Thanks for the Tip

You missed a spot, Rudy.

That was the third time Kerri Dumas had said it that morning, and each time she pointed at something new, like she kept a list taped inside her eyelids. First it was the ceiling fan in the guest room nobody used, then it was the grout line behind the stove, and now she was standing in her living room with one arm raised, finger aimed at the crown molding like she was calling in an artillery strike.

"Right there, above the window. See the shadow? That's dust."

Rudy looked up at it. He could see it, barely, a faint gray line maybe six inches long, and he swallowed down the smart remark that wanted out because Kerri was the one client who actually tipped, and tipped good, and a man didn't talk back to the hand that fed him. He climbed down off the step stool he'd been using for the light fixtures, walked over, and wiped the strip down with the microfiber cloth hanging out of his back pocket.

"Gone," he said.

"Thank you." She checked it with a squint, then nodded and went back to her kitchen, where he could hear her open the laptop and start typing like the typing had personally wronged her.

He'd been cleaning her house on Saturdays for about a month now. She'd found him through a flyer he'd taped up at the hardware store in town, the one with the tear-off tabs, and of the eleven tabs taken only one had ever called, so when she did he'd driven his fifteen-year-old silver Tacoma out to Cedar Glen and spent forty minutes on the phone with her going over exactly what a deep clean entailed and exactly what she expected, which was everything.

Cedar Glen was the kind of place where every house had the same mailbox, black steel with brass numbers, and every third Saturday somebody woke up to a little white sign in their yard that said YARD OF THE MONTH like it was a Grammy. The houses were big and beige and the lawns were mowed to a height approved by committee. Rudy had cleaned half of them by now and they all had the same smell, that candle from the store that was supposed to smell like some other candle.

He worked through the rest of the house without another interruption, which he took as a good sign, and by two in the afternoon he was done, three hours early, mostly because there was nothing left to clean. He packed his supplies back into the blue plastic tub in the bed of the truck and was halfway to the driver's door when he heard a sound from the side of the house, the screen door off the back patio creaking, followed by a voice that didn't sound like the woman who'd been directing artillery all morning.

"Rudy. Hey. Is that you out there?"

He came around the corner and found Kerri on the patio, sitting at a little wrought iron table with a glass of wine that was half gone, though she looked like she'd been drinking faster than she'd been tasting. She was still in her work clothes, a blazer over a blouse, but the blazer was off and draped over the chair next to her and her shoes were off too, feet tucked up under her on the chair, and her face had gone tight in a way he hadn't seen on her before.

She was thirty-one, he knew that much, because she'd told him early on, back when he was still being interviewed like a job applicant, that she was thirty-one and single and worked in event planning for a pharmaceutical company and had moved here two years ago from Denver knowing exactly nobody. She hadn't said it like a complaint, more like a fact she kept in her pocket.

"You're done already?" she said.

"Three hours early. House fought back, but I won." He shifted his weight and looked at the gate behind her, wondering if he was supposed to leave or stay, and she solved it for him.

"Sit down. Please. I need to vent at somebody who doesn't work with me." She gestured at the empty chair across the table. "There's beer in the fridge, help yourself, I'm not getting up."

Rudy went in through the screen door, got himself a bottle of the only beer in there, which was some light lager he'd never heard of, and came back out and sat down. The patio looked out at the back fence, the HOA-approved brown one, and past it the foothills went up all dry and gold.

"So what's got you rattled," he said.

"The garden gnome." She took a drink and set the glass down hard enough that he worried for it. "There is a man on Sycamore Court who put a ceramic gnome in his front yard, four feet tall, holding a lantern, and it is not on the approved decoration list, and I had to sit on a conference call for ninety minutes tonight, I mean this afternoon, whatever, with eight people arguing about whether it constitutes a visual nuisance, and one of them, Diane, called me dictatorial, on the call, in front of everyone."

"A gnome."

"A gnome, Rudy."

He drank his beer and let her go, because it was clear she wasn't done, and she wasn't. She told him about the beautification committee she'd joined when she moved in, how it had seemed like a way to meet people, and how instead it had turned into two years of phone calls about trash can placement and fence stain colors and now one man's gnome, and how the nearest thing she had to friends were people who hated her over a four-foot gnome with a lantern.

"I moved here and I knew no one," she said, quieter now, turning the wineglass by the stem. "I work from home. My life is this house and those calls. That's the whole thing, that's the whole exciting life of Kerri Dumas, and I'm telling my janitor about it, so that's where I'm at."

"You're not my boss," he said. "I mean, you are, but not right now."

She laughed at that, the first real laugh he'd heard out of her, and something in her shoulders came down an inch.

The light was going gold over the hills and the beer was going down easy and at some point she got up and came back with the bottle in her other hand and refilled her wine, and they sat there another hour talking about nothing, his other cleaning jobs, her company's Christmas party that she had to plan for four hundred people, the gnome, always back around to the gnome. Rudy noticed she kept touching her collar, that little tell people have when they're wound up, and he noticed she didn't once check her phone, which in his experience meant either she was dead or she was happy.

When he finally stood to go she jumped up too and said wait, hold on, and went inside, and came back out with her purse, digging in it while he stood there with his empty bottle.

"No, don't," he said, because he could see where this was going. "You already pay me."

"This is different." She pulled out a folded bill and took