Single in Suburbia (12 page)

chapter
10

F
or dinner Amanda decided on Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic and Moroccan Couscous which she found in her favorite Barefoot Contessa cookbook. She served it on the back deck on a patio table covered with a red checkered tablecloth. Flickering candles stuffed in empty Chianti bottles and a string of white Christmas lights wound through the deck railing provided light and atmosphere. A
Paris Combo Live
CD played on the boom box. If she tried hard enough, Amanda could imagine herself at one of the sidewalk cafés that dotted the broad avenues along the Champs-Elysées.

“Welcome to Chez Amanda!” she said as she took one of the bottles of white wine Candace proffered and set Brooke’s prettily wrapped bakery box on the counter. She kissed them, European style, on both cheeks. Bringing the bottle of wine, she led them onto the deck.

“Wow! What a great setup,” Candace said. “All we need now is a Maurice Chevalier–type waiter. Or a piano player with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth singing naughty French love songs.”

Amanda uncorked the bottle and poured a glass of the white wine for herself and Candace. “Brooke?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

Amanda smiled and reached for the bottle of Pellegrino. When they all had something to drink, she raised her glass and the three of them clinked crystal.

“Ooh la la.” Brooke sipped her sparkling water and scanned the setting Amanda had so painstakingly created. “It’s fabulous out here. I feel like a jetsetter.”

“Have some brie.” Slathering apple slices and crusty bread with the melted cheese, Amanda prepared them each a plate of appetizers.

“This is great.” Candace snagged a bunch of white grapes and helped herself to a cracker covered with pâté.

They chatted for a while, just the inconsequentials of their day, but Amanda could sense them waiting for her to invite them into her life. For the moment she was content to play hostess—she’d enjoyed preparing tonight’s meal even more than she’d anticipated. Still it felt incredibly good to know that they cared what happened to her. With some surprise, she realized that they no longer seemed like unlikely strangers. Their movements and facial expressions had become familiar; the details of their lives important.

“How did the boys take their loss today?” Amanda asked as she set an endive, pear, and Roquefort salad at each place.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Candace said as they sat. “If those parents don’t stop blaming Dan for everything, I’m going to snap someone’s head off. I don’t know how he stays so calm. Even my mother couldn’t rattle him.”

“I know what you mean,” Amanda said. “He always seems like a white sand island in the middle of a roiling sea.”

Amanda finished her salad. Pleased, she watched Brooke and Candace finish every bite of theirs too. “How about you, Brooke?” she asked. “Is Tyler treating you any better?”

“Only when Hap’s around.” Brooke speared the last sliver of pear. “Which isn’t anywhere near as much as I’d like. He’s out visiting his restaurants almost every week now. So I’m on my own a lot. Good God, I miss my job at the accounting firm. And when he gets back, he either wants to play golf with his friends or we have some event of Tyler’s. Or both.”

They carried the empty salad plates to the kitchen and came back out with heaping servings of chicken and couscous. The garlic was sweet and tender with the faintest hint of Cognac and cream sauce.

“OK, now I know I’ve died and gone to heaven.” Candace bent over her plate and inhaled. “Why don’t we skip right over the brainstorming? I think you should train to become a French chef and open your own restaurant.”

“Someday, maybe.” Amanda smiled at the compliment as they began to eat. “Right now I know how to make two dishes and I have aspirations for a third. And I don’t have time for a slow build. I’ve got to make money and I’ve got to make it fast.”

The sun sank lower and the breeze that had felt balmy earlier began to feel cool as they finished the main course. “Why don’t we have coffee and dessert inside?” Amanda suggested. “I’ve been dying to see what Brooke brought from the bakery.”

They trooped in, carrying everything they could. Candace rinsed the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher while Amanda brewed a pot of coffee. Brooke sliced three large wedges of the chocolate mousse cake and carried the plates into the family room.

Shoes off, their feet tucked under them, they settled in to drink coffee and moan over the sinful richness of the chocolate cake.

“OK.” Amanda set her plate on the coffee table in front of her. “I need an idea.”

“Maybe we should try stream of consciousness and see what we come up with,” Candace suggested.

