It’s six in the morning, and someone is breaking into our house.
It’s not the scraping noise this time, which I have heard a handful more times since I tried to investigate. I’ve convinced myself that the scraping must just be a branch somewhere, which scrapes against one of the windows downstairs, but this is a very different kind of sound. These are loud noises. Footsteps. A door slamming. It’s loud enough to make me sit up in bed, even though my husband is still snoring softly in the bed beside me. This is supposed to be a safe neighborhood. Stuff like this isn’t supposed to happen here.
A resounding thump from downstairs has me sitting bolt upright. Is this one of those home invasions? If it is, what do we do? We don’t have a gun. Enzo used to keep one in our apartment, but after Ada was born, he got rid of it. He was terrified of her finding it and hurting herself.
I’ll just have to call 911 and hope they get here quickly.
Enzo is sound asleep beside me, completely unaware of the home invasion in progress. He came to bed so late last night, I never had a chance to ask him what he’d been doing with Suzette in her backyard. And now it’s the last thing on my mind.
I shake my husband awake, more aggressively than necessary. “Enzo,” I hiss. “Someone broke into the house. I’m calling the police.”
“Che?” He rubs his eyes. His accent is heavier first thing in the morning. “Broke in?”
“Don’t you hear them?”
He listens for a moment, while I practically want to scream. “Is Martha? No?”
“Martha? How did Martha end up in our house at six in the morning? How did she get in?”
“I give her key.”
I stare at him, horrified. “You gave her the key? Why?”
“Why? So she will not wake you up when she comes in to clean!” He groans and throws his head back against the pillow. “Go to sleep, Millie!” And now I hear the distant sound of a vacuum running downstairs.
Okay, fine, I guess he’s right. Most burglars don’t take the time to vacuum the living room, so it must be Martha.
But even now that I know my home isn’t being invaded, I can’t go back to sleep. My heart is still racing. So instead, I get up and take a shower. I may as well start my day, especially since Nico usually takes some persuading to get out of bed.
I come down the stairs about half an hour later, freshly showered and dressed. I’ll grab another banana from the kitchen so I don’t get in Martha’s way. She does an extremely thorough cleaning of the kitchen.
Except Martha isn’t in the kitchen.
She’s next to the desk we keep in the corner of the living room. And she’s not cleaning the desk. She’s looking through one of the drawers. I watch her for a moment, and all I can think to myself is, What the hell is she doing? I never rifled through any drawers like that when I was cleaning for people.
“Martha?” I finally say.
She raises her eyes. I may not know Martha very well—she rarely speaks to me unless absolutely necessary—but I know a guilty expression when I see one. I’ve got to hand it to her though; she composes herself very quickly.
“I needed to leave you a note, so I was looking for a pen and paper,” she tells me. “We are almost out of cleaning spray.”
Are we? That could be true. I suppose.
But I’m willing to bet she wasn’t looking for a pen and paper.
Martha disappears back into the kitchen. I can’t believe I caught her going through my desk drawers. That’s a fireable offense. Granted, Suzette highly recommended her, but it’s not like Suzette is high on my
list of people I trust. There’s something about Martha that I don’t like. I wish we could get rid of her.
I don’t know what to do. How do you even fire someone? I mean, it’s been done to me before, so I understand the general concept, but my heart speeds up at the idea of it. My blood pressure is undoubtedly through the roof.
I start to sit down on the sofa to contemplate my next move, but it’s a good thing I’m wearing slippers, because it turns out there is broken glass all over the floor in front of the couch. It takes me a second to realize that the vase I usually keep on the coffee table has been knocked over. A pile of lilies as well as endless shards of glass are scattered all over the floor.
Okay, now I’m pissed. And I have another reason to fire Martha.
I march to the kitchen, trying to avoid the glass, which seems to be just about everywhere. I’m surprised I didn’t hear the shattering of glass from upstairs, only the usual thumps associated with cleaning. In the kitchen, Martha is spraying down the counter with a bottle that looks pretty much full to me.
“Martha,” I say, “you could have warned me about the broken glass all over the floor.”
She doesn’t even bother to look up from the counter. “What broken glass?”
“You knocked over a vase on the coffee table,” I say tightly. “And it broke. And there’s glass everywhere.”
Martha finally puts down her sponge. She faces me with her dull gray eyes. “I didn’t break any vases. I haven’t even started cleaning in the living room yet.”
Seriously? First, she was going through my drawers. Now she’s pretending she didn’t break a vase when she obviously did. I can’t believe Suzette recommended this woman.
“Martha,” I say sharply. “If you break something, you should at least have the courtesy to admit it. I’m not going to charge you for it.” But I
am going to fire you.
