She has tuned into a news station and they are rattling off all the things that are wrong in the world. Israel and Palestine at odds like they have been ever since Asher can remember. The president fighting with Congress. Hostages. Kim Davis campaigning against gay marriage. A car bombing outside an American embassy. Another movie theater shooting. The local news is mostly about the weather—rain in the forecast—and talk of oil still showing up in the Gulf and how cruise ships are impacting the reef. No mention of a man who has kidnapped his son and was last spotted shopping at Fausto’s.

At least this lady is clean, Asher thinks, even if she isn’t very friendly. She has draped thin, colored scarves over the lamps. Dozens of bottles, tubes, and tubs of makeup are lined up in neat rows on the bathroom sink. She has cleared everything off the desk by the front window. There is a box filled with a dozen or so pens and five white legal pads crowded with slanted cursive writing. She has even made her own bed, but when Asher asks her if she wants fresh sheets she says “Of course” as if it is crazy to think she can use the same set two days in a row.

Asher loves finding the symmetry of bedsheets, the finality of clean dishes in a drainer. When he was growing up he had been the one who kept their house. His mother had worked like a mule and been treated like a dog at the high school, where she had been the janitor. The students made fun of her, made messes just so she had to clean them up. She had spent her days scrubbing toilets and scraping dried snot and gravels of gum off the bottoms of desks. More than once his face had burned with shame when he dashed by her in the school hallway as she spread sawdust over vomit or cleaned vulgar graffiti off lockers. Luke had fought people in school when they insulted her. He was suspended for fistfights three times, all in her defense. But Asher, he thinks now, had been a coward.

As he leaves Mrs. Lewis’s room she puts her hand on the crook of his arm.

“Wait. I know your face. You look so familiar. Were you ever on TV?”

“I’ve just got one of those faces, ma’am,” he says, and slips away, his heart pounding.

By the time Asher gets to the other rooms the guests have gone to the beach or out to eat. He cleans the bathrooms, gathers the towels (the most disgusting part, to his mind), makes the beds, dusts, sanitizes the remotes, Windexes the windows, mirrors, and television screens, puts fresh plastic bags in the ice buckets, new bags in the trash cans, restocks the soaps and bottles, runs the vacuum.