by A N Sandra
“How about salad for dinner?” Danica said behind him.
“Really?” Bud was surprised she would ask such a foolish question. What kind of man would eat salad for dinner? Did she think he was that kind of man?
“I meant, steak salad,” Danica clarified. “It’s just us, you and I and Twilight.”
“If you put steak on it… I guess.” Salad was not a meal, even with steak on it. Bud would have preferred a salad before a steak with a large baked potato covered with butter, and bacon bits next to it. But Danica was afraid of giving him too much fat and carbs. He was getting old, for sure. “You’re going to give me dressing, right?”
“You’re suspicious.” Danica smiled. She tilted her head, appearing to consider whether or not Bud deserved to have his salad dressed. “Probably you can have dressing. I’ll deprive you of something another time.”
“Nothing low calorie,” Bud insisted. Runny salad dressing disgusted him. Salad dressing should be thick and creamy, in Bud’s opinion.
“I’ll add calories,” Danica told him. “Extra ones. It’ll be extra calorie ranch dressing.”
“That’s the best kind.” Bud told her, trying to turn his attention back to his book. It was a classic. It had absorbed him before, but it was hard to take it seriously when his own life was wrapped up in something just as improbable.
CHAPTER 3
June 6th, Dallas, TX
Seriously? It’s the last day of school and I have a stain on my shirt?”
“I need to turn in my Latin book today and I can’t find it anywhere!”
“Your stupid dog is jumping all over me! Put him in the crate!”
“I’m leaving you all here if you aren’t ready in two minutes!”
“Ow! Stop!”
“Give it back!”
Maria held her breath, waiting for Mrs. Harris to take the children to school and give her some peace. Ray had six clean uniform shirts; it wasn’t Maria’s fault that he’d spilled egg on one and wouldn’t just change his shirt. The Latin book was under Peter’s desk, right where he’d left it. The dog was a miserable, untrained beast who would bark and whimper from the crate anyway. If Tawna did drive away and leave all the kids there, Maria might be tempted to leave herself. That thought made Maria smile a very small smile. There would be anarchy in the Dallas penthouse if she left. The catastrophic damage would be impossible to calculate.
Being the Harris family housekeeper was a job made in heaven, or in hell depending on the day. Maria Gonzales often joked to her friends that the days the Harris family were gone were heaven and the days they were home were hell.
That had not always been true. Maria had worked for the Harris family for fifteen years, and the first twelve had been very lovely for Maria. Mrs. Harris was a workaholic scientist, bent on eradicating disease from the world. She never interfered with Maria’s work at all. Maria ran the Harris household beautifully and the Harris’s were quite generous with her.
At that time the whole Harris family had lived in a large ranch compound outside of Dallas, Texas. Maria had the whole house under her care and the Harris’s were quite thankful for her hard work. Mr. Harris would show his appreciation for Maria by letting her husband and three grown sons use his four Cowboys season tickets when he was out of town. Mrs. Harris would give Maria her tickets to the symphony when she was busy, which was all the time, and it turned out that Maria and her sister enjoyed the symphony very much. There were also the gallery openings that Mrs. Harris could never attend. Maria and her sister loved to admire unknown artists and drink wine while wearing their best clothes. For twelve years Maria and her family enjoyed great bounty that the Harris family never missed. It was a lovely arrangement.
Eventually the enormous medical project Mrs. Harris was working on caused her to ignore her husband and children so much that Mr. Harris had decided to take the children away from her to live in a large penthouse apartment in Dallas. The penthouse was close to the children’s exclusive school and a two-hour drive from the woman who wasn’t paying attention to her family.
Instead of a lovely commute to the country, Maria fought public transportation into Dallas five days a week. Urban Relocation had made the commute even more challenging. Maria had never known Mrs. Harris well enough to miss her, but she missed the large house and beautiful garden, and afternoons by the pool playing with the children.
