Clean sweep, p.1
Clean Sweep, page 1
Clean Sweep
Katie Cross
To Cindy-Mom.
* * *
Thanks for giving me your son.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Authors Note
PROTECT ME
Do you want to join my community?
Also by Katie Cross
About the Author
1
Leslie
Something fuzzy lived in the dish at the bottom of my fridge and it had been there for over a week now.
The old ceramic dish had a glass top so I could peer inside. At best, the contents appeared mushy and gray, with a slight green tint around the edges. Mold, for certain.
Never mind that my divorce had been final for over a year now, Mrs. Cortez still brought dinners for me and my son like we actively mourned my first marriage.
No, that thing needed to die. In fact, that marriage had died long before the divorce drove a wooden stake in its soul-sucking, vampiric heart.
Not for the first time, I regarded the moldy dish, shuddered, and closed the door.
“Not right now,” I whispered, then crept away, like it would grow across the floor after me.
Coffee almost sloshed out of my mug as I set it on the table and called out, “Blake! You have five minutes before you have to leave. If you’re tardy, you’ll get detention and I am not saving you again.”
An unintelligible, teenage grunt followed. I fought not to roll my eyes, but at least the thudding music quieted a little. I passed by a load of clothes that Blake still hadn’t taken upstairs even though I’d graciously folded them in piles on the table. Most of the time these days, he dressed himself from the dining room.
Beneath the table lay carpet that needed a good vacuum a few weeks ago. Various parts of my kitchen and entryway boasted floorboards that weren’t gray, but appeared to be from gathered dust. One wall collected cobwebs at the seam like an old lady would cats. Behind me, the dishwasher let out a groan as it attempted to clean an overly-full load I’d forgotten to start last night.
“Hello, Monday in the middle of November,” I muttered, then sighed.
My phone chimed with a text from my oldest of four sons, Landon. At twenty-three and almost accepted into medical school, he currently finished up his last semester of his undergrad in Jackson City. It was a bigger—but still not big—mountain city forty-five minutes up the canyon from here in Pineville. He’d saved up all his online classes for his final semesters so he could move to Jackson City, work, get a hold of debt, and still graduate on time.
Sensible, this kid.
Landon soothed my Mama nerves every time I saw his name. Easy going. Hard working, but wasn’t obnoxious about it. His latest girlfriend of four weeks showed real promise this time.
Not like all the others, anyway.
Landon: Can I come home Saturday for food?
* * *
Leslie: Sure. Your favorites?
* * *
Landon: You’re the best. We’ll be there at noon.
I paused.
Although he’d been idly mentioning a woman named Starla every now and then, there had never been a we attached to anything.
In fact, he’d almost disappeared since they started to officially date. Not only had I not met Starla yet, but I knew nothing else about her except her name and a vague mention of a super awesome first date, Mom. Tell you about it later.
Leslie: We?
* * *
Landon: Yeah, I’m bringing Starla. I proposed to her last night, thought you’d want to meet her. This seemed like a good time.
I blinked.
Wait, what?
Leslie: I’m sorry, you did what?
* * *
Landon: It’s a conversation better to have in person, but didn’t want to spring too much on you at once.
* * *
Leslie: Is this a joke?
* * *
Landon: No. It’s a long story. Could we have BBQ instead of pasta?
“No,” I murmured. “This . . . this has to be a joke.”
Landon is not the son that would casually mention a proposal or break life-changing news to me over a text message without any contextual basis at all.
Certainly not after dating for four weeks!
This was something my second-oldest son Max would do, because he fell in and out of love every twenty seconds.
Not Landon.
Furious, I tapped the phone icon and listened to it ring in my ear. He denied the call, then texted back.
Landon: Can’t talk now. At work. Later.
“You did not just decline me,” I growled.
Blake descended the stairs, thudding like he stomped out cockroaches on his way down. He zoomed by, a blur that managed to snatch his car keys before disappearing out the kitchen door with a “Bye, Mom!” tossed over his shoulder.
I sent a vague wave in response.
With all my control, I stopped myself from calling Landon again. I settled on the most threatening I-brought-you-into-this-life-I-can-take-you-out-of-it message I could conjure with so little brain capacity left.
Leslie: We WILL talk later, young man.
* * *
Landon: Thanks, Mom!
Sensing that he must be nervous about this—or he would have told me about it already—I schooled my inner Mama Bear and gave a calm reply.
Leslie: We’ll eat at six. See you then.
Then I set my phone down and screamed like a wild banshee.
After a few deep, calming breaths, I paced across my kitchen.