“OK, but it has to be something that will allow me to be home for the kids by dinnertime and doesn’t involve a lengthy commute,” Amanda said. “I don’t want to be too far away in case of an emergency.”

“What are your skills?” Brooke asked.

“Well…” Amanda thought about that for a moment. “I’m good organizationally. I’ve chaired a ton of committees and I know how to get things done.”

“What’s your degree in?” Candace asked.

“Drama.”

“Have you tried the local theatre companies?”

“Yes.” Amanda ticked off the negatives on her fingers. “Employees are mostly volunteers. Those who are paid, get almost no money. And you have to be there nights and weekends.”

They all drooped. “Could you teach it?”

Amanda shook her head. “Not certified, and I don’t have time to get a teaching certificate.”

“What about substitute teaching? You don’t need a degree for that,” Candace said.

“Even less money. A substitute gets a whopping ninety dollars a day before taxes. And you can’t count on it.”

“Drama…makeup…” Brooke mused. “How about selling Avon? Or one of those multilevel marketing companies?”

“I’m not giving home parties. Even if I could count on my former friends and acquaintances, it takes forever to build those things.”

“What about real estate?” Candace asked.

Amanda shook her head. “Every other divorced woman in the county has already beat me to it.”

“Catering?”

“Like I told you, I make two really good dishes, both of them French. And it’s another slow build.” Amanda was starting to get depressed. “I need something I can make money at right away.”

“Party planning?” Brooke said.

“Too festive.”

“Personal shopping?” This from Candace.

“I thought I had a job doing that for Steinmart for about five minutes. But doing it on my own?” Amanda shook her head. “Most of the women I know are probably even more avid shoppers than I am. And it’s another slow build.”

“Decorating?”

“I’d need training and, again, you have to start with your friends. Right now you two are it.”

Brooke sighed. Candace settled back into the sofa and folded her arms across her chest. “There must be something you’re good at that people need.”

“Right now the only thing I excel at is cleaning my house.” Amanda laughed, but there was little humor in it. “My grout and I are intimately acquainted. It started as a kind of therapy, but at this point I spend so much time cleaning we could have stayed inside tonight and eaten off the floor.”

“You know,” Candace said slowly, “the only thing the women around here talk about more than other women is their maids.”

“That’s true,” Brooke said. “The other night at the ballpark there was a thirty minute dissection and comparison of cleaning crews. And nobody sounded all that happy.”

“Just imagine what they’d give for someone who could speak English and actually understand what they want done,” Candace said thoughtfully.

Amanda looked at Brooke and Candace. “I would have hated waiting on these women in Steinmart, I don’t see how I could waltz into their homes, shoot them a smile, and excuse myself to go clean their toilets.” She shook her head vehemently. “I don’t think so.” She got up to retrieve the carafe of coffee then freshened everyone’s cup.

Candace raised an eyebrow. “My cleaning crew gets a minimum of one hundred twenty-five dollars a house and they do two houses a day, sometimes three, five days a week. That’s…”

“A minimum of twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week,” Brooke calculated, her voice sounding odd.

“Cash? In their pocket?” Amanda couldn’t believe it.

“That’s sixty-five grand a year.” Candace did the math. “Cash. No deductions.”

They looked at her, waiting for her reaction. Sixty-five thousand dollars a year would go a long way toward paying their bills and keeping them in the house. And if she did more than two houses a day…

“Bitsy Menkowski and Susie Simmons are both looking for a new cleaning woman.”

“Oh, right, should I just call them up and tell them I’d like to come wax their floors?”

“I could book it for you, maybe use an alias,” Candace suggested. “We could try to schedule you to clean when no one was home.”

Go in their closets? Pick up their underwear from the floor? Amanda grimaced. Given the hours required to thoroughly clean the houses here, she didn’t see how she could completely avoid the customers. And she wouldn’t be the only one embarrassed. How would she feel if an old friend asked to clean her home? She might say yes at first out of pity, but it would be so uncomfortable. Like giving someone who’d been a frequent dinner guest scraps at the back door.