The previous Mrs. Harris still made sure to keep up with Maria, however. The month before, she had made sure that Maria’s whole extended family had received the most up-to-date flu shots, given by her quirky assistant Natalie at her lab. Maria had been extremely touched by Mrs. Harris’s thoughtfulness.
It was not a whole year before Mr. Harris remarried. Then came the hell. The new Mrs. Harris was a demanding social climber who did not appreciate people who worked hard to make her life pleasant. She also did not believe in passing on things to the help. On one occasion the new Mrs. Harris threw away fifty pounds of organic grass-fed beef that her new personal trainer told her was not on her diet, and so she felt that no one else should eat it either. When Maria thought how much her husband and sons would have enjoyed barbecuing that meat, it was hard to be pleasant to Tawna Harris.
On another occasion, Mrs. Harris had contracted food poisoning from eating food not prepared by Maria and had not been able to take Helena and Lourdes to see Beyoncé. On that occasion Maria had retrieved the Beyoncé tickets from the master bathroom trash, called her sister, and had taken her nieces to watch Beyoncé at the AT&T stadium anyway. The thought of Mrs. Harris retching during their good time did not impede Maria’s enjoyment of Beyoncé at all.
The days when only Helena and Peter were home were still pleasant. Maria had cared for them since they were babies and she considered them to be extended family. Helena in particular was dear to Maria, because Maria’s own children were all boys. Helena had spent countless hours of her childhood standing on a step stool next to Maria while she cooked or walking beside her in the garden choosing produce. Lourdes and Raymond, the children of the new Mrs. Harris, were spoiled intruders and Maria was suspicious of them at the best of times.
“Get! Out! Here!” Tawna Harris yelled from the open front door. The young people stomped out the door to go to school.
Maria went through the penthouse to begin restoring it as much as she could before fixing lunch. Today was only a half day of school since it was the last day, and she only had four hours before the family came back to eat lunch and get ready to go on vacation. The dog sitter came to pick up the dog and Maria briefly thought about kissing her on the lips before handing her the dog’s leash.
Once the laundry was folded and set out for everyone to finish packing, Maria went back in the kitchen to fix lunch. She carefully arranged sandwiches on platters and set the table with glassy pastel dishes and linen napkins.
Ding! Maria could hear the elevator announcing their arrival for lunch. All of them streamed in from the elevator, heading straight for the dining room.
“Chicken salad again!” Peter complained as he leaned over the table and took apart a sandwich before he even sat down. His tan face scrunched into a grimace and he narrowed his blue eyes. “Do we have any lunch meat, Maria? I can make my own sandwich.”
Maria ignored him. It was a hell day, pure and simple. Peter had never complained about the food in front of him before Tawna and her children had set that example. Later the family would be gone, and she would clean and put the house back to rights in peace. Right now she needed them to finish their lunch and just. get. on. the. plane.
“God, I’m hungry,” Lourdes fell upon the sandwiches and sat at her seat spooning honey mango fruit salad onto the same plate she had stacked three sandwiches on.
Maria knew she would not eat all the sandwiches she took. Lourdes was like a seal; she would take two bites from the center of each sandwich the way a seal eats the middle of a fish, and the rest would go in the trash. Using mass transit on her way home, Maria would pass
at least twenty hungry people who would have done unspeakable things for the food that Lourdes threw away after every meal.
“Can you find my green swimming suit?” Helena asked Maria with a polite smile as she took a sandwich and a neat spoonful of fruit salad and put it on her plate with grace. Just the way Maria had taught her when she was small.
“Lourdes left it on her bathroom floor,” Maria said, squinting slightly at Lourdes. “I washed it for you and it’s ready to be packed.”
“Thank you, Maria,” Helena sighed. Lourdes rolled her large, lovely green eyes, annoyed at being told on. Maria ignored her.
All the children ate quietly after that. The food was good enough to ensure that even children as picky as they were would eat. Every meal that Maria served them had cost at least eighty dollars’ worth of groceries at Whole Foods, and Maria was a master cook. All her friends felt that she should be on the Food Network with her own show. Maria privately thought that if her life was a reality show, it would be called Feeding the Cannibals.
