Scarlett's Sunday

Washington Clausen had a system, and the system was this: everything got packed into the blue plastic tote the night before, so Sunday morning he could just grab it and go.

He was forty-six years old, and he had been doing this for three years now, and honestly he had never once gotten tired of it. How weird was that? A guy who spent all week scrubbing other people's toilets, and then on his one day off, he drove across Larkspur to scrub one more?

But it wasn't really about the scrubbing and he knew it. Scarlett Farrell's apartment was the highlight of his whole week, and it had been for a long time, and he had stopped pretending to himself about that somewhere around year two.

He packed the tote the same way he always did. Wood floor cleaner in the middle so it wouldn't tip. Glass spray, bathroom spray, the good microfiber cloths (not the cheap ones, the good ones, because she had nice wood furniture and he cared about that sort of thing). A fresh box of the teal nitrile gloves because the last box had about four gloves left in it, all left hands, which was somehow worse than having none.

"Okay, buddy," he said to the tote, the way he talked to inanimate objects when nobody was around to judge him for it. "Big day."

It was not, in fact, going to be a big day. It was going to be a regular Sunday. Vacuum the living room, wipe down the kitchen, do the dishes she'd been too busy to do, and spend a couple hours in an apartment full of books and half-drunk tea with the smartest, funniest, most guarded woman he'd ever met. Then drive home and think about her all week. That was the routine.

Scarlett was thirty-five, a tenured professor at the college up the hill, which still blew his mind a little. Tenured at thirty-five! She taught something to do with comparative literature, and when she explained it to him he mostly nodded and loved listening anyway. She had moved into the grad housing complex near campus even though she was way past being a grad student, because it was cheap and quiet and close to her office, and that was where he'd found her, three years back, when he put a flyer up in the little campus coffee shop advertising house cleaning. He was semi-retired from a career he didn't like talking about, cleaning kept his hands busy, and Scarlett had been his first regular, and his favorite. She was trans, which she'd mentioned on the second Sunday the way you'd mention being left-handed, and she had never brought it up again, so neither had he.

At first she'd barely spoken to him. She'd sit at her desk while he worked, headphones in, not looking up. He figured that was just how she was and he respected it. But something shifted somewhere along the line. Maybe it was the week she had the flu and he showed up anyway and made her soup out of the sad contents of her fridge. Maybe it was the day she caught him reading one of her books upside down in his lap while he sat on the floor resoling his mop, and she laughed so hard she almost cried. Whatever it was, they'd become actual friends. Real friends. The kind where she knew his coffee order (large black, boring, she teased him about it constantly) and he knew her worst moods (November, grading season, do not engage).

And the kind, he thought sometimes, standing in his kitchen at six in the morning packing a spray bottle, where a man starts wondering if maybe...

He didn't finish the thought. He never finished the thought. But it sat there.

* * *

The drive over took fifteen minutes through streets lined with old oaks, the kind of town where the bars closed at 2 AM and everybody knew everybody's dog. When he knocked on Scarlett's door she opened it looking rumpled and gorgeous in an oversized cardigan, hair piled up with a pencil through it, and his heart did the little stupid thing it always did.

"Washington! Oh thank god, it's you. I have a situation."

"What kind of situation?" He held up the tote like a shield. "I've got supplies for most situations."

"A wine situation. A big red wine situation." She stepped back to let him in, and he saw it immediately. There on the beige carpet by the couch was a stain the size of a dinner plate, dark and unforgiving, like a crime scene in a very cozy detective show.

"Whoa. What happened there?"

"I knocked my glass off the arm of the couch with my elbow. Like an absolute animal." She pressed both hands to her face. "I panicked and googled it and the internet told me salt and club soda and also that my carpet is basically ruined, and then I drank the rest of the bottle, which, in hindsight, was not problem solving."

"Okay, well, first of all, it's not ruined." He set the tote down and knelt by the stain, poking at the edge of it with a fingertip like a doctor examining a patient. "It's dried, which is not great, but I've pulled worse out of worse. I had a client once whose dog knocked an entire curry pot onto white carpet. Entire pot. We got it out."

"You're lying."

"On my life. There was a whole week of it. The dog was named Juniper and I hold no grudge."

She laughed and sat down on the couch arm to watch him work, and that alone made the whole drive worth it. Usually by now she'd be at her desk with the headphones. Today she was six feet away, barefoot, watching him blot wine out of her carpet, and he had to concentrate very hard on the carpet and not on the fact that her ankle was right there.

"Can I help?" she asked. "I feel bad just sitting here."

"You're the client. Clients supervise."

"That is absolutely not how cleaning works."

"It's how my cleaning works," he said, and handed her a clean cloth anyway. "Fine. You dab, I blot. Dab, don't rub. Rubbing is the enemy."

"Rubbing is the enemy," she repeated, solemn, dabbing. They worked like that for a while, trading the spray bottle back and forth, and the stain did the slow fade from angry purple to dusty pink to a faint shadow that even Washington had to squint to find. Somewhere in the middle of it their hands both went for the same cloth and stayed there a half second too long, and neither of them mentioned it, and both of them thought about it.

"There," he said finally, sitting back on his heels with his knees cracking like firewood. "You can barely see it. Honestly the carpet's the winner here, it got a better cleaning than it's had in months."