She blinks at me. “I don’t break things,” she says stiffly. “But if I did, I would admit it.”
“Then who broke it?” I shoot back. “Did it just walk off the table and break itself?”
This is unbelievable. It’s not like I didn’t break my fair share of glasses and vases and whatever when I was cleaning houses. But I always admitted it. It was obvious that I did it, so what would be the point of lying about it? But Martha is stubbornly refusing.
“What is going on here, ladies? What is the shouting?”
Enzo is standing at the entrance to the kitchen. Apparently, I was shouting. I didn’t think I was, but I feel a little vein throbbing in my temple like it sometimes does when I raise my voice too loud.
Martha places her hands on her sturdy hips, on either side of her immaculate white apron. “Mr. Accardi, can you please tell your wife that I did not break the vase in the living room?”
Wow. Now she’s turning my husband against me? This just gets better and better. “I found it broken when I came down here this morning. Who else would have done it?”
Enzo snorts. “That sounds exactly like the work of Nico.”
Granted, Nico does break a lot of things. But when he does, he always tells me about it immediately. He’s not one to break a vase and then just leave all the broken glass behind in the living room. I know him well enough to know he wouldn’t do that.
“It wasn’t Nico,” I insist. “Besides, he’s still asleep.”
Enzo looks down at his watch. “Well, is time to wake up, I think.”
Before I can stop him, he goes to the foot of the stairwell and starts shouting Nico’s name. It takes a good minute of him shouting for Nico to get his butt down here until my son descends the stairwell with sleepy eyes and tousled hair.
“What is it?” Nico mumbles, still rubbing his eyes. “Why are you bothering me?”
“Nico,” Enzo says sternly. “Did you break the vase in the living room?”
There’s a long pause while all three of us stare at Nico. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah.”
I stare at him, astonished. “Seriously? Why didn’t you say anything?
I could’ve cut my foot open on the glass.”
He shrugs. “You were asleep. In the middle of the night, I got hungry so I went downstairs to get some food, and that’s when I bumped into the table and it fell.”
Great. I knew he was going to be hungry after not finishing his dinner. Also, it disturbs me that the sound of shattering glass didn’t rouse me from sleep. What else am I sleeping through?
“You could have tried to clean it up,” I point out. “You told me not to touch broken glass.”
That is true. But still. I would have hoped Nico had more of a sense of responsibility, especially now that he’s doing chores for the Lowells.
“Martha,” Enzo says. “We are so sorry we thought you broke the vase. Clearly, we were mistaken.”
He’s being generous. I was the one who accused her of breaking the vase. In my defense, it really seemed like she had broken it. But I know the feeling of being wrongly accused, and I feel terrible that I did it to Martha. Moreover, I have been accused without any sort of apology plenty of times. A woman I was cleaning for once accused me of taking a ring she left in the bathroom, and when she found it behind the toilet later that day, she didn’t even tell me she was sorry. I do not want to be that woman.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say to her. “I just I jumped to conclusions, and I was completely wrong. I hope you can accept my apology.”
Martha doesn’t say anything.
“And we will clean up the broken vase,” Enzo adds. “Of course.”
She rests her gaze squarely on my face. “I did not appreciate being made to feel like a criminal.”
I suck in a breath. Why did she look at me like that when she said the word “criminal”? That was not just my imagination.
Is it possible Martha knows about my past? Does she know that I’ve been to prison? Oh God, has she told Suzette? The idea is unthinkable. Suzette would have a field day with that information.
But she couldn’t possibly know. My last name is different now, and it’s not like she has my Social Security number to do a background check. I’m just being paranoid.
“I am sorry we made you feel like a criminal,” Enzo says, oblivious to the edge in her voice. “Will you please accept our apology?”
Finally, she nods. And without another word, she does an about- face, marches back to the kitchen, and starts cleaning again.
“Come on,” Enzo says to me. “We need to get this cleaned up before the kids get downstairs. There is glass everywhere.”
I can’t help but feel irritated that even though I now have a cleaning woman, I will be spending the beginning of my morning cleaning broken glass. Not that I haven’t cleaned my fair share of it over the years. The irony is that if I hadn’t accused her, Martha would have probably cleaned it for me.
So fine, she didn’t break the vase. But I didn’t imagine the look on her face when she said the word “criminal.” She was definitely snooping in the drawer of that desk—I saw that with my very own eyes. And I’m not sure I believe her excuse.
Why was Martha going through my drawers? What was she looking for? Has the woman been digging into my past?
I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t trust this woman who Suzette sent to work for us.