My fourth read-through of the conversation allowed the truth to gain full hold in my mind. With it came a flush of cold as brittle as the winter mountain wind.
My brilliant, would-be-a-cardiothoracic-surgeon-and-always-followed-through-responsibly son had just proposed to a woman he’d been dating all of four weeks.
Four.
Weeks.
My heart did a double whomp for a tenth time. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t restart. I leaned back against the wall and stared at the floor. Shock made me almost entirely mute. My mouth opened, then closed while my brain looped around that single line.
I proposed to her last night.
I proposed to her last night.
I proposed to her last night.
Unable to stay still, I began to pace again.
The tile floor squeaked under my shoes every time I turned. Something in the weird noise calmed me. It gave me a thing to wait for. Something that wasn’t the crash and demise of my only child that didn’t think like a caveman. The only one who called on a regular schedule, for cripes sake.
I stopped, turned to the fridge, and grabbed a permanent marker. Now that Landon was bringing home a fiancée, there was so much to do.
List time.
My thoughts moved faster than my hands could write as I scrawled tasks across my favorite bright green sticky notes. A sense of relief followed as I peeled each note off and slapped it onto the counter.
By the time I’d emptied my brain of the populating tasks, a pile of green awaited me.
One at a time, I placed the sticky notes on the wall under different headers. Food went next to Work which sat next to Non-Alcoholic Divorce Recovery. Leading the battle for tasks-I-couldn’t-care-less-about was Cleaning.
Laundry, dishes, floors, dusting?
“No thanks,” I sang under my breath.
Then I sucked on my teeth as I studied a pattern of notes that, to my delight, resembled a Christmas tree.
Thanksgiving was next week, which had its own to-do list. Merging the two of them just asked for disaster.
My gaze lingered on the far column again.
Cleaning.
Blerg.
After raising four boys—five if you included my ex-husband, which I did for at least the first fifteen years—then I’d been doing house management and housekeeping for the last twenty five years. Ethan and I had married young. He was twenty two, I was barely twenty, and I had Landon before my twenty-second birthday. Which put me at forty-five. Two-point-five decades and a still-messy house to show for it.
Why had I even bothered?
While there was some satisfaction and joy to be found in the process and journey of raising my boys, that ship had long since sunk. These days, the last thing I wanted to do was mop. I’d earned my time off.
Now that I had daily work duties at the local Frolicking Moose coffee shop, home took a backseat for the first time in . . . ever. Also, it wouldn’t kill me to get a new pair of shoes since these had holes in them.
The status of my house, my utter lack of conviction about cleaning it, and the fact that Landon would be bringing a woman—no, a fiancée—home on Saturday, meant it was time to do something I’d never done before.
Something drastic.
Something supposedly selfish, but probably not really. Something that I’d wanted to do for the last two decades but I had never let myself do.
Hire a maid service.
I grabbed my phone, searched for Dahlia, and tapped on the icon. Once I set it on speakerphone, I put the phone on the counter while it rang. Moments later, a bright voice called, “Aloha, boss lady!”
“Aloha, amiga.”
Dahlia, barista at The Frolicking Moose, blew a light raspberry. “You’re mixing your languages again.”
“I know!” I straightened up. “Listen, do me a favor?”
“Always.”
“On the cork board near the door is a list of papers offering local services, right?”
“Right,” she drawled.
“Is there one that Celeste just put up a few days ago about a cleaning service? She said that she and her father were taking new clients in the area, or something.”
Dahlia tutted under her breath, then let out an exclamation of success. “Yes! Right here. T&C’s Cleaning Services. You want their number? You finally hiring out some help already?”
“You know it.”
Dahlia cheered. “The Frolicking Moose is a big enough mess for you to clean up, you shouldn’t have to take care of your house too. I’m with you, boss lady. I’ll text you the info.”
“Thank you!”
The phone cut off. Seconds later, a notification popped up with a contact page. Before I could talk myself out of it, I clicked on the number.
While it rang, I attempted not to think about my unhinged son. About the implications of a wedding in my life right now. No, there were enough celebrations for other people to plan, I didn’t need another.
This whole thing was probably a big mistake. A phase. An I-did-something-stupid-and-I-feel-stuck kind deal.
Stuck.
Uh oh.
My stomach clenched. Sweet baby pineapple, as Lizbeth would say. What if the girl was pregnant?
All the blood rushed out of my head at once. I wasn’t ready to be a grandma! Responsible or not, Landon definitely wasn’t ready to be a father. He had medical school! A cardiothoracic internship and . . . medical stuff to do.
A firm voice in my ear brought me out of my spiraling terror.
“Hello?”
