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formally.”
                  “This my step sister, Pym.  Pym, this is Amanda, the girl I was telling you about.”  She and I smiled tightly at each other.  “Why are you dressed like that?”
                  “I’m in charge today,” she answered him smugly, “I had to look—commanding.”
                  “Where’s Cricket?”
                  “You know your mother—she likes to waft in at the last second expecting everything to be running smoothly while she’s been applying her Shalimar and adjusting her Givenchy, but God forbid the table cloths are the wrong length—I’ll be hearing about it until Christmas.”
                  “Big event?” I asked.
                  “Political fundraiser,” he answered.  “Why are you carrying a clipboard?”
                  “Because the fucking wifi is out,” Pym said evenly, “so I’m having to do this all on paper and if you ask me one more question I will shove it up your ass.”  I decided Pym might have some likeable qualities.  “Now I have to go make sure the hors d’oevres are being prepared without garlic—the Senator’s emtire family is allergic.”  She tried to stride purposefully off, but her tiny heels sunk into the grass with each step—she’d have been more ‘commanding’ in flip-flops.  
    “So, I’m glad you came.”  He rocked from his heels to his toes and back again while I crossed my arms, to guard against whatever effect he wanted meeting him here to have.  “I, uh, talked to my mother, who talked to the head housekeeper, who thinks we’re about to have an opening.”
                  “An opening?” I asked.
                  “It’s a good gig because they’re only here less than half the year and with such a large staff you don’t have to clean much.  And if the head housekeeper likes you in a few years you could maybe move up to the Connecticut place—or even Aspen if that’s your thing.”
                  “My thing?”
                  “Yeah.”  He slid his hands into the back of his shorts, which made all his muscles flex.  “Oh, and you have to submit to a background check, but that’s just standard.”
                  Once again I was stunned.  And in total disbelief that I’d spent four hours of gas money for this.  “You’re offering me a job cleaning up after you ?!  That’s how you’re going to make it up to me?”  I spun for my car. 
                  “W-well, I just thought, hostess, and, and you brought the cart, and—”
                  “Oh my God.”  I threw the door open and flung myself in.  It was by far the best—and only—offer I had going, but there was no way.  Fucking Delilah’s pride.  It made its presence in me known at the most inopportune moments.
                  He put his hand on the door.  “I was just trying to help.”
                  I looked up at him, struggling to close my gaping jaw and say something.  “ Help would’ve been stepping in, putting your asshole, yes, asshole of a friend in check.  Barring that, help would’ve been maybe asking what I wanted to do next.”
                  “Well, what do you want to do?”
                  “I don’t know yet.”  I was brought up short.  “Look, maybe all I’m qualified to be is a maid—and I will do it with my head held high.  But I would like to have been asked if maybe I was dreaming just a little bit bigger than that.  You look like the kind of people who could put in a word for someone.”
                  “Oh, God, we are—we can.  I’m sorry, please stay.”  He seemed genuinely mortified.  “This was a mistake—let me make this up to you.”  He waited for my answer, looking like he might jump on the hood of my car to stop me from