Cleaning up, p.1
Cleaning Up, page 1
Cleaning Up
Leanne Lieberman
Groundwood Books
House of Anansi Press
Toronto / Berkeley
Copyright © 2023 by Leanne Lieberman
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
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Published in 2023 by Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
groundwoodbooks.com
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We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Cleaning up / Leanne Lieberman.
Names: Lieberman, Leanne, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220268843 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220268851 |
ISBN 9781773068060 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773068077 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8623.I36 C54 2023 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Jacket illustration by Charlotte Day
Design by Michael Solomon
Ebook developed by Nicole Lambe
Chapter opening illustrations: pikisuperstar on Freepik
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Groundwood Books is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. An ebook version of this book that meets stringent accessibility standards is available to students and readers with print disabilities.
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Groundwood Books is committed to protecting our natural environment. This book is made of material from well-managed FSC®-certified forests, recycled materials and other controlled sources.
For Makaio and Dassa
Groundwood Books is grateful for the opportunity to share stories and make books on the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. In partnership with Indigenous writers, illustrators, editors and translators, we commit to publishing stories that reflect the experiences of Indigenous Peoples. For more about our work and values, visit us at groundwoodbooks.com.
01
The house was bigger and shabbier than Jess had expected.
She stood on the gravel drive looking up at the antique-looking gray stone house with its peaked roof and white gingerbread trim. A narrow porch with fancy lawn furniture ran across the front of the house, but the lawn needed mowing and the garden beds were a mess of weeds.
If this was her garden, she would plant white hydrangeas with blue irises for contrast.
Jess slowly walked her bike toward the house, propped it against the porch and took off her helmet. She tried to smooth her hair more neatly into her braids. Her mom’s rose-colored lipstick was in her knapsack, but maybe it would be too much for a job interview for cleaning.
Jess smoothed on some lip gloss instead. Then she clicked the empty Shania Twain CD case in her knapsack open and closed a few times, feeling the plastic snap in and out of its grooves.
She’d never set up her own job interview before or introduced herself to strangers.
Jess had seen Liz Gupta’s notice for a cleaner on the Valu-mart corkboard in Westport last week. She had spoken with Liz on the phone and sent on her references, and now Liz wanted to meet her.
Jess took a deep breath, clicked the CD case open and shut one more time and then walked across the front porch and knocked on the door.
A petite blonde woman answered a moment later.
“You must be Jess.” She smiled, showing off perfect white teeth. “Come in.”
Liz Gupta had wide-set, pretty green eyes and a pointed chin. Her arms, exposed by a tailored tank top, were fit, as if she played tennis. Jess noticed her diamond stud earrings, her expensive-looking ring and an elegant navy jacket draped over a chair in the front hall that matched her suit skirt.
Liz led Jess into a dining room with a wooden table so shiny it looked like glass. Chairs were neatly pushed in around it.
“So, it’s a heritage house with lots of corners that trap dirt, and it’s pretty big,” Liz said.
Jess resisted running a finger along the edge of a china cupboard.
“Old,” she said.
“Yes, from the 1850s,” Liz said. “We bought the house two years ago and remodeled the bathrooms and kitchen, but these are the original oak floors.”
Jess looked down and nodded, as if she was interested in the wide slabs of wood.
They were in a sunny kitchen now, done up with white cupboards, marble counters and a copper range hood. Liz pointed out a door to a powder room, led Jess past a breakfast nook and then down a hallway that opened on to a master bedroom and bath that Liz explained were an addition that included a basement, and then into a large living room.
The house was dusty but uncluttered. Instead of the magazines and kids’ toys at the Chin and Mueller houses where Jess also cleaned, there were antique lamps and carefully curated knickknacks — the kind of vases and candlesticks that you couldn’t buy at Bed Bath & Beyond. Jess had been cleaning long enough to know the difference, even though her own apartment had none of those items, not even little signs that said things like “A Home Is Not a Home without Love.” Jess and her dad moved too often for extra things like decorations.
In the living room Liz perched on one of the matching chairs in front of the fireplace. She gestured for Jess to sit on a deep couch facing her. At the back of the room by glass doors that led to a patio sat one of those big pianos with the top propped up.
“We’ve been away for a few months and haven’t had a chance to have the house cleaned since we came back.” Liz tapped her manicured nails on a dusty side table. “I was hoping we’d find someone a little … well, a little older, but I called your references and Evelyn Chin couldn’t say more nice things about you: responsible, efficient, meticulous.”
Jess smiled thinly. “Thank you.”
“So we’re looking for someone to get the house in order, and then come once a week. Do you think you could do that?”
Jess nodded. “I charge twenty dollars an hour.”
“Oh, that’s fine.” Liz Gupta seemed a little unsure what to say next. Her thin hands flopped in her lap a moment.
