Charlaine Harris: Shakespeare’s Landlord

In other words, he didn’t leave his room like this to spite me after I’d thumped him in the guts for putting his hand on my bottom. It’s just that Bobo has been accustomed all his life to having someone clean up after him.

Days like this, I feel like I’m following an elephant in a parade, armed only with a puppy’s pooper-scooper.

But since I am well paid by Beanie Winthrop to clean her house, I shouldn’t grumble, I reminded myself sternly. Faced with Bobo’s room, it was hard to remember why I’d chosen housecleaning as my means of support.

I was a National Merit Scholar, I reminded myself, dragging the plastic wash basket behind me as I worked my way across the room, tossing in soiled clothes as I went. I was top of my high school class. I finished college. My grade point average was 3.9.

On Tuesdays, that is my mantra.

Bobo had also ordered pizza one evening while his parents were out, I discovered. Probably-I evaluated by the layers of clothing over the cardboard box-about three days ago.

“Yoohoo!” came a light sweet voice from the kitchen, accompanied by the slam of the door leading into the garage. “Lily! I’m just stopping by on my way to my tennis lesson!”

“Good afternoon,” I called back, knowing my voice was (at best) grim. I much preferred seeing none of the Winthrops-not Beanie; her husband, Howell Junior; her oldest son, Bobo; or his younger siblings, Amber-Jean and Howell Three.

Beanie’s maiden name had been, incredibly, Bobo:

Beatrice (“Beanie”) Bobo. The Bobos were sixth-generation Arkansas aristocrats, and I suspected Beanie had a slave-owning gene still in her DNA.

“Here I am, Lily!” Beanie cried with exaggerated joy, as though I had been on tenterhooks waiting for her appearance. And Beanie always makes appearances; she never just walks into a room. She popped into the doorway now like she was appearing in an English comedy: Attractive Lady Beatrice, on her way to play tennis, stops to speak to the parlor maid.

Beanie is undeniably attractive. She’s in her middle forties, but her body doesn’t know it. Though her face is not actually pretty, Beanie is a past mistress at maximizing what she has. Her long, thick hair is colored a discreet chestnut brown, her contacts make her brown eyes darker, and her tan is always touched up in the winter with a sun-bed session or two a week.

“Listen, Lily, wasn’t that awful about Pardon?” Beanie was in her chatty mode. “I went to high school with his little sister! Of course, even then Pardon wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but still… to be killed like that! Isn’t it awful?”

“Yes.”

“Ah… well, Lily, if you find Bobo’s checkbook, please leave it on my desk. He hasn’t balanced it in six months, and I promised him I’d do it. Though when he thinks I’ll find the time, I don’t know!”

“All right.”

“Oh, and Lily-Bobo tells me you take karate. Can that be true?”

“Yes.” I knew I was being uncooperative. I was in a bloody mood today. And I hated the idea of the Winthrops discussing me. Most days, I find Beanie amusing but tolerable, but today she was irritating beyond measure. And Beanie felt the same way about me.

“Well, now, we always wanted Bobo to take tae kwan do, but there never was anyone here to teach it, except that man who went broke after six months. Who do you take from?”

“Marshall Sedaka.”

“Where does he teach it? At his gym?”

“He teaches goju karate to adults only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights in the aerobics room at Body Time, seven-thirty to eight-thirty.” Those three nights were the highlights of my week.

Beanie decided I was experiencing some kind of warming trend, and she beamed at me.

“So you don’t think he’d teach Bobo? After all, Bobo’s seventeen, and as much as I hate to admit it, he’s practically an adult-physically, at least,” Beanie added rather grimly.

“You can ask him,” I replied. There wasn’t a hope in hell of Marshall taking on a spoiled kid like Bobo, but it wasn’t my business to tell Beanie that.

“I just may do that,” Beanie said, making a little note in the tiny spiral-bound notebook she keeps in her purse all the time. (That’s something Beanie and Claude Friedrich have in common, I reflected.) And Beanie would call, too; one of the few things I find to admire about the woman is her devotion to her children. “Well,” Beanie said dismissively, looking up and turning slightly as if she was already half out the door, “I’m just going to freshen up for a minute and then I’m off to the club. Don’t forget about the checkbook, please!”

“I won’t.” I bent over to retrieve a sweatshirt Bobo had apparently used to clean his car’s windshield.

“You know,” Beanie said reflectively, “I think Pardon was that Marshall Sedaka’s partner.”

“What?” The sweatshirt slipped from my fingers; I groped around for it, hoping I hadn’t heard correctly.

“Yes,” said Beanie firmly. “That’s right. Howell Junior told me, and I thought it was funny at the time, because Pardon was the most unfit man I’ve ever seen. He wouldn’t walk down the street if he could ride. That gym’s been a great success. It must have made Pardon a lot of money. Wonder who he left it all to?”

I just kept tossing clothes into the plastic wash basket. When I finally looked up, Beanie had gone, and a moment later I heard splashing noises from Beanie’s big bathroom off the master bedroom.

After I heard the slam of the door to the garage, I said out loud, “I best start being nice to the mistress, else she sell me down the river.” I really shouldn’t be rude to her, I told myself seriously. Since they pay for me twice a week.

I got to Mrs. Hofstettler twice a week, too, but I charge her less-a lot less-because it takes me far less time and effort to straighten a two-bedroom apartment than it does the large Winthrop home, and also because the Winthrop children don’t do the slightest thing to help themselves, at least as far as I can tell. If only they would put their own dirty clothes in the hamper and pick up their own rooms, they could save their parents quite a bit of my salary.

Normally, I am able to maintain my indifference to the Winthrops’ personal habits, but this morning I was thrown off balance by what Beanie had said. Had Marshall and Pardon Albee really been in business together? Marshall had never mentioned a partner in the business he’d built up from scratch. Though Marshall and I knew each other’s bodies with an odd, impersonal intimacy from working out at the same time and taking karate together, I realized we really knew little about each other’s daily lives.

I wondered uneasily why I would worry about Marshall Sedaka, anyway. What difference would a partnership between Pardon and Marshall make? No matter how dim the light, I knew I’d have recognized Marshall if he’d been the person wheeling Pardon Albee’s body into the park.

That realization made me feel even more uneasy.

Bending my mind ferociously to the job at hand, I found Bobo’s errant checkbook and propped it on his mother’s dressing table, where she’d be sure to spot it. Thinking was slowing me down; I still had to do Howell Three’s room, and though he isn’t the pig Bobo is, he isn’t neat, either.

On my Tuesday at the Winthrops‘, I pick up, do the wash and put it away, and clean the bathrooms. On my Friday visit, I dust, vacuum, and mop. The Winthrops also have a cook, who takes care of the kitchen, or they’d have to hire me for a third time slot. Of course, on Fridays, too, I have to do a certain amount of picking up just to reach the surfaces of things I need to dust, and I get aggravated all over again at the people who are lazy enough to pay me to clean up their mess.