The Murderer's Maid. Erika Mailman
was hard not to think of the home as a sort of prison since they weren’t allowed to come and go as they pleased. Brooke had been a latchkey kid pretty much all her life; it was startling to be denied the right to step out for a Popsicle on a warm summer evening.
And summers were the worst.
When school didn’t dissolve a major portion of the day, the group home became a lame summer camp: the city pool twice a week, all day, so she was fried and sunblind by the end; stupid “matinees” on the smelly carpet of the home’s living room, each kid with a coffee filter full of popcorn, watching oldies on the VCR, itself an archaic electronic that somehow wouldn’t die and lay to rest its compatriot library of forgotten Hollywood goofs.
The upside, in her second year, was the arrival of Miguel. He’d been waiting for his parents to come home and make dinner, but they’d pulled to the side of the road for a fentanyl/heroin snack and overdosed. In the ambulance, the medical personnel found Miguel’s school photo in his mom’s wallet and dispatched police to ring the doorbell. His parents were alive but not going to be able to resume their parental duties for quite some time, so Miguel wound up sitting next to Brooke at his first dinner at the home, sticky spaghetti with mealy-textured meatballs.
“Is this really meat?” he’d cocked his head and asked her.
“It’s brown and ball-shaped, and that’s all I can say,” she’d answered.
They’d been close friends since then, not just because of their good behavior in the midst of proto-juvenile delinquents, but also because of their Mexican heritage and the lilt in their voices that informed the world so.
“I’m trying to train myself out of it,” she’d confided once when he caught her imitating the flat tones of the NBC anchor.
“Mija, never,” he’d said. “Your voice is too pretty.”
She and Miguel had aged out around the same time, she a few months earlier than him. They’d both taken the jobs and living situations offered them without thinking of refusing, he in Baltimore and she in Houston. College was never an option. Neither had the grades. With her mother’s insurance payout, she could afford community college tuition, but knew she’d rather dole out the money over her work life rather than blowing it in a few years.
She hadn’t wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a maid, so she was relieved when she was placed in a pop-up café as a low-wage barista, subsidized by a state grant.
The café got her for free in return for training her, and the grant paid her a meager salary, the idea being that when the grant ran out she’d move on to a genuine job with a gleaming entry on her résumé.
It was like her mother’s death all over again to lose Miguel. As the years passed, she saw him now and then, saving up money to take separate rooms at a Motel 6 somewhere between their two cities. They’d shyly bring each other up to speed by the pool separated from the big rigs in the parking lot by a chain-link fence. By the roar of the idling diesels, they’d sum up their years apart. The blue paint on the bottom of the pool peeled like a sunburn.
Romance never happened for them. She figured they both knew their friendship was a vital brick that kept their walls upright. They didn’t dare mess with the mortar. Life without each other wouldn’t have been worth living. Friends fight—and they did—but only lovers take savage joy in ripping the other from their life.
Brooke had tried to kiss him once at one of these reunions, and he’d put his hands tenderly on her face as he pulled away.
“Mija, if this didn’t work . . . ,” he had said.
“I know. But we’re never going to try?”
“To be honest, if a relationship failed, the friendship would, too. And that would kill me.”
“It would kill me, too.”
So they didn’t risk it, and he resumed being the brother she’d never had. In their world untethered by parents, they provided stability to each other.
They really did best on Facebook, relaxed, joking, unselfconscious. Under their fake avatars, they were each other’s only friend. They live-chatted pretty much daily, and her feed was a long row of funny and sweet things he’d said to her. He was her brick, her wall, her touchstone, her core.
The next day, Brooke shows up for her new job at the coffeehouse. She’s adjusted her speech and her clothing to look like the illegal immigrant she’s posing as, so she can be paid under the table. This is what she’s had to do to avoid being tracked: she changes her name every few years, moves, and finds a job where an employer is happy to look the other direction in exchange for paying a pittance.
With her looks and fluency in Spanish, it’s easy to pass as someone who doesn’t have a legitimate Social Security number. She has long black hair with a bit of natural curl at the ends, dramatic eyebrows, high cheekbones, and caramel-colored skin. Her body is lean and strong, thanks to not being a fantastic cook and not eating many meals out. She’s beautiful, but her understated way of dressing and behaving lets her easily be overlooked.
“Hi, Brooke!” her employer greets her. Jane is an older woman with gray hair braided into a Germanic-looking crown atop her head. She wears vests and approximately three huge silver rings per finger, an entire flea market table’s display on two hands. Jane had explained at Brooke’s interview how she felt sympathy for the plight of so many stranded Mexicans and she knew the government was wrong to impede immigration, so it was her own politically subversive act to therefore hire Mexicans even if they couldn’t appropriately and honestly fill out the I-9 form. She said nothing about how this then released her from the burden of paying minimum wage; no, it was all about screwing “the man,” not screwing the young woman in front of her.
“Going to be a busy day?” Brooke asks.
“It was . . . I had you come after the rush so it wasn’t stressful. This is Maria, and I’ll have her train you. You already know how the equipment works, but we have a few things we do differently from other places you might’ve worked.”
Maria, in a low-plunging tank top that gives a view of what Brooke suspects to be only the top 30 percent of a cresting serpent tattoo, gives her a friendly tour of the workspace, interrupted a few times by customers. Maria stands back and lets Brooke wait on them, and Jane gives an approving smile after each interaction.
After Jane leaves, Maria says in Spanish, “You have to be careful not to make her mad. She threatens to call Immigration.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. When you first meet her, she’s all ‘Oh, I love to help you; I know you had a hard life in Mexico,’ but what she likes is the power of knowing you’re illegal.”
“I’m not, actually,” says Brooke before she can help herself. Way to go. Contradict the fiction that’s keeping you safe.
“Oh, really? You’re working these shit wages because . . .?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“I bet. Anyway, don’t cross her.”
“Okay.”
Maria looks to the glass café front and grins. “Here’s our rush hour. Offices must be very difficult places to work; the workers stream out of them like their asses are on fire!”
Together they grind beans, scald milk, forge designs on the blank canvas of the latte foam. They press paninis and stock the sugars, ease a spatula into the pre-cut slices of a red velvet cake.
When the next shift arrives hours later, Maria leaves without saying goodbye to Brooke. It’s better that way—Brooke doesn’t want to get close to someone who will ask all the questions she’s had to rehearse answers to. But there’s still a pang at how their camaraderie had only been because they were on the clock together.