Peter stopped complaining and started eating his chicken salad sandwich with wasabi mayonnaise with gusto. Maria had known he would. Expressing discontent was just something that had happened at every meal with the Harris family since Tawna and her children had joined it. Maria’s own boys had happily eaten beans and tortillas for lunch every day and run back outside to play, teasing each other and laughing. The Harris family would be surprised to know that Maria almost never envied them, and frequently pitied them.
“Where did you put the sunscreen, I bought yesterday?” Tawna Harris demanded to know as Maria was arranging a plate of cookies to bring to table. Tawna stood in the doorway of the kitchen, her huge green eyes framed with perfect makeup, looking at Maria as if stepping foot in the kitchen would contaminate her the same way eating meat might contaminate a devout Hindu.
Maria nodded toward the shelf over the microwave without speaking. Maria had been born in San Antonio and English was her first language, but she didn’t like speaking to Tawna, so she always insinuated a language barrier between the two of them that did not really exist.
Tawna slunk across the kitchen and picked up her sunscreen and crept back out as though she were afraid she might have to wash dishes if she didn’t make a fast-enough getaway.
Maria remembered how Tawna had insisted on remodeling the kitchen two years ago when she married Mr. Harris. At the time Maria had been worried that Tawna would want to cook for the family herself when the kitchen remodel was completed and that she would lose her job. The worry had turned out to be completely unfounded. Tawna had never so much as buttered a slice of toast in the kitchen she had insisted needed a complicated range that had caused Maria immense stress to learn to use, and pink quartz countertops that needed constant polishing and resealing.
“I would like a cappuccino with my cookie,” Tawna said. Maria nodded and went back to the kitchen to fix it. The cappuccino machine was one kitchen improvement that Maria approved of. One touch of a button and out came a fabulous cappuccino, topped with a pretty leaf painted in foam. Maria would fix one for herself when the whole family left for the airport.
“Thank you, Maria,” Helena said when she finished her cookie. She put her silverware on her plate and smoothed her napkin down beside it, the way Maria had taught her when she was small.
“You are welcome.” Maria smiled back at her.
Helena was like the daughter she’d never had. None of the other children said thank you, but Maria never expected them to. Maria began to pick up the table, placing most things that were on it on a huge tray and carrying them back to the dishwasher.
The penthouse the Harris family lived in was huge and well insulated, but the chaos involved in getting four spoiled young people packed and out the door for vacation was impossible for Maria to ignore as she cleaned up after lunch. Peter and Ray argued, Lourdes and Helena argued, Helena and Ray argued and Tawna scolded all of them but Ray. Maria often thought that she had raised three boys to adulthood with fewer problems than the Harris family had in a day.
The children were lucky to take a vacation at all, much less go to Cancún for a whole week. The first Mrs. Harris had never gone on these family vacations, but Peter and Helena had gone with their father to Cancun for a week after school got out every year since they’d started elementary school. Maria had packed them and sent them out the door with their nanny with minimal fuss. The new Mrs. Harris, however, adored fuss. She would deny it vehemently, but since she and her children stirred up so much of it, clearly fuss was her element. The penthouse vibrated with the emotional thrashing involved in getting everyone organized for the trip.
“The limo is waiting!” Tawna called. “Come on, everybody! Let’s go!”
“You’re wearing my flip flops!”
“These are mine!”
“We are leaving, now!” Tawna yelled loudly this time. “Now!”
Maria breathed a sigh of relief as she heard all the kids making their way to the front door. The dishes were in the dishwasher, the kitchen was immaculate. There were just three more hours in her workday, which would be used to clean up the hurricane the teens had left. But she would have a cappuccino before starting on the mess in front of her and she would have a huge bottle of beer when she got home. Maybe even a shot of tequila from her husband Jorge’s stash.
“I just wanted to say goodbye,” Helena said. She looked serious, especially for a girl in a hurry who was about to go on vacation. “I’ll miss you a lot.”
