Last house on a Friday, and Jodie’s body ached for weekend. In the master bath she scrubbed soap scum and toothpaste and coiled hair from the sink basin with cleanser wipes. No water was the rule—chemicals only. No using the client’s toilets, either. Even if she had to pee, Kwik Kleen rules forbid her. Jodie was owed nothing by the world, and the rules applied to her.

In the mirror she caught sight of her ruddy face, the freckles all leaked together. The uniform was a buttondown shirt with the fake front of a white maid’s apron printed on it. Her hands, inside rubber gloves, she kept moist with lilac-scented lotion. Hair the color of Cheetos, tied back with a plastic clip, although one spiral strand of her bangs came down to irk her face.

Out in the hallway the vacuum cleaner yawned again and again, Inez pushing. Five women in the house including Jodie, all scattered to different rooms. The place was three floors, seven bedrooms with as many bathrooms, dizzying square footage. It was a three hour scrub-and-shine job. Such lonesome hours Jodie spent in these bathrooms, they seemed almost a comfort. In here was a mounted flatscreen TV and a Jacuzzi tub with ten gold jet valves she had to keep the lime and rust away from with her scrubbing.

The people were never home when the Kwik Kleen van pulled up. In their portraits, they were a family of four with rich brown skin. Their decorating taste was for earthy oranges and reds, for weird stilt-leg carvings of giraffes and men with large heads. Wicker disks on the walls that Jodie didn’t know what they were.

But wondering slowed her work, which was bad because wages were for hours estimated, not actual. Told herself she could dream about strangers’ bathrooms later, off-clock, over a tumbler of wine on ice and the television mutter and the chug of her radiator. Still, she wondered if they wondered about her when they came home and saw that this room readied for them.

When the tiles shined, Jodie tossed the soiled rag into her bucket. She lifted the handle and stood stoop-shouldered, eyeing the bathroom for what she might’ve overlooked. She followed the plan, top to bottom, clockwise, no water. She sighed at this, the finish of a fifty hour workweek, as if it were something.

Back through the master suite with potted palms and a four-poster bed, sunburst carvings on the headboard, matching armoires and nightstands. Her tennis shoes sank into the carpet. Outside a window, wet February blew a drizzle with dead leaves in the mix. By rote she glanced around for any missed tasks. She didn’t care to check, but the tic was fixed after two months on this job. Atop one nightstand, a clay bowl not larger than an ashtray sat with its lid tilted askew. With her free hand in a rubber glove she reached out to straighten the lid.

Inside the bowl was an inch-thick stack of folded money. The lid was propped such that she couldn’t see the whole stack, just a corner of the topmost hundred-dollar bill. Jodie inched the lid further off the bowl and the doubled-over money stack began to unfold itself. She touched her thumb to the blooming bills and they were all hundreds—maybe fifty of them. More than she ever saw in one place, even back when she worked grocery store checkout.

Just outside the room Inez still vacuumed the hallway with her back to the bedroom. The vacuum cleaner’s headlight doused the hallway walls like a search beam. The bed beside Jodie had a tropical-themed duvet cover folded over goosedown pillows, tan corduroy throws fanned out across the fold. The owners of this cash slept here last night. They dreamed of a redhead maid in blue gloves and wet-kneed jeans and sneakers a size too big. Her fingers on their money. They knew her like she knew them, haunting in each other’s absences.

She still held the bathroom bucket. She smelled of her own armpits and bleach. If these people dreamed Jodie here, what did they dream would happen now? Another static weekend, more Monday-to-Friday toil, hours like empty containers she filled one after another with expired leftovers? Unfair, how they baited her. Casting off like pocket change enough money to throw her life wide apart for weeks, maybe months. It all turned instantly unbearable when she looked inside the bowl. Her spirit was inside there, long-lost but suddenly—

—van’s back passenger side, crammed against another maid’s lumpy ass. Jodie clutched a Hardee’s cup with nothing inside it but melting ice. Pressed her head against the windshield and watched Chick-fil-A and Cartoon Network billboards. Five o’clock Friday on seven lanes pushing northbound from Atlanta. A thousand slow-motion cars and trucks stewed in a river of exhaust. Soundtrack on the radio was some Mexican polka, accordions and horns, ten-man mariachi singalongs. The van smelled of chemicals and dust, but Jodie guessed now she’d never have to catch a migraine off the Kwik Kleen bleach fumes again. The stolen cash was stuffed in her left pocket against her thigh.

