“We need the money,” Byron pleaded with her. “You say you want this to work out with Yovanna? Then do as I ask. Please. Go to work today and don’t tell anyone about what happened.”
Marcela had just two houses to clean on Saturdays. The first was a couple whose son and daughter were in high school. They were all usually coming out of their own bathroom showers when she arrived, often draped in nothing but towels. Marcela was always amazed at how casual and informal norteamericanos were in her presence. The daughter and son usually had headphones on so they barely acknowledged her. Se?ora Garner was always friendly, if a bit frazzled, running around in her tennis whites with her cell phone at her ear. Se?or Garner wandered in and out of the kitchen wearing a one-piece bright green spandex outfit, fluorescent orange sneakers, and a yellow bike helmet that jutted out like a wing in back. He looked like one of Damon’s comic book figures. Marcela tried hard not to giggle. All the men she knew in town rode bikes to work—including her husband. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a getup like that even if they could afford such a thing.
Se?ora Garner grabbed her tennis racket and car keys and motioned to Marcela that she’d left cash for her on the kitchen counter.
“Thank you, missus.”
If the se?ora knew anything about the shooting, it wasn’t apparent from the big smile on her face.
“We’re all very excited,” the se?ora told Marcela. “Jackson just got accepted to Brown.”
“Congratulations, missus.” Marcela knew from the tone of the se?ora’s words that Brown must be something other than a color. But she had no idea if it was a team, a college, or a company. Not that she would ever ask. Being someone’s housekeeper was both deeply intimate and oddly impersonal. She scrubbed the toilets and folded the underwear of people she rarely if ever saw. And yet she was privy to their deepest secrets. Husbands who slept apart from their wives. Closet drinkers who buried the evidence at the bottoms of their trash. The bulimic soccer moms who stashed huge bags of candy and bottles of laxatives in their closets. The teenagers who kept baggies of marijuana and packages of condoms under their beds.
And yet most of these families knew almost nothing about her—not how long she’d lived in the country or where she was originally from. Not her little boy’s name or where her husband worked. Certainly not that she’d just smuggled her thirteen-year-old daughter here after ten years of them being apart. Most of her clients passed her with a smile and a wave as they headed out the door, their eyes on their watches and a cell phone at their ear. Byron had been right all along. The norteamericanos had no idea that Marcela was related to the man the police had just shot—if indeed they knew there’d been a shooting at all.
She wished she were cleaning for a family with lots of children today. She craved distraction. But the Garners all ran out the door early. Marcela was alone. She tried to lose herself in the rhythm of housework but she ended up crying openly as she scrubbed the Garners’ marble bathroom tiles, her tears mixing with the vinegar cleaning solution (Se?ora Garner didn’t allow bleach in the house).
Everything brought the horror of last night back: the chrome appliances in the Garners’ kitchen. The rubber gloves by the sink. The smell of disinfectant. It still seemed unreal to Marcela to imagine her father lying on that shiny steel gurney in the medical examiner’s office last night, his face so ravaged that the attendant left a sheet over it during most of the viewing. But worse than the carnage and the circuslike atmosphere was the aura of smugness and condescension in the police. As polite as that detective (Dooley? Doyle?) who spoke to her was, there was no mistaking that he believed her father was entirely at fault for what had happened to him.
Marcela took a quick break from cleaning and called to check on how Yovanna was faring babysitting Damon. Then she flicked on the Garners’ kitchen television and caught the local Spanish-language news while she wiped down the countertops. She stared at yet another helicopter view of Ricardo Luis’s Wickford estate with its swimming pool, tennis courts, and fountain. The footage was interspersed with headshots of police officers and reporters babbling on camera. There was a quick segment showing Alma, her tweezed eyebrows moving in angry animation across her puffy face as she held up one of those department-store portraits of her, her two boys, and Marcela’s father. Next to her on camera was a black man with dark-framed glasses and a red bowtie. A lawyer perhaps. Marcela couldn’t say. His Spanish carried an American accent. He seemed far more interested in criticizing the police than in getting restitution for her father’s killing.