Page 44 of Out Of Time

She held his gaze for what seemed like an eternity and then looked over at the dishwasher and then back to him. Her shoulders fell. The tense line between her eyebrows relaxed, her pursed lips fell into a lifeless frown as if surrendering to this mess—she was giving up. It broke his fucking heart that he had caused her to look this way.

“You're doing that wrong,” she said weakly.

Max looked down at the jumble of dishes he had stacked awkwardly. When he looked back up, she was standing beside him.

Leaning across him to turn on the faucet, he watched as she stuck her hand under the water until steam rose up from the spray.

“That's your first problem, you need to use hot water. It helps break down the dried-up food.”

Max made room for her between the dishwasher and the sink; she was so close he could smell the ocean on her skin. His heart broke for her, and he hated what he had already managed to put her through.

Wishing she wasn’t so calm, he thought he actually might prefer her yelling at him over this. But she didn’t yell, or scold him, instead, she reached down to grab the oatmeal bowl he had just loaded and began to rinse it under the hot spray. The oatmeal was old, and stubborn, and wouldn't budge with just the water. Embarrassment flooded him, watching her clean up after him. He didn't like it, but he let her do it anyway because it took words to tell her to stop, words he did not have at the moment.

She reached into the cupboard below the sink, pulled out a scrub pad, and began to work on the dishes he had already loaded, scraping away pizza sauce and curdled milk before reloading them into the dishwasher with precision.

“You have to basically wash the dishes before the dishwasher canwashthe dishes,” she said, offering him a weak smile. He noticed her small dimple appear on her left cheek and his heart ached to brush his fingertips across it.

She pulled a cleaning pod from a clear jar below the sink, held it up to show him, then placed it into the small compartment on the dishwasher door, making eye contact with him before closing it. Max knew she wasn't trying to make him feel stupid for not knowing how to load a dishwasher properly. She was simply showing him how to do something normal, something common, something kids who lived normal childhoods did daily.

Max hadn’t had a normal childhood, but neither had she.

“All done,” she said, stepping back, away from the sink, the dishwasher, andhim.

As if gravity had shifted, he felt the loss of her in his space.

He looked at the dishwasher, then back up to her. “Seems silly,” he said, because it did. What was the point of the dishwasher if you had to wash the dishes beforehand?

Her smile lifted a bit more, and there it was, above her lips on her right cheek, the other dimple. His heart hammered as hisfeelings warred inside of him; he longed for her, and he hated himself.

“It does, doesn’t it? Seem silly?” she said, pondering the thought. It wasn’t a profound conversation, but Max found a sliver of hope that she still wanted to converse with him at all.

Remi, without missing a beat, got back to cleaning the kitchen, leaving Max to feel like a speed bump in the middle of a busy road.

“Ummm, stupid question,” he started.

“There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers, Max,” she said, sarcasm lining her every word, causing him to squirm a bit under the pressure of this whole situation.

“Well?”

“Where would I find a broom?” he asked, ashamed he didn’t know this for himself.

He was almost certain she was going to tell him to fuck off. Tell him it was her job to clean his house because technically it was her job, but something about today felt different, this mess felt different. It felt destructive, and somehow his self-destruction over the past few days had managed to trigger something in Remi too.

She didn’t tell him to fuck off, she simply pointed to the hallway. “There’s a broom closet next to the laundry room, that’s also where your mop is.”

Max found the broom exactly where Remi told him it would be, and when he returned to the kitchen, he found her peeling up ink-covered plastic wrap from the marble countertop from his last tally mark. He hadn’t lost a game. He hadn’t even played a game. But he felt the phone call with his father warranted a fresh line, this one for the biggest loss of his life. This one is for the loss of it all.

“What’s this about?” she asked, picking up the small cap of black ink.

He played dumb, shrugging his shoulders as if he was just as confused as she was.

She didn’t pry, and for that he was grateful.

He finished sweeping and was shocked when Remi met him with a bucket of mop solution that smelled like lemons. He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with the high-tech mop bucket or the foot pedal thingy, and as if reading his mind, Remi took the mop from him. She dipped it into the water solution, then moved it to the strainer and began to press the pedal with her foot—he noticed her toes still had a little sand between them from earlier—the spinning made his vision blur. The majority of the solution had spun out before she handed it back to him.

“And now, you mop,” she said simply.

Clever, Max thought.

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