Traffic at a crawl meant cops would beat them to the Kwik Kleen office, handcuffs at the ready for her wrists. Jump out now and run, down the embankment into the scrub where the kudzu melted down the trees like burning candles. But the law could nab you easy, drag you out squirming with twigs in your hair and your muddied shins.

“Qué pasa, Roja?” Inez said from the shotgun seat. With her cheek glued to a cellphone, she eyed Jodie in the rearview mirror.

“Nada,” Jodie said.

Inez twisted herself around and said to Jodie, “My boyfriend’s cousin is having a party. You should come.” Inez was nineteen and engaged to this boyfriend named Hector who sprayed paint on walls for work. She was the only other maid who spoke fluent English, the only other legal worker.

“I don’t feel too great,” Jodie said.

“Aw, come on. Everybody’s going,” said Inez.

“I don’t know,” Jodie said. Almost every weekend Inez dropped these invitations. Jodie would smirk and mutter until the question went away. It seemed like a joke, the idea of a whitegirl thirty-two years old at a Chicano all-night fiesta. Instead, Jodie was planning how she might hop a taxi back down to Buckhead and offer up the loot to those she stole it from, get on her knees and beg mercy. She’d lose her job for sure but maybe skirt jail time.

Couldn’t figure how it happened in the first place, how this plan to steal first stabbed into her head. She could’ve resisted the urge easy enough. She could’ve walked off and slumped into this van like usual, gone on as before. The worry chilled her deep. Body tremors made her grip her plastic cup too hard and the lid popped askew. Thought she needed money but what she needed—

—Kwik Kleen storefront shared with a Korean dry cleaners. They parked the van in the sidelot and Jodie slid the door, stumbled out into the cold, fought to keep her breath slow. The rubbery muscle threads in her back were primed to snap. Overhead droned the fat transport planes in patterns over Dobbins ARB. Across the street taxis and busses idled at the station, drifters loitered, everyone on watch duty.

Boss shoved through the store’s aluminum side door with a huff so hard it misted in the air. He was Cuban, a refugee going on twenty years, a sweetheart for illegals and the minimum wage he could pay them. He hired natural-born Jodie Larkin at the same rate and promised raises after a first-month probationary period. Raises never came. Soon enough she might’ve quit. She might’ve done a lot of things.

“Where you ladies been at?” Boss said.

“Traffic,” Inez said, “Always traffic.”

“I got crap to settle and don’t need to be waiting all night,” Boss said. He eyed each gal in his housekeeping harem like he meant to pick one for the night. Soon as he squinted at Jodie, she dropped her glance into the topmost bucket in the pile she held. The inside was lined with black grit and smelled like fake pine. The maids lugged supplies into the storeroom where the busted overhead light forced them to grope around in the dark for the shelves where things went. When they came into the office, Boss rolled his swivel chair from behind his desk and waved a stack of envelopes. Calling names: Mariana, Raquel, Inez, Haida. No Jodie Larkin. The others took their paychecks.

“Jodie, stick around a minute, will you?” the boss said. They were all shoulder-to-shoulder in that office cluttered with bulk boxes of cleaning solutions. The computer keyboard keys and the telephone buttons were filmed with the grease that time collected. “I said Jodie,” he told the others, shooing them out.

She wanted to pull the money out of her pocket and toss it in his lap.

“Problems,” Boss said after they were alone. “Issues.”

