Page 3 of Clean Sweep
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.Foodwent next toWorkwhich sat next toNon-Alcoholic Divorce Recovery.Leading the battle for tasks-I-couldn’t-care-less-about wasCleaning.
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 lastthing 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.