“Give me a hug and go quick,” Maria advised her. Helena was taller than Maria now that she was fifteen and she smelled like all the expensive beauty products that Tawna insisted she use, but Maria still remembered her as the sweet four-year-old who loved to bake cookies and write letters to Santa as early as July. “Be good, Helena.”
“Love you, Maria!” Helena called back over her shoulder. Maria could hear her running to the door to catch the rest of the family.
When she heard the door shut Maria went to the cappuccino machine and slid her cup under the spout before she pushed the button. For the first time her eye caught an envelope that had been left in the spot that Tawna’s sunscreen had occupied. Picking it up, Maria saw her own name written on it in Mr. Harris’s careful printing.
She opened the envelope and pulled out a note. Unfolding the note caused a large pastel cashier’s check to flutter to the floor. Before reading the note Maria picked it up and saw that it was made out to her, for forty-five thousand dollars. Her heart began to race. It was severance pay, she was sure of it. She was being let go. After changing diapers and fixing bottles and washing dirty underwear for fifteen years, Mr. Harris was not going to say goodbye to her face.
Quickly she scanned the note, not surprised to find that her services were no longer required. There was a flattering letter of reference to use for another employer if she should need it. She could place her key on the counter and leave without cleaning up. That made no sense at all. Were they going to pay someone else to clean up? Because none of the Harris’s had ever so much as picked a towel up off the floor since Maria had known them.
At least Helena had said goodbye. Maria tried to fix the last glimpse of the beautiful girl she had raised from toddlerhood in her mind. The long soft brown hair, the sparkly blue eyes, the pastel pink cheeks and the expensive, fruity smell. Such a clever, intuitive girl. She had known to say goodbye, even though her stepmother had obviously not told her about the dismissal.
“Goodbye, Harris Family,” Maria said to herself as she tucked her check and reference letter into her purse and looked around one last time. Taking the high road, Maria uttered one last sentence. “God bless you all.”
Helena sat on her bed in the Cancun timeshare trying to read and not pout. Sharing her father’s vacation time with her stepmother and stepsiblings was hard enough, but he wasn’t even there yet. When the family had gotten to the airport he hadn’t met them at the gate for their flight. When they arrived in Cancu
n he hadn’t been at the timeshare, and now Tawna wanted to go on a dinner cruise without him.
Helena didn’t see why she couldn’t just say no. Better yet, say no and make Peter stay with her so that they might be able to catch their father alone when he did show up, and have a small amount of time together, just the three of them, the way it had been for years.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
“We’re going!” Tawna demanded. With a determined look on her beautiful face, she stood at the door, gesturing for everyone to go first so she could lock up behind them.
Three more years of high school, Helena told herself. Then college. College, far away from Tawna. Helena had been working on her Spanish since she was tiny, and with Maria’s help, she was quite fluent. She would go to college in Madrid, and if her father wanted to visit her he could, but she was not coming back to Dallas to put up with Tawna again. Funny enough, she had somehow felt that she was leaving Dallas for the last time this afternoon. If only it were true. If only she were about to enter some wormhole in time and come out in a new life. One not controlled by Tawna.
“You don’t have to yell,” Helena told Tawna, wondering if she had used those words to Tawna one million, or two million times in the last three years. She put down her book and picked up her purse to leave.
“Don’t bring your purse; it’s dark and I don’t want you to drop your phone somewhere. You can go two hours without your phone.”
“Fine.” With a frustrated sigh, Helena put down her purse on a small end table. With all the self-discipline she had, she walked toward Tawna to leave.
“I’m leaving mine too,” Tawna told her, gesturing theatrically toward her own phone sitting next to her purse on the glass coffee table. Then she looked at Peter, Ray, and Lourdes who were clutching their phones. “You too.”
Helena got more interested. Tawna’s commands were usually just for her and Peter. Lourdes occasionally had to obey, and Ray always got to do whatever he wanted. Surprisingly, all three put down their phones on an end table by the couch and walked out the door so Tawna could lock it.
