Mindy Black was, she didn’t deserve her credit being destroyed by my assuming her identity.
Well, whether she did deserve it or not, she hadn’t done anything to me, so even though I needed the fake identity, I tried not to ruin her credit more than it was already ruined. Which meant that I needed to get to the Phillips home using cash.
I didn’t know the city well enough to rely on public transportation, and I had a suitcase. Even if I could get a bus, it would be a pain. I wound up calling a good old-fashioned yellow cab. They still took cash.
The driver was friendly enough, even more friendly when I said I was going to work as a maid in a house on Hickory Creek Drive.
“Rich people can be a bitch.” He had an accent that sounded Spanish.
“I know. But it’s a job.”
“They have all that money, and they tip like shit. If they tip at all.” His name was Juan, and he’d been working as a taxi driver for ten years. “The more money, the cheaper they are.”
I agreed, even though I hadn’t had all that much interaction with rich people. I didn’t have anything against them, not unless they helped kill my daughter, but that’s a different story. There were a few rich people in my town in Vermont, but most of them pretended not to be. They dressed in jeans and flannel shirts. They bought my vegetables and eggs, and we talked about the news in the town and changing weather.
Would I have liked to have that kind of money? Sure, who wouldn’t? But it was never a main motivator.
Ashley met a lot of rich people in college, others when she was working at the station. Some of them were the pretend-not-to-be-rich kind, like the ones back home. Some weren’t—but because she was at the top of her class and then working at a television station, they treated her okay.
I suspected the Phillipses weren’t the pretend-not-to-be-rich types.
The home was impressive. White stone facade. Fountain in the circular drive. Little marble statues of angels as decorations. Not as big as some of the McMansions in the Austin area, but big enough to be impressive—just under 6,000 square feet, five bedrooms, five baths, according to Zillow.
Juan gave an appreciative whistle as he pulled up. Then he got my suitcase from the trunk, wished me luck, and handed me a card with his phone number. “If you need a ride.” He cast a cynical glance at the house facade. “Because you might.”
I thanked him and gave him a twenty-five percent tip in cash.
Who needs a house this big? No one. It was to show off. I’d lived the last thirty years happily in a 1,900-square-foot farmhouse. It had been cozy, easy to take care of. Unlike this one.
Expensive to heat or cool, but I suspected the family didn’t worry about energy use. A bitch to clean, too. No wonder they wanted a housekeeper. Were there other maids or would I be expected to clean it all? I had watched some of those English shows with the aristocracy upstairs and the servants downstairs and wondered if I would be eating meals with a butler, a cook, a maid, and a gardener.
I set my suitcase on the porch and rang the doorbell. A voice through the security camera told me to wait. I waited ten minutes and then rang again. I was told to wait again.
Another ten minutes later, I was debating ringing a third time when the door swung open to reveal a man who I assumed was Brenda’s husband. He was tall, with a protruding stomach and a head of thinning light brown hair. Pleasant face, but not what I would consider handsome.
He extended a hand. “Roland Phillips. Sorry. I was on a call with a client. You weren’t waiting too long, were you?”
Twenty minutes, and under other circumstances, I’d have been pissed, but I had a role to play. “No, Mr. Phillips. It wasn’t that long.” I’m such a good liar. “I thought Mrs. Phillips would be here.”
“My wife’s very busy.” Roland Phillips had a vaguely apologetic tone. “My office is in the house, so it’s easier for me. Let me show you around.”
He made no move to pick up my suitcase, so I did. I carried it into the marble rotunda that passed as the front hall, set it on the sparkling white floor, and looked up. A chandelier dangled fifteen feet overhead, crystals transforming sunlight into small rainbows.
I watched the colors dance. It was almost hypnotic.
“Pretty.” It was, but how did they change the light bulbs?
“Yes.” His tone was noncommittal, even bored. He’d seen it so often that he no longer noticed the rainbows. “The living room is to the left.”
I left my suitcase in the hall while he walked me through the living room, into the library, with a wave at a room that he said was his office and another towards a room that he said was his wife’s home office. The living room was very white. Two white leather couches. White silk chairs. Pristine. Cold as shit. Wouldn’t know they had kids.
“The children play in here?”
“No, this is for company. We have a family room in the basement.”
We descended. A flat screen television took up an entire wall, with a leather couch and leather chairs forming a viewing area. On the far side of the room, a mini bar next to a ping-pong table offered snacks and drinks.
“How often will I be expected to clean the entire house?” I asked after we returned to the main floor and entered the kitchen. Tiles of blue and white for counters. A granite island. Cherry cabinets. Where the rest of the house had had the odor of antiseptics, the kitchen was filled with the sweet scent of some kind of plug-in essential oil. Peppermint, maybe.
