The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Calhoun asked her husband to pass along to me a list of his friends and associates who were looking for housecleaners, and in no time I had work lined up every day of the week. There were many bosses to practice my English on, and while I’d never command the language the way my daughter would, I could speak it as well as a man making a promise—that is, with equal doses of earnestness and desperation, along with enough wiggle room to escape out of a commitment by feigning a misunderstanding (“Three days a week? I’m sorry; I thought you said three hours a week. We will need to renegotiate my fee”).
    Cleaning other people’s houses—their cherished possessions in both good and bad taste, the chipped dishes they eat off of, the ratty sofas they make love on, the unlevel, puckering floors they shed curly hairs on—is the most intimate relationship you can have with them. Yet every boss I’ve worked for wants that relationship to be unobtrusive to the point of being invisible. I have done my best to live my life in between those two places, intimacy and invisibility. Over the years I’ve absolved the remains of a thousand indiscretions without judgment, and have learned not to ask questions. Men staying over, friends moving in, children moving out; none of this is my concern. If my job is done right, what you find when you get home is a comforting antiseptic, fresh Band-Aid smell, spotless floors, and no evidence another human being, a cleaning lady, was ever there.
    Cleaning lady? A hell of a term. There’s nothing ladylike about it. To be a good cleaning lady, you must learn to act like a man.
    On my last cleaning day, I arrived to find a note from Mrs. Calhoun on the dining room table. I couldn’t read it because blinds had been installed on the sliding glass doors and the house was coated in blackness. Opening the blinds for sunlight, I squinted to read the faint handwriting.
    â€œTake the day off,” it said. “You deserve it.”
    On the opposite side, “For Felicia,” and a list of her personal items, including the corduroy couch. Confused, I wanted to ask Mrs. Calhoun to explain, but the house was quiet, save for what sounded like rain pelting the sliding glass doors,
drop drop drop
. Through the blinds, I saw the jacaranda tree raining crisp, dazzling violet blossoms from its branches atop a floating body in a lavender bathrobe, its legs together, its arms outstretched as if reaching for something.
    I plunged into the cold water, wading through the thick swamp of jacaranda until I reached Mrs. Calhoun’s feet. The flowers pounded our bodies,
drop drop drop,
with a sudden violence that blanketed us. Mrs. Calhoun’s bathrobe was heavy and her body rigid. My head bobbed for air as I struggled to stay afloat; I was drowning. All around me was the loud roar of water, a sound that still wakes me up in the middle of the night, screaming. I could not carry us both back to the rim of the pool. When I surrendered her body, it floated out to the center of the pool and slid under the thick carpet of fallen flowers.
    Beneath a raining jacaranda tree, the blossoms shuddered and fell.

3

Our Lady of the Lost Angels
    I sn’t a miracle something we see every day but ignore? Then I, too, am a miracle, but I want to be seen, and be heard. The telling is the most dangerous part of my story. And though we’ve just met, I can tell you have time to listen. I can tell we are going to be friends.
    Evil is everywhere. The Devil is looking for lost angels; on the streets you wander, in your neighbors’ hearts, which you peek into when gossip chirps in your ears, even under the bed you lie on. Do you know about the Devil’s Toe? If you feet dangle over the bottom edge of the mattress, the Devil reaches up from Hell, touches your big toe, and controls what direction you walk in when you wake, steering you into bad luck, pain, misery, and death. I was nine