“I’m at Body Time.” I gave him a minute to switch gears.

“Okay,” Claude said cautiously. I could hear a creaking of bedsprings as the big policeman sat up in bed.

Maybe if I took this step by step it wouldn’t be so bad? I glanced over at the still figure on the bench.

No way to ease up to this. I’d just plunge right in.

“Del Packard is here, and he got squashed,” I said.

I did make it to my first job on time, but I was still in my workout sweats, and still barefaced. So I was uncomfortable, and disinclined to do more than nod by way of greeting Helen and Mel Drinkwater. They weren’t chatty people either, and Helen didn’t like to see me work; she just liked seeing the results. She’d been giving me hard looks, since September when I’d been sucked into a notorious brawl in the Burger Tycoon parking lot-but she hadn’t said anything, and she hadn’t fired me.

I’d decided that she’d passed the point of most concern. Her pleasure in a clean house had outweighed her misgivings about my character.

Today the Drinkwaters went out their kitchen door at a pretty sharp clip, each sliding into a car to begin his/her own workday, and I was able to start my usual routine.

Helen Drinkwater doesn’t want to pay me to do a total cleaning job on the whole house, which is a turn-of-the-century two-story. She pays me for two and a half hours, long enough to change the sheets, do the bathrooms and kitchen, dust, gather up the trash, and vacuum. I do a quick pickup first because it makes everything easier. The Drinkwaters are not messy, but their grandchildren live just down the street, and they are. I patrolled the house for scattered toys and put them all in the basket Helen keeps by the fireplace. Then I pulled on rubber gloves and trotted up to the main bathroom, to start scrubbing and dusting my way through the house. No pets, and the Drinkwaters washed and hung up their clothes and did their own dishes. By the time I rewound the cord on the vacuum cleaner, the house was looking very good. I pocketed my check on the way out. Helen always leaves it on the kitchen counter with the salt shaker on top of it, as if some internal wind would blow it away otherwise. This time she’d anchored down a note, too. “We need to pick a Wednesday for you to do the downstairs windows,” said Helen’s spiky handwriting.