Maisie was full of surprises. I knew she was rich, that she'd always been rich, and that she didn't clean her own house, let alone her own room. She didn't even make her own bed! Yet, here she was digging through trash with me, and she seemed to find it less disgusting than I did.

I figured that Maisie was going to call me "Mark" in front of my parents to see what would happen, so when she did I was ready.

"Where do we start, Mark?" she called out.

Before my mother could react, I said, "I don't know, Mike."

"Ow!" she groaned dramatically, as if she'd been struck. "Point goes to Miss Donner."

Mom cut in, "I think the first thing you ought to do is see your new room. After that, take a look around the house. Then you can either start cleaning upstairs, or you can bag up the trash in the basement and carry it to the garage." Maisie and I looked at each other, and Mom continued, "Your room is the one on the right at the top of the stairs."

The two of us tore up the stairs. I thought I had a sure win, but Maisie arrived several steps ahead of me. She's little and bony, but she's wiry and fast. She also did some strategic elbow work and at the end she took three steps in a single bound.

When I walked into my new bedroom, all I could say was "Wow!"

"Luck-ee!" Maisie commented.

The ceiling was very high, and the windows were huge. "You're going to need curtains, girl, unless you want to give anatomy lessons to the neighbors."

There was a bay window in front, and its three windows faced the street. "This way's south," Maisie told me, "so you'll have a lot of light." There was a fourth window on the east wall that looked out to the side yard and the neighbor's house.

"You know what this room is?" Maisie asked. "This room is vast. I can't believe all this is for one person."

I opened the door to the closet, which was in the north wall. "Yikes, that, on the other hand, is painfully small," Maisie commented. "A little musty too. Better leave it open."

There was one door left to open, in the middle of the west wall. "Is this another closet?" I wondered aloud. It turned out to be a tiny room with a narrow window at one end. "What the heck is this?"

"I dunno," Maisie admitted. "It could be a closet, if you put up a bar, or even a couple bars. But it's so long and narrow! I suppose you could fit a skinny little bed in here, but it would be claustrophobic."

"What were they thinking?" I said. "If that window wasn't there, you could use the whole thing for storage."

"Or if the door was at the other end, near the window, you'd have all this part," Maisie said, waving her arm. "Another mystery, Nancy."

Automatically I almost said, Don't call me that, but stopped myself. It was certainly better than being called Mark.

"Okay, let's see the rest of the house," I said. "We can finish our tour in the basement, and then decide which job is worse."

In the end we opted for carrying the trash out of the basement. As dirty and creepy as it was down there, cleaning the bathroom seemed far worse. "Plus," Maisie pointed out, "we might find something interesting!"

Dad gave us each a pair of work gloves, and armed with two boxes of large trash bags, we descended the stairs from the kitchen. The basement was lit by two bare light bulbs in the unfinished ceiling. I was glad I wasn't down here alone!

Maisie looked around, sniffing. "No mice or rats," she commented. "That's good."

"What are you, a cat?" I asked. "How do you know what mice and rats smell like?"

"Oh, I can smell them, girl, believe me. They have a very distinct stink. Huh! Distinct stink — I just made up a tongue twister!"

Maisie was full of surprises. I knew she was rich, that she'd always been rich, and that she didn't clean her own house, let alone her own room. She didn't even make her own bed! Yet, here she was, digging through trash with me, and she seemed to find it less disgusting than I did.

"What is it with all this old cloth?" she wondered aloud, as she shoved a handful of it into a bag. "None of it was ever any good; it's all rags and rags of rags."

Lifting one of the larger "rags of rag," I found a pile of newspapers and old magazines. There were similar piles nearby. "Hey, Maze!" I said. "Do you think any of this stuff is worth anything?"

Her nose wrinkled as she sampled the pile. There were old, dirty copies of Look, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post. "They would be, if they weren't so dirty and bent," she said. "Collectors want things in good condition."

"Maybe if I cleaned them up a little, I could sell them in a yard sale," I ventured.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "You could do that. We should make a SAVE pile over there." She pointed to an empty spot near the north wall, and went back to bagging rags.

Under another pile of rags we found a cache of rock-hard paint brushes. Some of them were stuck forever to mixing sticks or paint-can lids. "Could be modern art," Maisie mused with fake pretension, and I giggled.

The work went fairly quickly, and we didn't talk much. In the end, we didn't find anything of real interest, and — excepting the petrified paint brushes — there weren't many laughs to be found. A few items were pretty gross, and I still shudder when I remember finding a dead mouse.

"Calm down!" Maisie said. "This thing is so dried out, it must have died a thousand years ago, when the pharaohs ruled this land."

"Just... just... throw it away, will you?" I screeched.

"Okay," she said. "Quit being such a girl about it." With a look of distaste, she speared it with an ancient screwdriver. It made a very dry crunch. Then she dropped it into a garbage bag.