“Where do you keep the cleaning supplies?” Jess asked. “I’m coming on my bicycle, so …”
“Oh, of course.” Liz sprang up. “Let me show you the utility room.” She bounded through the living room back to the kitchen and opened a closet in the laundry full of mops and brooms. “Both Sid and I work in the city, so we won’t be here when you come.” Liz told Jess that Sid was a lawyer and that she worked as an accountant for a marketing firm, as if it was necessary for Jess to know the Gupta family if she was going to wash their sheets and clean their floors.
“There’s a key under the back mat,” Liz said. “You can let yourself in. Oh, and just text me your hours and I’ll pay what we owe.”
“An e-transfer would be fine,” Jess said.
“Great.” Liz had her arms full of cleaning rags. “These should be enough, right?” She held them like she’d never seen them before.
“Yes. I can come tomorrow.”
Liz nodded. “There’s also bedrooms upstairs. … If you want to do one floor one day, and then the other another day, that’s fine. I didn’t show you upstairs yet.”
Jess shrugged. “I’ll find my way around.”
Liz nodded. “You might run into Sid’s cousin Matt while you’re here. He’s living in the barn out back.”
“Okay,” Jess said. Then she said goodbye and was out the door and back on her bicycle.
She pedaled away quickly. Liz Gupta had that beautiful house and the kind of good looks that made people’s lives easier. She was also friendly, but something sad clung to her. Jess wasn’t sure what it was.
Still, the Gupta house was big and dusty, which was good for Jess. Their yard needed work too. Already Jess was calculating how many hours she could bill the Guptas and how much that would bring in over the summer.
Jess had one more year of high school and then she was going to college to study landscape design. Then she was going to get a job and then maybe if things went really well, she’d start her own company, Dreamscapes. She’d have a white truck with a yellow daffodil on the door. Then maybe she’d be able to have her own house — just a small one — but with a wild garden. Jess saw herself with a large dog — preferably a husky she’d call Mack — in the yard picking rhubarb or tomatoes.
But before all that she needed to save money for college, and the first baby step was this job cleaning the Guptas’ house.
Jess had cleaned houses in Kingston for a year now. She started out helping her neighbor Norene, but then Norene quit to take a job with a caterer. At first her clients, Mrs. Chin and Mrs. Mueller, had been a little surprised to see Jess by herself, but Jess asked her former teacher Mrs. M to be a reference. Also, Jess always did such an excellent job — better than Norene who skipped cobwebs in corners — that her clients quickly forgot s
It also probably helped that Jess had one of those round faces that made her look twenty or even twenty-five. Sometimes Mrs. Chin forgot that Jess was in high school and asked her to come earlier in the day, and Jess had to politely remind her that she wasn’t available until after 3 p.m.
Jess pedaled fast back to the Lake Grove trailer park to feel the breeze on her arms. She passed fields of young corn and then the deep emerald of the forest. A glimpse of lake flashed at the side of the road. She slowed down at the gravel entry to the trailer park and made her way past the other trailers.
Her father was sitting in front of their trailer with a beer. She ignored his offer of hotdogs for dinner — gross — and pulled on her swimsuit in her tent.
Soon she was floating in the cool water away from the kids playing on the beach. She smelled lake and dirt and barbecue smoke. Jess closed her eyes against the bright cloudless sky and let herself drift until the lake’s chill started to penetrate her bones.
Back on the beach she wrapped herself in her towel and gazed at the line of fir trees along the far shore as she squeezed out her long hair. She walked past the families at the beach by the picnic tables and playground and past the communal toilets and shower house with their buzzing electric lights and mildew smell.
The nicest spots in the park were by the water with lake views from the front porches. Jess was staying at her dad’s friend Mike’s decrepit trailer with the moldy carpet and torn linoleum. The rusted trailer, which also leaked, was tucked under the fir trees at the back of the park where the mosquitoes hummed in thick clouds and old metal car pieces lay strewn among tree stumps and moss-covered rocks.
When Jess was younger she loved coming out to stay at Lake Grove for a week at the end of summer. She and her dad would sleep on the brown and orange striped mattress tucked in the cozy back of the trailer. In the morning her father would cook eggs and take her fishing or berry picking. They borrowed a wildflower guide from the rec hall and found purple vetch and bladder campion, yellow primrose and white bellflowers. Once they even found a jack-in-the-pulpit.
At night there’d be a campfire with marshmallows, and someone would play old songs from the seventies on a guitar — James Taylor and The Band and all the other old songs her dad loved.
This summer Jess hated the trailer. She was supposed to be working for Leonard’s Landscaping in Kingston and saving money for school, not wasting her time at a trailer park.
When Jess’s dad announced they were moving to Lake Grove shortly after she finished the school year, Jess felt her temples start to pulse. She and her dad were in their narrow kitchen on a hot evening. The windows were open but there was little cross breeze. Their apartment in Limestone Gardens, a development of four-story walk-ups, was neither garden-like nor made out of limestone.
