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It’s the beautiful daughter of a maid who worked at my family home when I was a teenager...
1
THIRTEEN YEARS AGO
EMMA
It requires a bus to get anywhere remotelynearthe mansion, but the place is so far from the town of Crystal River – and seemingly from the rest of human civilization - that Mom and I still have to walk three damn miles from the bus stop to even reach the front gates of the sprawling complex. And this certainly isn’t helped by the fact that I am hauling a heavy bag with all my earthly possessions behind me.
With all the extra baggage, the walk hurts – it reallyfreakinghurts – but I have silently promised myself that I am not going to open my big dumb mouth and complain. Nope.Nada. I spotted the obvious stress on Mom’s face as we sat on the bus for the ride up here, and that expression is motivation enough not to moan about all this travel. Mom is clearly anxious beyond belief, and I can’t blame her.
This new job means everything to her.
It’s our last chance as a mother and daughter to make some money and actuallylive.
And I ain’t about to ruin things by complaining about how heavy my bag is as I pull it along the road or by moaning about how far this mansion is from the bus stop.
This is the first time I’ve stepped foot in this part of the country. Even though I am just fifteen - traveling and living in countless states has become the norm for me, so Crystal River is simply another stop in a whole line of temporary stops in my short life. I glimpsed the actual town only for the briefest of glimpses as we trundled into the station this morning on the train and waited for the bus. And, boy, it is definitely a small town out in the middle of nowhere. Crystal River is even smaller than I imagined for a town which boasts of a full-blown university.
“Is this it?” I ask Mom as we finally reach some very high walls and an even higher gate. My breath is knocked out of me as I stop and blink up at the impressive security that rises out of the ground at the end of this road.
Mom turns to me, her brown hair sticking to her forehead with sweat and the lines on her face even deeper because of the stress.
“This is it,” she replies, just as breathless as me. “The Penmayne family mansion. Our new home, and our new job.”
“It’s pretty damn impressive,” I remark with an admiring whistle.
“Don’t curse.”
“I didn’t,” I retort. “I just saiddamn.”
Mom rolls her eyes.
“Emma, this is a new start for me,” she says. “It’s a new start forus. This is an amazing opportunity that I can’t afford to lose. You know more than anyone, Emma, that maids usually never get the chance at a stable, long-term, well-paid job like this, so we have to be polite and thankful and specificallynotuse any curse words. You got that? And especially around our new employer; the cleaning agency told me she’s a fascist when it comes to the rules.”
“I know,” I reply, playing with the dirt at the edge of the road with the tip of my shoe and avoiding Mom’s hard gaze. “I just don’t want to clean some big old mansion. I hate it. I hate cleaning.”
I can hear Mom take a long sigh. “You are the daughter of a live-in maid,” she says. “This is our lot in life, you have to accept that sooner or later. Cleaning is what we must do to survive, and a big old mansion with just one family in it is a million times better than some soulless factory or hospital restrooms. Trust me on that. I’ve done them all, and this is where I’d rather be.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“I really don’t want to have this conversation again, Emma,” Mom says.
“Why do we have to be cleaners, though?” I ask softly. “Why can’t we be like them?”
Mom scoffs at the idea.
“This family? The likes of the high and mighty Penmaynes are unreachable, and it has always been like that. There is no use in thinking you can rise to be on their level. We can’t all be billionaires with big fancy mansions, some of us have to clean those mansions.”
I continue playing with the dirt.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “You’re right.”
Mom has blown through so many temporary jobs, as far back as I can remember, and we’ve permanently been on the breadline because of it. It’s through no fault of her own – the cleaning profession has such a high turnover rate, and employers are infamous for just firing people on their whim. No legal protection for a near-homeless single mother with barely a dime. There have been so many days when we could barely scrape together enough to eat. Mom and I have traveled around so much that I can’t even remember the place where I was born, and I have never been in a town long enough I can call home. But even I, as a rebellious teenage brat, know that this big old mansion is our last avenue to make a decent living, and that’s why I’m not fighting back Mom’s points as I would’ve once done.
I can see the hopelessness in her eyes.
She doesn’t have much left in the tank.
