Laurie Boris

People are so disgusting. I should know, because after school I clean their apartments to help pay the rent. Someone told me there used to be this thing called “cleaning up for the cleaning lady,” so you don’t feel embarrassed by the mess, but apparently nobody does this anymore, and many don’t seem capable of embarrassment. Yesterday I found a banana peel between the cushions of someone’s couch. And it wasn’t for the first time. And the people don’t have children. I mean, seriously, who does this?

Today I have the pleasure of cleaning the apartment I share with my mother in Orlando, because if I don’t, no one else will, and it gives me the skeeves to live like this. Rotting food in the fridge, the gunk that builds up behind the sink, Mama’s cigarette butts (mostly) in the ashtray.

Yeah. No matter how much I bug her about it, she still smokes, even with all her problems, and does it in the house. “What am I supposed to do,” she says, “hang outside the window like a flower basket?”

What you’re supposed to do is quit smoking. And the home? Basically I’m paying for most of that now. Cleaning apartments, other odd jobs, and trying to take as little as possible from the bank account Papa set up for me for college. The balance of which is getting smaller and smaller. At this rate I’ll be cleaning up other people’s messes for the rest of my life.

“Mama?”

She sits in her recliner like a queen, reading about celebrity gossip on her phone, her long slim legs daintily crossed at the ankle. She’s still slender, beautiful, and stylish, despite everything. Most of it comes naturally, and the rest of the evidence she leaves all over the bathroom that we share. Yeah, I clean that, too.

Finally she realizes I’m talking to her but doesn’t lift her eyes from her phone. “Yes, bunny, what?”

The house is on fire. We’re out of Diet Coke. I’m pregnant. Some days I feel like sneaking those into our conversations to see if she’s paying attention. “Mama. I don’t mind cleaning, but if you could remember to at least aim for the ashtray, that would be a big help.”

“Just admit it, bunny,” she says, with that wheedling thing in her voice, like when I was five and she could bribe me with a promise of ice cream. “You like to clean up after your poor old mama. What would you do if I was not here? You would be so terribly bored.”

She thinks she’s so funny.

“Oh, take that frown off your face or soon we’ll be shooting Botox into it.” She pouts. “So serious, my little bunny.”

“I’m serious because—oh, never mind.” I swap out her full ashtray for a new one before she can tap the lit end on the side table. The apartment came furnished. If we have to move again, I want to get our security deposit back.

—

I don’t want to call the number. The last thing I want to do is ask my father for money. It always comes at too high a price—Mama having a freakout over it, or Papa asking me for creepy favors. But that night I checked our bank account against the upcoming bills against my work schedule, and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

He agreed to meet me for a late lunch after my last class at a diner near my school. I told him one o’clock even though I’m really out at two. He’s never on time for anything, so at least I can count on getting a good jump on my homework while I wait. It means a larger tip for the server, because I’m taking up a table, but to me it’s worth it to get some time to myself.

He pulls up in his black Porsche at two-fifteen, ambles into the diner like the world owes him something, and gives me a hug that’s a little too long. I turn my head when he tries to kiss me on the mouth. He always says that’s the Russian way, which Mama confirmed, but I’ve been in America since I was four, so it gives me the ick.

He’s wearing skintight jeans and a pastel golf shirt. He slips into the booth across from me. He doesn’t look good. I mean, cosmetically, sure. Sometimes I wonder who gets more injections, him or my mother. He has an expensive haircut and highlights. His cheekbones look sharper than they used to and his skin is on too tight. But it only emphasizes a kind of brokenness in his eyes.

“You like?” he says, waving a hand beside his face with a magician’s flair.

No, I don’t like. He’s a midlife crisis cliché. Mama showed me their wedding photos, and he looked so young and handsome. What am I supposed to say? I really need the money. I don’t want to have to move again. But I’m a terrible liar, so I just shrug.

“Come on, bunny,” he says. “I have to do this, in my business, to keep up. It’s a young man’s game.”

“If you say so, Papa.” I have an inkling of the business he does, and not much of it can be legitimately reported on his tax returns. I should know; I did his taxes last year. What can I say? It was one of his aforementioned creepy favors. I’m good with numbers, and he paid me in cash. I mean, a lot of cash. The IRS and the state of Florida don’t have to know that Jackson Abbott, his latest identity, had a thirteen-year-old CPA with faked credentials.

He asks the usual questions about how I’m doing, how is life, and how is school, and I give him the usual answers: great, great, and great.

He then leans forward. “And how’s your beautiful mama?”

The words are out before the diplomat in me can stop them. “If you don’t care, why do you ask?”

He presses a hand to his chest. “That hurts me, bunny. I care a great deal about your mother. She was a pain in my ass to live with and impossible to please, but I care. And don’t forget”—he pauses, readying an old line—“we made you. So of course I care.”

Here’s where I also ready the usual answers. But how can “great, great, and great” be believable about my mother if I’m here asking him for money?

Again I shrug.

He says, “Tell her when she’s ready to work again, I can set her up with something. Easy money for just a little flirting with the customers. All she has to do is ask me.”

We both know she would never ask him.

Somehow I make it through the lunch, keeping my diplomat hat firmly attached, and at the end there is a thick envelope, and I don’t know which is creepier, the kiss hello or the cash goodbye.

I lie to myself that I’m never going to do this again, and then I head straight to the bank. Most goes into the household account. Today, I keep some for myself. Mama always says that a girl should have an escape plan. And this is mine. Or at least a start.