No other maids. Just me. Good thing, too. Servants weren’t invisible to each other. Also good thing I was used to hard physical work. After all, I had run a farm by myself, and I had cleaned other people’s homes for extra money in college although when Ashley was growing up, my house didn’t look like this. I cleaned when I felt like it, and it looked damn good after I was done. I just didn’t feel like it all that often.
I had an image of my farm: my house nestled in trees, no other houses visible. Just the fields where the cows and the horse grazed, the woods, the mountains, and the clean smell of country air.
My neighbors Mike and Sue were taking care of my cows, my horse, and my chickens, in exchange for eggs, milk, a little cash, and the use of my fields once summer came. They were good people, really sorry to hear about Ashley, and understanding when I explained that I needed to spend some time away.
I didn’t explain where I was going or what I was doing. They didn’t ask either.
Good people.
I pulled myself back into the conversation with Roland.
“Clean as often as needed to keep the mess down.” Roland opened the well-stocked pantry. “For a thorough cleaning, at least once a week. As for cooking—you’ll mostly be feeding the children. I cook for my wife and myself—when we don’t have dinner engagements—and the kids don’t like what I make. They like simple things. Hamburgers. Fried chicken. Mac and cheese. You know. American food. If you can get the occasional vegetable in them, it’s a plus—but I understand if you can’t. And they eat at six so they can do their homework. We eat at eight when my wife gets home from work.”
But I’d be expected to clean up for them as well, no doubt.
“I usually work until around seven, when I start cooking. I’d prefer you out of the kitchen by then. And leave my office alone. I don’t want my papers messed up by accident.”
“Days off?” Not that I’d be staying long enough to care, but it’s what someone would ask.
“You’ll have Saturday afternoons off, more if we go away for the weekend. Sundays every week. That’s a family day. We go to church, brunch, and have a family activity.” He looked at me as if inviting me to accompany them to church, but there was only so far I was willing to go.
My bedroom was in the attic, and I carried the suitcase up the stairs. The room was small and cheaply furnished, compared to the rest of the house. But it was air-conditioned, and there was an attached bath. I hung up my jacket and put on an apron. Now I looked the part.
He showed me the bedrooms for the family on the way back down, and they were as luxurious and expensively furnished as the downstairs. The girl’s room was pink, with enlarged framed photos of ballerinas and horses, and the boy’s blue with posters of action movies.
The sight of the children’s rooms made me a little uncomfortable. Especially the stuffed animals on the pillow in the pink bedroom. Ashley had liked stuffed animals. She’d had a big collection, taking two of her favorites with her to Austin. I kept the others in a sealed crate, for Ashley’s children to play with when they came to visit.
The thought of those toys and the grandchildren that would never be made me want to weep.
The tour of the house ended back in the front hall as the kids arrived home from school. Two kids: a boy, Kevin, eight, and a girl, Christina, eleven. Mr. Phillips introduced me, told the children to behave, and disappeared into his office.
Kevin, slight with short brown hair, had a cheerful smile. “I won a race today. I’m the fastest in my class.”
I gave him a high five.
“Big deal. The others probably didn’t even try.” Christina was nearly bursting out of her blue dress. Didn’t her mother notice how poorly that dress fit? “How long are you going to stay?”
“I just started. Hard to say.”
“No one stays long here. My parents are a pain.”
I shared her opinion that her parents were a pain. Her mother was more than a pain. “Do you want me to stay?”
“Sure.” Kevin’s voice radiated enthusiasm.
“I don’t care. You’ll like Kevin and not me. Like all the others.”
Kevin didn’t dispute the assessment. Was he cheerful because he was eight or because he knew he was the favorite? Or because he was a little manipulator—like his mother?Not a fair thought. Children aren’t responsible for who their parents are.
But they often do resemble their parents. Not always, but often. That doesn’t mean they should be blamed for their parents, but it can predict who they might be as adults.
I trailed the children to the kitchen, where I found cookies and fruit for an after-school snack. Kevin grabbed an apple and two cookies before scooting off. Christina filled a plate with chocolate chip cookies and poured a glass of milk.
“Maybe trade a couple cookies for an apple?” I asked.
She gave a look that was somewhere between defiance and despair. “You think I’m fat?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Everyone at school says it.”
“Do you think I’m fat?” I’m overweight, but much of it is muscle from housework and farm work. Okay, some of it. But unlike her, I wore clothes that didn’t emphasize my weight: comfortable pants, a loose button-down shirt, and my apron.
“You’re heavier than my mother,” she tilted her head to take a closer look, “but not really fat.”
It was almost a compliment. I was getting somewhere.
“I’m a little heavy, but I’m healthy. Which is why you should trade a couple of cookies for an apple.”
She hesitated for a moment before putting three cookies back and selecting an apple.
Then she carried her plate and her milk from the kitchen. It was a small step towards acceptance, and both children accepting me was necessary for what I had to do.