Jodie slumped down onto a sturdy box of solvents. She couldn’t take it standing.

He said, “I don’t got your money, Jode. It ain’t here I’m sorry to tell you. Sons of bitches at the money place screwed it up. Clerical error, they claim, but they’re a bunch—”

Jodie put her face in her hands.

“Aw, cripes,” he said. “Don’t ball on me here.”

The bell inside the phone unit clanged, and the shock of it made Jodie cry out. The ligaments in her throat were strained. The other maids were just outside the door, Inez cackling a laugh about something. Jodie slipped somehow completely out of the world where you could just be alive without anguish. Kept going back to the moment, the nightstand, the bowl, her hand on so much money.

“No—I didn’t—” the boss said into the phone “—where? Hold on a sec.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and nodded at her. He said, “It’ll only be till Monday, Jode. First thing Monday they’ll have it over here. That’s what they said, all right? You need me to front you something for the weekend?”

“Front?” She could hardly hear what he was saying to her.

“Twenty? Forty? Forty’s about all I can spare right now.”

“No, no—I’m okay.”

“You sure? Serious?” He took the phone away from his ear and reached into his breast pocket, peeled out a twenty between his middle and index fingers. Fluttered it at her. “Take it,” he said. “Pay me back come Monday.”

“I’ll manage,” Jodie lied. She didn’t know how—SWAT team breaking down her wall, plainclothes detectives knocking calmly at her door, Boss on a rampage. She just couldn’t dare go home with what amounted to six months of wages, two years of Georgia HCV-subsidized rent. Her apartment was cramped and dark, a trap to keep her cornered. It wasn’t anyplace she could trust, but noplace was.

Outside Inez leaned against the store’s brick façade. She craned her neck forward to see into a compact mirror she held while she primped her hair. A cigarette dangled from her glossy lips and the smoke was making her squint. When Jodie came out Inez grabbed her by the elbow and said, “You’re coming with us tonight to this party, Roja. No excuses.”

“My check didn’t come in.”

Inez snapped her compact shut. “Puta Madre. You need cash? I can ask Hector.”

Inez’s boyfriend Hector was there across the lot in the driver’s seat of his Toyota Celica GT convertible. Faded red paint and flaking canvas top, spoiler, No Fear decal on the tinted strip across the top of the windshield. Hector had one arm laid across the open window frame, hand slapping the outside of the door to the Dem Bow beat of the reggaeton coming from his radio.

“Let me get the address,” Inez said. “Or, no—you need a ride anyways, right?”

“I’m a mess. I smell like bleach.”

“So don’t I, right? You ain’t getting out of this. That cabrón ain’t gonna ruin your weekend with his no-check bullshit. There’s gonna be some bad-ass music, some dancing.”

“I’m in my uniform—”

“Yo, Roja, what else you gonna do on a Friday? You live by yourself, right?”

“And my cat,” Jodie said.

“Pobrecita.” Inez pursed her lips and blew a fake kiss at the sky. Hector honked his horn and Inez rolled her eyes, gave another kiss to the tip of her cig—

—night with strangers, four margaritas poured into the same plastic cup, mostly tequila. She sat on the steps leading down from the back door, sipped her drink and smoked a Kool. More reggaeton pulsed from stereo speakers propped in the open windows behind her. Backyard of a brick ranch somebody’s relative of somebody rented. A dozen kids chased a soccer ball, scurried behind men who sat in lawn chairs that were circled around a fire pit. The men spoke low and burst out laughing, slapped shoulders, stomped their boots in the dust. Faces golden in the firelight—all unfamiliar, all Mexican, like Jodie had somehow finagled an escape across the border and hid among the natives.

“Qué honda?” said a squat Latino with a black t-shirt too tight across his gut. He leaned on the rail beside her head, put his face inches from hers and grinned like he’d already stuffed his whole evening in the bag. He gulped from his bottle of Sol, lime wedge fizzling inside. He was maybe twenty years old. “No español,” Jodie said.

