The Maid(7)

I said my halfhearted hello to Cheryl, and then greeted Sunshine and Sunitha, the two other maids on shift with me. Sunshine is from the Philippines.

“Why are you named Sunshine?” I asked her when we first met.

“For my bright smile,” she said as she put a hand on one hip and made a flourish with her feather duster.

I could see it then, the similarity—how the sun and Sunshine were similar. Sunshine is bright and shiny. She talks a lot, and guests love her. Sunitha is from Sri Lanka, and unlike Sunshine, she barely says a word.

“Good morning,” I’ll say to her when she’s on shift with me. “Are you well?”

She’ll nod once and say a word or two and little else, which suits me just fine. She’s agreeable to work with and she does not slack or dillydally. I take no exception to other maids, provided they do their jobs well. One thing I will say: both Sunitha and Sunshine know how to make up a room spotlessly, which, maid to maid, I respect.

Once my trolley was set, I rolled down the hall to the kitchen to visit Juan Manuel. He is a fine colleague, always quite pleasant and collegial. I left my trolley outside the kitchen doors, then I peeked through the glass. There he was, at the giant dishwasher, pushing racks of dishes through its maw. Other kitchen workers milled about, carrying food trays with silver covers, fresh triple-layer cakes, or other decadent delights. Juan Manuel’s supervisor was nowhere to be seen, so now was a good time to enter. I crept along the perimeter until I reached Juan Manuel’s workstation.

“Hello!” I said, probably too loudly, but I wanted to be heard above the whirring machine.

Juan Manuel jumped and turned. “Híjole, you scared me.”

“Is now a good time?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, wiping his hands on his apron. He ran over to the large metal sink, grabbed a clean glass, and filled it with ice-cold water, which he handed to me.

“Oh, thank you,” I said. If the basement was warm, the kitchen was an inferno. I don’t know how Juan Manuel does his job, standing for hours in the unbearable heat and humidity, scraping half-eaten food from plates. All that waste, all those germs. I visit him every day, and every day I try not to think about it.

“I’ve got your keycard. Room 308, early checkout today. I will clean the room now so it’s ready for you whenever you want it. Okay?” I’d been slipping Juan Manuel keycards for at least a year, ever since Rodney explained Juan Manuel’s unfortunate situation.

“Amiga mía, thank you so much,” Juan Manuel said.

“You’ll be safe until nine tomorrow morning, when Cheryl arrives. She’s not supposed to clean that floor at all—but with her, you just never know.”

It was then that I noticed the angry marks on his wrist, round and red.

“What are those?” I asked. “Did you burn yourself?”

“Oh! Yes. I burned myself. On the washer. Yes.”

“That sounds like a safety infraction,” I said. “Mr. Snow is very serious about safety. You should tell him and he’ll have the machine looked at.”

“No, no,” Juan Manuel replied. “It was my mistake. I put my arm where it shouldn’t go.”

“Well,” I said. “Do be careful.”

“I will,” he answered.

He did not make eye contact with me during this part of the conversation, which was most unlike him. I concluded he was embarrassed by his mishap, so I changed the subject.

“Have you heard from your family lately?” I asked.

“My mother sent me this yesterday.” He pulled a phone from his apron pocket and called up a photo. His family lives in northern Mexico. His father died over two years ago, which left the family short of income. Juan Manuel sends money home to compensate. He has four sisters, two brothers, six aunts, seven uncles, and one nephew. He’s the oldest of his siblings, about my age. The photo showed the entire family seated around a plastic table, all of them smiling for the camera. His mother stood at the head of the table proudly holding a platter of barbecued meat.

“This is why I’m here, in this kitchen, in this country. So my family can eat meat on Sundays. If my mother met you, Molly, she’d like you right away. My mother and me? We are alike. We know good people when we see them.” He pointed to his mother’s face in the photo. “Look! She never stops smiling, no matter what. Oh, Molly.”

Tears came to his eyes then. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to look at any more pictures of his family. Every time I did, I felt an odd sensation in the pit of my stomach, the same feeling I got when I once accidentally knocked a guest’s earring into the black hole of a drain.

“I must be off,” I said. “Twenty-one rooms to clean today.”

“Okay, okay. It makes me happy when you visit. See you soon, Miss Molly.”

I rushed out of the kitchen to the quiet, bright hallway and the perfect order of my trolley. Instantly, I felt much better.

It was time to go to the Social, the restaurant bar and grill inside the hotel, where Rodney would be starting his shift. Rodney Stiles, head bartender. Rodney, with his thick, wavy hair, his white dress shirt with the top buttons tastefully undone, revealing just a little of his perfectly smooth chest—well, almost perfectly smooth, minus one small round scar on his sternum. Anyhow, the point is, he isn’t hairy. How any woman could like a hairy man is beyond me. Not that I’m prejudiced. I’m just saying that if a man I fancied was hairy, I’d get the wax out, and I’d rip the strips off him until he was clean and bare.