Room-maid(41)

My phone buzzed and it was a text.

From Tyler.

“I have to go! I’ll explain later!” I don’t know why I made Shay get off the phone; I could have just as easily read the text while she waited for a second. It said:



I replied with a sad face and told him to fly safe. After I pressed send, I immediately felt stupid. It wasn’t like he was the pilot. He had zero control over what happened with the plane and whether or not it flew safely.

He seemed to pick up on this when he replied:



I smiled.





There was a loud clatter and what I guessed were swear words in Russian. I went out into the front of the apartment and found Oksana smoking outside on the balcony. I was glad she was doing it out there and not in here, although she’d left the sliding door wide open. She was taking a picture and leaning back over the balcony rail and I had a sudden flash of her tumbling backward like one of those Instagram influencers who fell off a cliff while trying to get a perfect selfie.

“Hey, Oksana?”

She paused what she was doing, blowing a ring of smoke in my direction.

“I just got a text from Tyler. His flight was delayed so he won’t be back tonight.”

She shook her cigarette, letting some ash fall to the ground. She held her phone back up, presumably to verify if I was telling the truth.

But from the look on her face, Tyler hadn’t contacted her.

That should not have delighted me the way that it did.

“The borscht simmers until twenty minutes of the ninth hour.”

I wasn’t sure what time that actually was. 8:40? 9:20? I was about to ask, but she kept talking.

“Then you will pack it up and keep it for Tyler.”

It took me a second to register her instructions. Soon-ish the soup would be done and she wanted me to put it away for her? And given everything still out on the counters, clean up her mess, too? I opened my mouth to protest, but she grabbed her coat and left before I could.

Yes, that’s just what I’ll do. I’ll put away your homemade soup and clean up the kitchen and lie down like the pushover that I am and you can take him and love him and I’ll just be pathetic, sitting on the sidelines.

I went into the kitchen and started putting the leftover vegetables into the drawer in the fridge. I turned the heat off on the soup. I didn’t care when it was supposed to finish. I considered dumping it down the sink, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Why was it so hard for me to say no? I figured it was a combination of needing to please scary, cold women and having no money—I couldn’t let this much food go to waste, especially since there was enough soup here to feed a platoon.

And it smelled delicious. I decided to have a bowl and it was amazing and I wanted to curse her name for being so good at everything, but I held back just in case I made her appear again.

I wanted to have another serving of the borscht but decided against and finished cleaning the kitchen instead. When I started the dishwasher, I noticed that Pigeon had been hiding for a long time.

“Pigeon? Where are you, girl? The Wicked Witch is gone. Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I walked past Tyler’s bedroom and that’s where I saw her.

Lying on the floor, chewing up one of his shoes.

I’d forgotten to close his closet door!

“No, no, no, no,” I muttered as I reached for what had once been a shoe. A very expensive one, from the looks of it. While I ran to the closet to find the matching one, Pigeon stared at me as if she couldn’t figure out why I was upset. I had to throw a bunch of clothes around, ignoring the fact that everything smelled like him. I finally located the other shoe and I made sure to close the door nice and tight this time.

“Well, Pidge, I’ll give you this. At least you have good taste.” And considering what a mess his closet was, she also possessed a fierce determination in unearthing the shoe that I wouldn’t have anticipated.

I had to get replacement shoes tonight. Before Tyler got back in the morning. I didn’t want him to think that I was irresponsible. Especially after he’d specifically warned me not to leave closet doors open. First, I called Pigeon’s vet. The number was listed on the fridge. Pigeon didn’t normally ingest shoes; she just liked to gnaw on them. His vet told me to contact her if Pigeon started acting strangely but that, more likely than not, Pidge would be just fine.

Then I looked up his shoes online. Fortunately there was a store just a few blocks away that had the exact same name brand, color, and size of Tyler’s shoes. I’d just go exchange them and he would never know that I had been creepily fingering his ties and smelling his dress shirts like some kind of deranged stalker.

If he knew, then he’d probably take a restraining order out against me, too.

I worried about leaving Pigeon alone, but she was curled up on my bed and seemed okay. Deciding to take the vet at her word, I was going to just run over, grab the shoes, and come right back.

I walked quickly, hoping the entire way that the shoes would be there. I didn’t recognize the name of the upscale men’s clothing store that had the shoes in stock. Admittedly, my expertise was limited to women’s fashion. A salesman in a three-piece suit approached me.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, I need to replace these.” I put the one good shoe on the counter. “Same size, same color.”