“Qué lástima,” he said, pursing his lips at her, “calor de mi corazón.”

“Something about your heart?” Jodie guessed.

“Heat,” he said, “yes. Javier is my name.”

“Everybody’s name starts with—” She hocked phlegm in the back of her throat.

Toothy Javier imitated the sound, like it was some surefire mating call. He said, “Su cabello es muy bonita.” He brushed his fingers along a red curl that sprang away from her scalp.

“Gracias?” Jodie said, and shrugged.

A couple screaming kids barreled up the steps into the house, almost knocked Jodie’s margarita from her hand. The men around the fire muttered and nudged each other while they watched Javier flirt. They ruined her buzz w

ith their leering. They dragged her back down into her tired body and her worry. Even this place wasn’t— —heater warmed her chilled skin. In another life years ago, Jodie withstood western New York winters, but Atlanta thinned out her blood. Now at the slightest cold snap she shivered like a stray pup in a sewer pipe.

Javier drove Hector’s Celica with headlights spotlighting southbound I-75, an empty splay of pavement this time of night. He wore only his black t-shirt and jeans as if to prove he could fight the cold with nothing but machismo. How Jodie agreed to this ride, she couldn’t remember. Only that Inez had whispered “watch out for him” and winked, like she was giving her blessing. Whitegirl trophy for the stumpy farm boy from Chihuahua or wherever. She knew what they all thought, and she let them think because what did it matter compared to what she knew about herself?

She was in a tequila drowse. Panic worn down after hours on watch, but still throbbing low and constant like the bleep of a forgotten alarm clock in the next apartment over. She watched each exit, afraid a cruiser lurked full of cops itching to take her down and hound her till she cracked. Kool pack in her purse, maybe ten menthols left for her to burn. She took one and scorched its tip with the bright orange spool of the dashboard lighter. The radio played something sweet for once—old Selena, or a J. Lo ballad, or slo-mo Shakira giving her hips a rest.

“This exit,” she told Javier. She was crouched down low in her seat, shoulder strap across her neck. She cracked her window and ashed through the slit, readied herself to lie. She said, “Yo necesito—mas, uh, cigarrillos—from—el estación?—”

“We find a gas station for cigarettes?” Javier said.

“Si, si—but first—my apartamento.”

“Apartamento,” he mused, like she’d named some fine wine he was hankering.

“Aqui,” she said, signaling the turn into her complex. Every parked car, even those familiar, looked like an unmarked with cops inside it. Seemed stupid that they’d post officers to catch a petty thief, but Jodie knew jack about the law or how she might avoid its snare, especially full of this much booze. Amazing she didn’t somehow steer Javier off the face of the planet.

She pointed out her unit and he pulled the Celica into the spot that abutted her door. He twisted the key in the ignition and the headlamps tucked back down into the hood. She touched him on the shoulder. He wore his eagerness like a child promised candy for dessert. The caterpillar mustache above his lip glistened.

“We get inside?” Javier said.

“No, no,” she said. “Please—a momento, okay?”

“Discúlpeme.” He slipped his hand off her thigh and hitched it on his own gaudy silver belt buckle instead. An eagle chewing on a snake, or something like that.

Jodie said, “No, I mean —one momenta and—nosotros vamanos to, uh, tu casa?”

Javier leaned back against the driver door and grinned like he maybe later still had a shot at romance. When Jodie pushed open the door her purse dropped onto the pavement, spilled her cigarette pack, tampons, loose change. She cursed and crouched and scooped it all up. The booze swirled in her head like a toilet flush. She wobbled and righted herself against the Celica’s hood, glanced down through the windshield. Poor slob Javier gave her thumbs-up with both hands and damned if it didn’t somehow help steady her footing. She laid one ear against her apartment door and inched the doorknob to see if it was loose. The sonogram pump of blood in her ear sounded like footsteps. Men waiting in the dark, flexing fingers inside stiff gloves, thugs hired by the man she stole this dirty drug money from.

