The House Cleaner

Heather’s knees clicked as she finally stood up, she had been on her knees for far too long as she polished the legs to the wooden furniture in the Willis’s house. In her eagerness to got off the floor, she stood up too quickly and got a head rush, or a freebee as her friend Cathy would say. Once the dots had faded she surveyed her work. The room was sparsely furnished, there were no pictures on the walls, and the mantelpiece was dedicated to the diplomas belonging to the master of the house. Heather knew that he had a wife and kids, but you wouldn’t know it looking at this room. It was too phony, too much like a picture in a magazine, even more so since she had just finished whipping away the dust that had gathered since she had cleaned it last week.
Heather gathered up all of her cleaning tools and placed them in their closet next to the laundry room. The brand new chrome washing machine and matching dryer sparkled without so much as a scratch or smudge on the surface. Heather knew from speaking with the housekeeper that neither of these machines was ever employed, since all of the Willis’s clothes were dry cleaned in town.
After she put all the cleaning items away, Heather used the backstairs up to the nursery where the nanny would be keeping an eye on the Willis kids and Heather’s check since the housekeeper was out.
Knocking discretely at the door Heather needed only to wait a few seconds before the disgruntled nanny stepped out of the room, check in hand; she did not invite Heather in, nor greet her in anyway. So Heather let her self-introduction awkwardly fade off as she took the check the nanny offered her before ducking her disheveled head back into the nursery in response to a loud thump and muffled yelp from within the nursery.
Heather checked the amount on the check, which was written out in perfect script with a fountain pen. She tromped down the stairs and out the backdoor as she exited the Stepford house she sighed with relief, some things were just too perfect to be true, she didn’t know what kind of a price Mr. Willis and his family had to pay everyday for their apparently perfect lives, but it had to be a dozy.