Jess and her dad had lived in several of these apartments, all with peeling linoleum, slanted floors and moldy-smelling bathrooms. The walls were thin, and Jess had grown up listening to her neighbors’ music and yelling and smelling their cabbage and garlic smells. If one apartment had mice, all the units did.
“The trailer park? How are we going to get to work?” Jess asked. She put down the knife she was using to cut celery into sticks. “It’s like forty-five minutes to get to Kingston from there.” Jess knew her dad didn’t have the gas money for that.
Jess’s dad focused on stirring electric-orange cheese powder into a pot of macaroni.
“Actually,” he said, “the truck’s not working so well. It’s going to be out of commission for a bit while I work on it.”
“So how are we getting to work?”
Her dad looked up at her and grinned. “I quit my job so we could have a vacation together.”
Jess pressed her lips tightly together to squelch the scream building in her throat. Her dad had probably been fired from his roofing job. Again.
“What about my job? I don’t have time for a vacation right now.”
“I thought you could use some time off this summer.”
Jess slapped her hand down on the counter. “I need to work so I can start saving money for school.”
Her dad looked guilty then. “I’ll try and save some too when I start a new job.”
Yeah, right. Jess clamped down on her lips to stop herself from saying something she might regret. Her dad didn’t even have a job for the fall. He’d probably run out of roofing companies that would take him on and have to go back to returning carts at the grocery story.
Jess’s dad had also worked for a maintenance company, as a taxi driver and as a crossing guard. It didn’t matter what he did because eventually he would be fired for showing up drunk, or not showing up at all.
“Hey.” Her dad brightened. “Maybe you can move out west with me? Then you won’t need the tuition money.”
Jess’s dad had this ridiculous idea that when Jess graduated from high school they would drive to Alberta and find work there. He could never say what she would do with only a high-school education, and Jess couldn’t imagine her dad’s truck making it out of Ontario.
Jess glared at him. “I need to stay in Kingston to work, to save for school.”
Jess’s dad lifted his hands. “I’m sorry. I already gave up the apartment lease. But we can stay at the trailer park for free so that will help save money, right?”
Jess cracked her fingers behind her back. Her dad hadn’t ever saved any money. If he had any spare cash, he bought beer or vodka. Her face hardened into a tight scowl.
“Aw, let me make it up to you, Jessie-girl.” Her dad punched her gently on the shoulder. “I promise, as soon as I start working again, I’ll buy you something special. What’ll it be?”
Jess exhaled. “Boots,” she said automatically. Her boots from last year were falling apart. Jess could find secondhand clothes easily, but shoes were always a problem, especially a women’s ten and a half. Last year she trekked around in a pair of snow boots, but the treads had worn thin and now the uppers were coming unstitched. In her spare time Jess looked at boots online — sleek leather knee-high boots in colors like fawn and heather with zippers up the sides or back. A winterized pair cost more than two hundred dollars, and Jess couldn’t imagine spending that much money when she still worried about buying shampoo.
“Boots it is,” her father sang.
Jess clenched her fists tighter. He was never going to come through. She’d have to find other work near the trailer park, if she could.
She chucked the knife into the sink and stormed out of the kitchen.
“Hey,” her dad called, “what about our mac and cheese?”
“Not hungry anymore,” Jess said as she slammed her bedroom door. She didn’t have any friends she could stay with this summer, and Mrs. M was too sick for Jess to visit, let alone stay with.
Jess glanced at the picture of her and Mrs. M that she kept in a cheap plastic frame on the milk crates stacked by her bed. The photo was from her grade-eight graduation a few years ago. Mrs. M had surprised Jess by bringing her a bouquet of orange roses and white lilies and peonies. Jess could tell the flowers were from a real florist and that Mrs. M had thought to choose flowers in Jess’s favorite color, orange.
Mrs. McConnell had taught Jess in grades two and three, and even though she retired ages ago, she still did things like remember to send Jess a birthday present even after she started chemo last fall. Jess had been startled when Mrs. McConnell’s husband Ted called last spring to tell her that Mrs. M had breast cancer. Jess didn’t know how to pray but she did know how to hope, and was it all that different? Mr. M said Mrs. M had an excellent rate of full recovery and the cancer had been caught early.
“Besides,” Mr. M had said. “Can you imagine anything coming between Susan and her intentions?”
Jess liked the way she looked in this photo. Her brown eyes were sparkling and she was smiling widely even if it showed off the gap between her front teeth. Jess had brushed out her long brown hair for the occasion instead of wearing it in her usual braids, which made her face look less round, her nose less arched. Her cheeks were flushed from excitement and she was wearing her mother’s Rambling Rose lipstick that she saved for only the most important occasions. It made her whole face seem brighter and not just a smudge of brownish skin under brownish hair.