Damn it, stifle your wild mobster thoughts. Just twist the key, push open the door, click the light switch, put your paranoia to rest.

There was nobody inside but Nero, curled on her bed in the corner. He raised his head and watched her over the curve of his back, squinted at the sudden light. Jodie tugged the money wad from her pocket and started laying it out in piles of five on her bedspread. All hundreds. Nero stretched himself out with a yawn that upturned his tongue and flashed his harmless fangs. He eased across the bed to sniff the bill stacks. Purred like he knew the value of this take. Jodie slapped the last bill down. Ten piles. A total of five thousand even.

“Don’t purr,” she told Nero. “I just ruined your life, too.”

The bathroom was a walk-in closet with a sagging floor. She yanked the string for the overhead bulb, popped the shower stall door. Nobody there. No hands over her mouth or knives to her neck. She snatched her shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, pill bottles, stacked them in the crook of her arm and then piled them on the bed for Nero to tap his nose at. His hackles were raised like he sensed the trouble that just now clouded his close horizons.

Jodie took to her knees bedside, retrieved a vinyl duffel bag she’d bought years ago for a Florida vacation that never happened. She unzipped the bag and loaded in the toiletries, threw open her dresser drawers, groped handfuls of underwear and socks and stuffed them. Jeans and some skirts, t-shirts, pairs of sneakers. The bag fattened full.

The folded slip of paper on top of the dresser she slid it into the back pocket of her pants. A lone red-light blip on the answering machine. Tapped the button and the robot said one new message, today, seven PM. Whatever time it was now, Jodie had no clue. On the recording, Boss clears his throat to talk: “Yeah, uh, Jodie. Something weird, just after you left, so I’m calling around. Appreciate if you’d shoot me back tonight, don’t matter how late—”

His canned voice was enough to knock her seated on the bed. She pressed her face between her hands and Boss rushed toward her through hours and miles until he was there in room huffing hot blame down her spine. She wanted to tell him stop. I confess, here’s what’s owed with interest and here’s my sad magnetic nametag, Jody, spelled wrong.

The windows in this place were three missing cinderblocks with glass, all too high to look through. The money spread out beside her seemed just enough to buy a plot in hell, but it could do something else. It could carry her to her son. She could see him again, and for the first time in five years. What made sense was heaped inside the bag and where she planned to take it, and a man stood in the doorway with his fingers looped into the waistband of his pants.

It was only Javier. No deadbolt on her door, just a rinkydink chain lock she installed herself last month after a drunk man, a stranger, bashed on her door and screamed “Queenie, come out with your hands up! I’m gone wrap a staircase round your neck.” But here, unthinking, she left the door wide open for Javier to mosey through.

“Okay? Problems?” Javier sang, as if problems were a delight.

“No problem,” she said. She clawed the money back into a single pile, blocked his view of it with her body. If Javier saw, his grin didn’t wiggle even for a second. He crouched down when Nero trotted over to greet him. The cat slid his flank along the lip of Javier’s left cowboy boot. While Nero distracted him, Jodie crammed the money back into her pocket.

She squeezed the flaps of her duffel bag together and zipped it up tight, hoisted it into her arms. “My overnight bag,” she told Javier. “Could you put it in the car, por favor?”

The weight of her luggage nearly knocked him flat. She worried she’d finally scared him off, but he kept up the grin as he lugged the bag back through the door.

Nero eyed the open escape route, pivoted his ears at the clap of a car door, but he showed no urge to flee. He was content with his limited space. He twined himself around her ankle and she lifted him to her chest. He rubbed his face along her chin. She propped him on her shoulder and hurried to the kitchen counter and laid down her purse. Slid inside it three cans of Nine Lives from the cupboard. She decided to leave without locking up. Let them come, let them sift through the meager leftovers, let them wait in the dark, let them—

—circled her lap, fretting and mewling. Nero propped his front paws on the window frame and peered with wide pupils at the night. Javier drove with one stiff arm, wrist hung on the steering wheel at twelve o’clock. Veering out of the complex he cranked through gears and he asked, “Eh, why is you carry the pussy?” “Are you allergic?” Jodie quipped.