The feeling of ice water flooding my veins sent me reeling, and I scrambled to get my voice back under control.
“Hey. Hi. Sorry. I just . . . I was . . . anyway—”
My mind became a snowy, blank canvas. I attempted to conjure up who I called and why, but all presence in the moment had disappeared under the terrifying thought that my son might have gotten someone pregnant.
I blinked.
Did I call someone, or did they call me?
“This is T&C Cleaning Services,” the male voice said. A note of amusement lingered in his silky tone. His voice, while not as resonant as Maverick’s, had a touch of smoothness to it, like ripples on a lake.
Singer, maybe?
Wait, what was I supposed to be thinking about?
My silence stretched too long. Cleaning services? Why would a cleaning service call me? Did Mav—
He cleared his throat. “Hello?”
Memory served.
Landon. Fiancée. Disastrous house.
“Right!” I cried, dragging a hand through my hair. “Sorry. Rough morning. Right. I called you.”
“Can I help you with something?”
Aggravated now, I shoved away from the wall and resumed pacing. When had I become this scatterbrained? Oh, with the first pregnancy. There was no true recovery from that. At least I found myself back on the original path of my thoughts.
“Yes, thank you for your patience. I was calling to see if you could send someone to clean my house. Like . . . today. Or, at the latest, tomorrow.”
A rummaging sound issued in the background, as if he sorted through paperwork. Beyond that, the distant sound of a truck backing up. T&C Cleaning Services meant I must be speaking with the owner, Tanner. His daughter, Celeste, went to school with Blake. Both of them were seniors in high school. I’d seen Tanner around Pineville now and then, but not often.
“Today?” he asked.
“It’s a long shot, I know.”
“Let me see.”
While Tanner countered with a few basic questions about my house, I sank into a kitchen chair and gazed around with new eyes. The mess that I’d been ignoring for—oh, who needed to count the days?—suddenly looked a lot . . .
. . . worse.
“Today is pretty open,” he murmured. “We had a last-minute cancellation. In fact, Yessica could be there around 9:30. Would that work?”
My gaze lifted to the clock over the table. Almost 8:00 now. I could be out of here before Yessica arrived and stay away all day at work. Someone else cleaned my house while I made money doing what I loved?
Yes, please!
“Should be perfect.”
“What specifically are you needing help with?” he asked.
“Can you just come and take it all and I can start over new?”
My quip had been mostly joking, although I’d take the offer if he responded in the affirmative. Getting rid of all the old furniture and stuff left behind when Ethan left? Another easy hallelujah.
Instead, Tanner fumbled over his response for a moment. Out of experiential pity, I saved him.
“Just kidding. You don’t have to take all my stuff.” I tucked some hair behind my ear and leaned forward. “Look, on Saturday my son is bringing a woman home that he just proposed to after only knowing her for four weeks. I’m super busy at work and don’t have time to clean. Scratch that, I could make time, but I just . . . I really don’t want to clean.”
“Okay.”
“Frankly, I’ve done the whole stay-at-home-mom-clean-up-after-everyone thing for the last two decades and I’m over it. I couldn’t care less about my floors if you paid me to care less about my floors. No one gave a damn then, and no one seems to care now. So sayonara suckers! I’m out of the cleaning game.”
I gave a flippant salute to the ceiling, but had no idea who I meant. Of course my sons hadn’t cared about the house, and Ethan hadn’t been awake enough on a good day to consider something like, oh, laundry.
These were the thoughts the divorce stirred up in me the most. The ones I should have shared sooner.
On a roll now, I kept going.
“Still, I want to make a good impression on this woman. Also, I’m not a disgusting person, so this isn’t a hovel, okay? It’s . . . lived in. All right, it’s chaos. Even with just me and Blake living here. I need help.”
The other three words I should have said sooner.
I need help.
The end of my much-needed diatribe halted so quickly it left dead space. I paused. Had I overshared again? I had a thing about doing that. Apparently, honest details made other people uncomfortable.
“Well,” Tanner cleared his throat, “we can help you out with that. A deep cleaning, maybe? We do floors, windows, dusting, counters, general clean up, that sort of stuff. We can go as heavy into details or as light as you’d like.”
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the chair. “Deep cleaning would be great.”
“I can’t give you a quote until I stop by to look at it.”
Over $1,000 had been burning a hole in my underwear drawer ever since the divorce finalized. Once I let Ethan officially go, my great aunt—who was somewhere between ancient and Moses’s wife—sent me $1,000 with a card that simply said, About damn time. Now go do something crazy.
This was just the level of crazy that I needed.
“I don’t care how much it costs.”
“We . . . I’m sorry?”
