Free April & Oliver by Tess Callahan Page B

front of Oliver and twists it open. She makes the tea and closes out the cash
     register, draining the taps as the last customers leave. Bernadette takes a few sips of her tea and lets the rest go cold.
     Too strong, April supposes. She takes out her keys. “Are you leaving out the front or back?”
    “Which way are you going?” Oliver asks.
    “I’ve got another hour of cleanup,” she says, turning off the neon lights.
    “We can help you,” Bernadette offers.
    “Thanks, but it’s a one-person job.”
    “April,” Oliver says. “We came to see you home, so we’ll do whatever it takes to get you out of here.”
    “It isn’t necessary,” April says. “And to be honest, I don’t want you to.”
    “Too bad,” Oliver says. “Because here we are.”
    April dead-bolts the front door and starts turning chairs upside down on tabletops. What the hell. Let him see her like this.
     She carries a rack of dirty glasses back to the dishwasher and begins loading it. Her apron is discolored, her hairline damp
     with perspiration. Oliver comes in behind her. “I’m going to clean the bathrooms next,” she says. “Want to watch that, too?”
    “Nana said you fainted today.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “So she lied?”
    “She misunderstood.” She snaps on a pair of rubber gloves, canary yellow. “I work faster alone.” She picks up a bottle of
     disinfectant.
    “Bernadette wants to offer you her place, if you don’t mind the smell of paint. You’ll have it to yourself for a week.”
    April stops herself before asking where Bernadette will be. She wonders why they bother with separate apartments. “Thank you,
     but I like my own bed.”
    “If I thought you’d changed your locks today, I wouldn’t be bothering you.”
    “What if I did?”
    He raises a skeptical brow.
    She brushes past him and heads for the men’s room. He follows her inside, motioning for Bernadette to come after. The room
     is dingy, the wall behind the urinal spotted from men who missed their mark. Bernadette folds her arms across her chest, appraising
     the scene.
    “So you’re the janitor, too?” Oliver asks.
    “The extra money buys me a tank of gas,” April says. “Did you think I’d be too proud?”
    April thinks of her grandmother at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, cleaning priests’ toilets for twenty-five years, hearing their
     complaints about paint chips in the bathtub.
“What was I supposed to do?”
Nana lamented.
“Stand there and catch them as they fell?”
    “I didn’t come here to argue,” Oliver says.
    “Why are you here?” April asks.
    “Appease me,” he says.
    She sighs, wiping her forehead with her arm. “First of all, I’m not going home. And second, I don’t need an escort.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “Nowhere if I don’t get this bathroom done. Now will you excuse me, please?”
    “I’ll help you,” he says, taking a scrub brush. “You do the sink. I’ve got the john.”
    “I’ll do the mirror,” Bernadette says. “I can handle that.”
    “Don’t you think this makes me just a little uncomfortable?”
    “We do our own every week,” Oliver says. “A toilet is a toilet.”
    April shakes her head and wrings out the mop, like strangling a chicken. For a few moments, they work in silence. She pummels
     the sink until the bristles of her scouring brush are bent. When Oliver is done, he comes beside her and lathers his hands
     to his elbows. She notices the fine hair on his forearms, curly and wet.
    “I’ve mopped us into a corner,” April says.
    She watches his back as he bends over the sink, his shoulders beneath his canvas shirt, sleeves rolled up. He has changed
     his clothing since leaving her apartment.
    “It’s strange,” he says, prying loose a paper towel from its overstuffed bin. “My memories keep moving back; today all I can
     think of is the week he was born. I had poison ivy and wasn’t allowed to touch him, remember?”
    April doesn’t answer. Bernadette wipes the glass,