"Sorry, Maze," I began, but she turned away and got back to work.

Again, I marveled at what a hard worker Maisie was. I couldn't think of a way to compliment her on it without it sounding patronizing, so I just kept working, trying to keep up with her. But it was hard! She never stopped. The song John Henry came to mind, although I'd be John Henry and she'd be the machine.

"Hey, let's lug these bags out to the garage, and get something to drink," Maisie said. "We have to keep hydrated or we're going to ache tomorrow."

"Yeah, I guess so," I replied. "How do you know this?"

She pushed a stray lock of hair from her face and smiled. "Experience, my young friend, experience."

When dinner arrived, we all washed our hands and gathered in the empty dining room. It was lit by a chandelier full of little bits of glass cut like crystals. Luckily someone else (not me!) had cleaned it. Probably Mom and Ida had tackled it during the day. It must have been a pain, taking down all the little pieces (being careful not to break them!), cleaning them all, and putting them back up.

"What are you talking about?" Maisie asked me, incredulous. "It's not a big deal. Once you take it apart, it's easy to clean. It would be hard to clean only if you left all the glass bits on there."

Ida knelt next to the bags of food and handed things to my mother, who took care of the distribution. Since there weren't any chairs or tables, we were going to have to sit on the floor.

"And Marcie," Mom cautioned, "even though these are work clothes, there is no need to get food all over them."

"Mom!" I protested, blushing.

Maisie mugged a haw haw face at me. I figured it was better to let my mother's comment go. If I continued to protest, she was bound to have plenty of examples of times I'd ruined clothes by spilling food. I couldn't remember any, but I'm sure she could!

"Mrs. Donner, do you have any lamps, like floor lamps, you could bring tomorrow?" Maisie called across the room.

Ida pulled a pile of paper napkins from the bag. She didn't look up.

"No, Maisie, I don't think I do," Mom replied. "They'd all be in storage." It was already dark, so we could only work in the rooms that had light fixtures: the basement, the kitchen, the bathrooms... "But you're right, we could certainly use a couple..."

"I can bring some tomorrow," Ida quietly told her.

Maisie smirked. "The moving men will do that tomorrow."

My mother glanced quickly at Maisie, then Ida. When Ida didn't react, Mom said, "Yes, that's true, but they'll all be packed. If I could borrow a few lamps, it would make tomorrow night more productive."

"Good," Ida said. "Then it's settled."

The two women sat on the floor, facing each other, leaning against opposite sides of the doorway to the living room. Their voices dropped when they started talking.

"Look at them," Maisie commented, "Mom's probably going on about her girlhood in Flickerbridge again. They're like two schoolgirls. Isn't it gross?"

Maisie and I were sitting against the far wall, opposite our mothers. Dad was by himself with his back to the windows. He heard Maisie's comment, and looked from the two women to Maisie and me a couple of times and grinned in amusement. Even without looking, I could tell that Maisie had turned red. She hadn't meant to be overheard.

"Sorry, girls," Dad said, still smiling. "But sound carries in an empty house. I didn't mean to eavesdrop."

Maisie looked down, a little uncomfortable.

After dinner, we all went home. There wasn't much we could do in the dark, and tomorrow was a school day. I wasn't surprised by how tired I felt.

"I wish I'd thought about the lights," Mom said. "We didn't really get that much done."

"At least the bathrooms and the kitchen are clean," Dad said. Mom nodded.

Dad looked at me in the rear view mirror. "Hey, back there. How're you doing?"

"I'm good, Dad. I'm beat, though. Maisie is like a machine! It wore me out, trying to keep up with her."

"She does work hard," Mom agreed. "And she doesn't complain the whole time, like some people I know."

"Oh, Mom," I protested, but I was too weak to go any further.

"And she was the first one to mention lamps. I should have thought..."

Dad cleared his throat. "I have to tell you both something. Tonight I realized who Ida and Maisie are. I never met them before, but, Ida is the ex-wife of Aiden Beale, who was head of IT at my old job. He's actually the one responsible for the layoffs."

"Oh!" my mother said, surprised. I froze.

"I've never met Aiden Beale, but the point is, if I were you two, I wouldn't explore their life or our life in California too deeply. You never know... they might know somebody who knows us. I don't want you to worry, because it isn't likely. At the same time, we have to be ready, because everything about Mark might come out.

"Beale is very rich, really snooty, and not a very nice man. I doubt that he knew or cared who I was. There were at least three levels of managers between me and him. The point is, the Beales moved in a very different social circle."

My mother said in a quiet voice, "I had no idea. Ida doesn't like to talk about California anyway. It's all connected to her divorce and her husband, which is... well... You can see how it must have been... must still be... so incredibly painful."

"Where did they live?" I asked.

"Tarhent," Dad said. "Just like us."

© 2007 Kaleigh Way