"You are a miracle worker and I will be telling everyone." She looked at the clock on the stove, then at him, and something crossed her face that he couldn't quite name. Nervousness, maybe? From her? "It's not even noon," she said. "I was going to... well, I was going to sit here and feel sorry for myself all day, but since you fixed my crime scene, would you want to stay? For coffee. I just got a new bag of beans and I make it better than that place on Fifth, and we both know their machine is held together with tape."

Washington blinked. In three years, he had never stayed past the end of a job. Well, once, when the pipes burst, but that had been an emergency. Coffee was not an emergency. Coffee was an invitation.

"I should tell you," he said, standing up slowly, "my coffee order is extremely boring and I'm not ashamed of it."

"Large black. I know. It's tragic. I'm going to fix you."

"Then yeah," he said, and his voice came out a little rougher than he meant it to, so he cleared his throat. "Yeah, I'd like that. An hour longer than usual."

"However long you want," she said, already heading for the kitchen, and then she stopped, like she'd heard herself, and added quickly, "I mean, within reason. I do have grading. But there's a chair by the window that doesn't get enough use."

He packed up the tote and put it by the door and sat down in the chair by the window, which was, he noticed, angled toward the kitchen. He tried not to read anything into that. He failed completely.

The smell of coffee started filling the apartment, and Scarlett was talking to him over her shoulder about her week, about a student who had argued that a famous novel was actually a metaphor for her own breakup, and Washington sat there in the Sunday light thinking that he could get used to this. That maybe, after three years, the routine was changing.

And he was going to be very, very careful with it.

Washington showed up the next Sunday at 8:45 like always, except this time he had a paper bag from the bakery on Oak Street balanced on top of his cleaning kit like it was a bomb he was afraid to set off. He'd walked past that bakery probably two hundred times in three years and never once gone in. Yesterday he'd gone in and stood there for ten minutes like an idiot, trying to remember exactly what she'd said.

It had been months ago. Some rainy morning, her pointing at the window with a mug, going, "There used to be this almond croissant place on Oak, before it moved across town, and now I never get over there because I have no self-control and no reason to drive." Something like that. He'd been dabbing at her baseboards at the time and it had stuck in his head anyway, the way things she said tended to do lately.

So. Almond croissant. Prayed they still made them.

She opened the door with her hair in a clip and a pencil behind her ear and looked at the bag, then at him, then back at the bag.

"What is that."

"It's a bag."

"Washington."

"It's from the place on Oak," he said, walking past her into the kitchen like he owned the place, which, honestly, after three years of this, he sort of did in a spiritual sense. "They still do the almond croissants on weekends. The woman at the counter said they sell out by ten so I got two, in case you were going to pretend you didn't want one."

She was quiet long enough that he turned around, and she was standing there holding the bag with both hands like it was something precious, and her face had gone soft in a way he'd never seen it. Not soft like sleepy. Soft like a door left open on purpose.

"You remembered that?" she said. "I mentioned that once. Months ago. I mentioned that once while you were scrubbing grout."

"You mentioned a lot of things while I was scrubbing grout. Most of them were about your department chair. This one was better."

She laughed and it came out a little weird, a little breathless, and she sat down at the table and opened the bag and just looked at the croissant for a second like she was composing herself. He pretended to be busy unpacking his supplies. He was not busy. He was watching her take the first bite out of the corner of his eye and feeling like he'd won something.

"Okay, this is dangerous," she said, mouth half full. "You can't just show up with remembered croissants. That's a whole thing. That's weaponized attentiveness."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"You're smiling. Stop smiling!"

"I'm not smiling."

"You're absolutely smiling, you look like a man who just got away with something." She pointed the remaining half of the croissant at him. "I'm onto you, Washington Clausen."

He was forty-six years old and being scolded with a pastry by a thirty-five year old professor in her socks and it was, genuinely, the best Sunday morning of his life. He cleaned her kitchen while she ate and read him passages from a student essay that was, in her words, "either brilliant or a hate crime against literature, I genuinely can't tell anymore," and he stayed for coffee again, and this time she didn't add any hasty corrections about grading. She just refilled his cup when it got low and they let the morning stretch out like taffy.

* * *

Then she canceled.

He got the text on a Tuesday, which was already wrong, because they didn't text on Tuesdays, Tuesdays were not part of the arrangement. Three years of Sundays and the whole system was built on Sundays and here was his phone buzzing at 2 in the afternoon with her name on it.

Scarlett Farrell: Heads up, no cleaning this Sunday or next. Conference in Denver, then a thing in Portland right after. Two weeks of me being in hotel ballrooms pretending to care about someone's dissertation on narrative time. I'll pay for both weeks anyway, don't argue.

He stared at it longer than a grown man should stare at a scheduling text. Then he typed, deleted, retyped.

Washington Clausen: No arguing. Kill them at the conference.

And then he went back to wiping down a client's refrigerator and thought about her for the next forty minutes.

It got worse over the two weeks. Not bad-worse. He was aware of that. He was aware that a person could fill a whole lot of empty space in your head without doing anything except existing on a predictable schedule, and when the schedule stopped, the space filled with something else. He caught himself checking his phone at stoplights. He caught himself wondering what conference food was like, whether she'd remembered to pack the good cardigan, whether hotel coffee had finally driven her to buy one of those travel pour-over things she'd ranted about once (once!) while he scrubbed her shower.

He told himself it was just the routine. You get used to a thing and then the thing goes away and you notice it. Same as when a client moves and you keep almost turning down their street. That was all.

Except he'd never once almost turned down a