Page 8 of Clean Sweep
A few lazy snowflakes twisted out of the sky as I pulled up to Leslie’s house and pushed my truck into park. I stared at the exterior for a full minute.
A waist-high fence had a few boards that could be knocked back into place with a hammer. No gate either. No hinges even, like it had been ripped off. She had the snowy lawn of every house here. A pair of sneakers had been discarded on a porch filled with ice. A hose that had been detached, but not yet put away, lay on the ground.
“Should be great,” I muttered as I climbed out of the truck. Tired appearance aside, Leslie’s house was well-enough maintained. It was a far cry from dilapidated, but pride of ownership wasn’t apparent.
I knocked on the door and called out, but no one answered. The door knob twisted, then squealed as it slowly swung open. Needed some oil, for sure. Like most Pineville residents, Leslie kept her door unlocked.
“Hello?”
When no one responded, I stepped further inside. All the lights had been turned off. The distant crackle of a dying fire kept the place from being still as a tomb. I shut the front door behind me and let my gaze travel around.
Automatic tallies populated the cost of cleaning in my head. After five years of business, that came as instinct now.
The other half of my brain began to wonder over Leslie’s real story.
Celeste had given me tidbits here and there. Leslie had four sons. Blake, the youngest, attended high school with Celeste as a senior. I had coached or taught the other three various years ago. Leslie had divorced after twenty-some-odd years over a year ago, but they’d been planning it longer than that. She ran the Frolicking Moose as a manager and loved organizing parties.
The house was normal enough. Old, but upgraded with wooden floors, a thick oak mantel over a brick fireplace and a sad Christmas tree.
Had Blake chopped it out of the backyard? Limp garland stuck up over top of a piano with yellowing ivory. The tips of my fingers ran across the keys as I walked past, little blips of sound following like rain on a puddle.
The living room gave way to a small hallway that split into two bedrooms and a bathroom. Drawn curtains and a closed door on the far side, and a partially open door right in front of me.
I stepped closer to it and pushed the door open to a room with a queen sleigh bed and feminine clothes everywhere, like a dresser had exploded. Discarded jewelry hung off a mirror. I pushed the door farther, but met resistance. Shoes cluttered the ground behind the door, making it almost impassable.
Leslie’s words came back to me.
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.
Interesting.
Mid-life mom burnout?
A very real part of me could relate. Although Celeste had a strong relationship with her Mom and saw her several times a month, Celeste had largely fallen to me to take care of for most of her life.
Some days, the thanklessness of parenting could suck the soul out the best of us. Besides, Leslie’s boys had been bright, intelligent, and determined. Harnessing that kind of power for good must have been exhausting.
Celeste had told me more about Leslie before she headed off to school that morning. Over a cup of coffee she said, “Leslie is, like, so cool Dad. She’s understands high schoolers without suffocating.”
Whatever that meant.
While Leslie’s name was a common word around town, I couldn’t picture her in my mind. Interaction with parents as an assistant basketball coach had been minimal, but I could remember her husband, Ethan.
I backed out of her room and headed down the hall, then stopped near a crooked photo in the hallway. I straightened it without thinking, then tilted my head to study it.
Four youngish boys attempted to throw a woman into the reservoir. They were easy to pick out. Landon, the oldest. A star basketball athlete bound for big things in the medical field. Max, the second oldest. He’d lived, breathed, and died football, then went on to get a scholarship for college football back east. Then Nicholas, who had aced my advanced algebra class but focused more on wrestling. The youngest, Blake, was outside my time at the school.
In the picture, Leslie’s sunglasses were skewed. She laughed, a bright, white-toothed smile almost obscured by dark blonde hair falling out of a hat. The four boys seemed to be laughing as they attempted to shove her off a pier.
I grinned. Yeah, this house that hadn’t seen a deep clean in awhile made a lot more sense.
Vestiges of my own divorce lingered on my mind. For a year after, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Part of me had wished I could just erase all those lost years in a failing marriage and then move on, but that would erase Celeste. I wouldn’t do that for anything.
No, the divorce had taught me how to swallow my pride, admit mistakes, and use time to get past it. Did Leslie have the same experience?
Divorcées, particularly ones as attractive and compelling as Leslie, were rare in these parts of the mountains. The mix of reality and humor in Leslie’s voice when she’d ranted about cleaning her house for decades remained with me.
Why? Maybe because her honesty had been refreshing, to say the least.