“I keep, eh, dog. Pete bull dog. He’s mouth ease angry?”

“It’s fine. We can put el gato in el baño.”

“My house ease small.”

“That’s okay, too.”

Nero howled nonstop, no matter how fast Jodie’s petting. He emitted that fruity stench of animal fear. Jodie inhaled and it infected her, tuned her senses too high. She blurted at Javier, “They’re spraying, is why.” She gestured a nozzle squeeze to illustrate. “In la mañana—the exterminators—will spray—my apartmento for cockroaches—coucarachas, right? The spray no es bueno por el gato, comprende?”

Javier scratched his matted black hair and sneered. He stopped at the red-lit corner of 41 and Roswell: gas stations, Los Reyes bakery, Title Pawn and that KFC with the red-and-white steel Big Chicken landmark, sixty feet tall with moving beak and slow-spin eyes. Its lazy silent squawk seemed like mocking meant all for Jodie.

“Cigarillos, por favor,” she reminded Javier.

He grunted and cut a hard left into a fluorescent BP, squealed the wheels to show off his mood. Jodie fished a wrinkled hundred from her pocket while he jerked up the handbrake. He propped his elbow on the window frame, pressed his fist into his cheek. The Latina on the radio was pitched too high and climbing. But Jodie brushed the hundred along his forearm and sighed, “Por favor.” He gnashed his teeth, she arched her eyebrows, and their music was the last stiff twist of a guitar tuner before the string snapped. Javier slid the cash from her hand. He said, “Hundred?”

“Sorry, it’s all I got.”

“Que tipo?”

“Ty—oh, type? What type? Newports 100s.”

When Javier popped the door open Nero lunged for the exit, but Jodie hooked her fingers under his flea collar. She poured the cat in the back seat where he went on meowing beside her duffel bag.

Javier pushed through into the convenience store. He might’ve refused her, might’ve snatched the key, might’ve pegged her scheme—but Jodie bumbled past these tripwires. It was too much guilt to bear, like some dream she sometimes had of choking an infant blue with her hands and when you wake you think, Christ, who am I in my sleep?

She hoisted herself into the driver’s seat, popped the handbrake and cranked the gearshift toward reverse, but no budge. Nero slinked across her lap again and she shooed, but he anchored his claws to her jeans. The transmission rattled its distress. Javier just inside the store exit, stopped short with a hundred in his hand, no cigarettes. They watched each other through two sets of glass, and Jodie saw her ugliness dawn on him.

Her left foot kicked the clutch and she realized it was a stick shift. She floored the clutch and dropped the stick down into the R slot by mistake. Too much weight on the gas pedal and the car barreled backward with a hard right crank that swerved it a half-circle around. The Celica stalled dead.

Javier came out form the store like any odd bystander. He seemed resigned to do nothing—no jumping the hood or wrenching door handles. Jodie kept her clutch step hard and fired the starter key, thrust the stick into first. The car lurched forward. The cat in her lap swayed and almost tumbled but she caught him by the scruff. Last second she grabbed the wheel and aimed for the road. Sharp left and she shut her eyes and tough luck to oncoming traffic. Crossed two lanes clear but on instinct stopped short of the red light.

The red light stared her down and dared her and she was not its equal.

“Turn,” she pleaded. In the rearview Javier sprinted over grass patch and street.

Still in first, Jodie braved a gas-and-clutch combo. The car heaved through the intersection. Momentum took shape as she glided into second. Javier was further gone behind her with nothing but his hundred-dollar payoff. Heat from the vents and heat in her gut where the tequila simmered, and Nero howl-howling at the glass. She knew for sure which turn— •