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Del expected screaming. It was the owner of the house, and she had never seen her cleaner before. But she didn't scream. She simply put down her bag, threw over a towel, and watched as Del put on her bleach-stained jeans and loose gray T-shirt. The woman was wearing a crisp white lab coat with her name stitched in blue above where her heart must be. Del had laundered that coat before. It had to be washed with like colors.
In silence they walked through the long white hallway and down the stairs, where Del slipped on her shoes and went to the door. She wanted to apologize, but the words didn't come. Shame pulsed through her body. The woman in the lab coat stood at the top of the brownstone steps and watched as Del retreated to her bus stop.
By the time Del got to the agency to drop off the keys, there was already an envelope on the desk with her name on it. It was her final paycheck with a yellow Post-it Note stuck to it.
On the Post-it Note were two words handwritten in black ink.
Get lost.
Chapter Two
There were several reasons Del did not plan to share the change in her employment status with her roommate, Tym. She needed to think through how she'd cover up her mistake.
Del and Tym had made a deal that her dirt-cheap rent was contingent on maintaining steady employment. There was no way she could afford to live anywhere else. Also, she was certain that she could find another job before he even noticed that she was around the apartment at unusual hours, such as all day long every day of the week.
Four years ago, on her twentieth birthday, Tym had brought a box of supermarket cupcakes to the apartment Del had shared with her father. Her father, Stan, had died several weeks earlier, and she had not been able to keep up with the rent. She had no experience with eviction and wasn't sure how quickly it would happen, so she had simply stayed inside the apartment, eating through her father's collection of spicy ramen, waiting for an authority figure to show up and kick her out.
By the time Tym arrived to check in on her, the utilities had shut off one by one. She was living in the dark, ignoring the huge pile of mail by the door.
Among her father's friends, she was well known for skipping out on jobs. It had become a joke. Since she moved in with her dad at age seventeen, she had worked at a restaurant, a cafŽ, a video rental place, and several temp agencies. Her longest stint had been a six-month placement at a dentist's office. She had liked that job: the dentist gave her a year's supply of toothpaste, and she always got to leave at exactly 4:30 p.m. But she got bored and irritated with the regularity of it, and one day she had simply stopped going in.
Tym had known the whole story, and so when he told her in her father's dark apartment that she could come and live in the spare room of his place, he stressed that she would need to get a job and keep it. He wasn't a charity worker, and she wasn't a strong candidate for late adoption. She would need to behave like an adult. She agreed and went on various long-term placements for a temp agency before being hired as a cleaner.
Being a cleaner didn't appeal to a deeper calling, but what did? Not the dentist's office. Not the video rental place, either. She had worked steadily since she was thirteen, when she earned a paycheck at a jewelry store where she used a bent paper clip to dip necklaces into an electrified vat of blue ooze until they shone. Work existed to provide her with food and rent money, that was it. Keeping her expectations low was the key to a minimal level of life satisfaction. And for a while, she had been satisfied. Her father had become a friend, despite everything that had come before, and she became friends with his friends, too. It was a new period in their lives, and everything that had happened previously was safe so long as they never talked about it.
Now that she had been fired, she felt sure that she could find something else pretty quickly. Cleaning for a different agency. Maybe back to temping. Perhaps something steady, like managing a coffee shop. She would go out the next morning and begin filling out applications.
Excerpted from Housebreaking by Colleen Hubbard. Copyright © 2022 by Colleen Hubbard. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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