Amanda shook her head. “I don’t think I’d actually mind the cleaning part. I don’t understand why, but it seems to relax me. It’s not the work, per se.” She looked at Candace and Brooke, willing them to understand. “It’s the humiliation. I’m not sure I could handle that. And I know Meghan couldn’t. She can’t bear the idea of being different or sticking out in any noticeable way. She would absolutely die of shame.”

Brooke considered them from beneath carefully shaped eyebrows. The curve of her cheek was lightly blushed, her skin taut and dewy. “I can completely understand that.” She hesitated for a long moment, looked as if she’d thought better of speaking, and then blurted out, “My mother is a maid.”

Brooke closed her eyes and tilted her head back as if seeing something she didn’t want to. “And I’m not talking the waltz-in-and-out, part-of-a-service kind of cleaning woman. I’m talking the backbreaking, down-on-your-hands-and-knees-scrubbing-the-floor, belonging-to-the-customer-like-a-slave kind of maid.”

Brooke shuddered. “She looked eighty at forty. And her hands are all crippled up,” she whispered. “I still can’t bear to look at them.”

Amanda stared at this woman she’d thought she was getting to know. The one she’d originally written off as an empty-headed trophy. “Where does she live?”

“Oh, she’s still back in Betwixt, Georgia, which is the booming metropolis where I was born. And she doesn’t make anywhere near the kind of money Candace is talking about.” She looked away. “I used to be so ashamed.” Brooke still spoke in a whisper. “I got myself as far away from that as I could. All the way through college and into an MBA program. Anytime things seemed too hard or unobtainable, I’d think about my mother.”

Amanda studied the beautiful young woman in the designer clothes and tried to picture it. “I never would have known.”

“No,” Brooke said. “I spend a lot of time and energy making sure no one ever does.”

“Not even Hap?”

“Especially not Hap.” Her look to Amanda and Candace was pointed. “He’s never met my mother. I’ve let him think that we’re estranged. You two are the only people on earth I’ve told.”

“Well your secret’s safe with me,” Candace said.

“Me too,” Amanda said. “Though I have to say my hat’s off to your mother. She must have been pretty highly motivated.”

“I guess so,” Brooke said quietly. “I never really stopped and thought about
who
she was doing it for. All I ever saw was that it was the best she could do.”

There was a silence as the three of them stared at each other, their coffee and desserts long forgotten. Amanda watched Brooke carefully but the younger woman didn’t seem inclined to pursue the subject. Her shame seemed fresh and real—not a part of the past, but painfully current. Was this how Meghan would feel if she knew her mother was cleaning homes for a living?

“So where do we stand?” Candace finally asked. “I don’t feel like we’ve found a solution. Do you want to table the subject and let us all give it some more thought?”

Amanda shook her head. “No. I don’t have time to keep thinking about what I want to be when I grow up. And I can’t afford to be picky. I need a regular income and I need it as soon as possible.”

She knew then what she had to do. She really only had one viable choice that she could see. There was no point quibbling further about the pros and cons or the potential for embarrassment. “If you can get me clients, Candace, I’m ready to start cleaning houses.”

“Are you sure, Amanda? I don’t know if…”

“I’m sure,” she said pulling up a picture of Meghan in the silver dress, rejecting the one of her on her knees in front of her ex-friends’ toilets. “Just don’t tell them that the maid you’re booking is me. And if you can schedule me while they’re out, that would be even better.

“In the meantime, I’m going to come up with some sort of disguise so that I can try to do this without being recognized.”

“A disguise?” Candace asked, incredulous. “I don’t think any of the women I know are going to welcome a maid in a stocking mask or fright wig into their home.”

“Oh, I think I can do better than that,” Amanda said, the wheels of her imagination already spinning. “I was a drama major after all, and I used to do local theatre before the kids’ schedules got so hectic. I have boxes full of costumes and stage makeup from the shows I’ve done. You book the work, Candace, and I’ll come up with the disguise.”

As soon as Candace and Brooke had gone, Amanda hunted down her cache of wigs and costumes. At the bottom of the last carton lay her tackle box of makeup and specialty items.

Carrying them upstairs she sorted through the possibilities and finally took the most promising with her into the bathroom and began to experiment.