Turnover

June pulled the van into the loading zone at ten past eight and sat for a minute with the engine running. The building was a four-story walk-up on Clement, beige stucco, fire escape zigzagging down the front like stitches in skin. Third floor, 3R. She’d been here hundreds of times. She’d never come with the van.

She cut the engine, pulled on her nitrile gloves in the cab — force of habit, the gloves went on before the door opened — and went around back for the kit. Two buckets nested inside each other. The shop vac. Three rolls of contractor bags, the thick black ones. Spray bottles in a caddy: the degreaser, the enzyme cleaner, the peroxide solution. TSP in a Ziploc. Razor scraper. Knee pads. The whole rig fit in a plastic tote she could carry one-handed up the stairs, leaving the other hand for the rail.

Third floor. She set the tote down and unlocked the door with the key the landlord had mailed her, not the one she’d carried for eleven years. That key was on her regular ring. She used the landlord’s.

The apartment smelled like her mother’s apartment. Which was information she didn’t need — she already knew whose apartment it was. But the nose doesn’t negotiate. Murphy Oil Soap and something floral, lavender maybe, or the ghost of lavender in the fibers of the couch. And underneath it, the thing the lavender was there to manage: the sweet, acrid, complicated smell of a body living alone in twelve hundred square feet for nine years.

She started in the kitchen the way she always started in the kitchen. Kitchens have the most biological material. Refrigerator first. She opened it and the interior light didn’t come on — someone had unplugged it already, the landlord probably. The smell was manageable. Her mother hadn’t been cooking much by the end. Four containers of yogurt, all expired. A jar of cocktail olives with a quarter inch of brine. Half a lemon in a sandwich bag, furred with white mold. Mustard, ketchup, relish — the holy trinity of condiments that outlive their owners. She’d found the same three bottles in a hoarder’s house in the Sunset last spring, pushed to the back of a refrigerator that hadn’t been opened in two years.

She bagged everything without sorting. The protocol was the same as any other cleanout: perishables first, then surfaces, then fixtures. You don’t look at things. You process them. A refrigerator is a sequence of shelves. A shelf is a sequence of items. An item goes in the bag or it doesn’t.

The cocktail olives went in the bag.

Under the sink: more Murphy Oil Soap, a can of Bon Ami her mother had used for the porcelain, a pair of yellow rubber gloves so old the fingers had stiffened into a permanent curl. June’s own gloves were nitrile, blue, disposable. Her mother had washed and reused the same pair of rubber gloves for — she didn’t know how long. Since the nineties, maybe. Since June was in high school, scrubbing the bathtub with Bon Ami on Saturday mornings while her mother supervised from the doorway, arms crossed, pointing at the places she’d missed.

She sprayed the counters with the degreaser and let it sit. Five minutes. That’s what the label said and that’s what she gave it, every job. She set the timer on her phone and moved to the cabinets.

Her mother’s dishes were still in there. This wasn’t a cleaning — it was a cleanout. Everything goes. The landlord wanted it broom-clean by Friday, which was three days from now, which was more than enough time for a twelve-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom, even solo. June had done three-bedroom Victorians in the Richmond in two days. A meth house in Daly City in four hours, though that was just surfaces — the belongings were already in evidence.

She stacked the dishes into a box she’d brought. Her mother’s everyday set: white with a blue rim, service for four, though it had been service for one since June’s father left in 2011 and service for two only on the Sundays June came for dinner. Three of the dinner plates remained. One salad plate. Two bowls. A cup with no saucer and a saucer with no cup. She put them in the box and put the box by the door.

The timer went off. She wiped the counters. Under the degreaser, the laminate was the same pale yellow it had been her whole life. A stain near the stove — soy sauce, maybe, or coffee — that predated her. The stain had always been there. She left it.

She pulled the stove out from the wall. Behind every stove in every apartment she had ever cleaned, there was an archaeological record: crumbs, grease, a petrified noodle, a twist tie. Her mother’s stove hid two pens, a refrigerator magnet from a Chinese restaurant that had closed in 2019, and a folded index card. June picked up the index card. It was a recipe in her mother’s handwriting — tight, vertical, the letters not touching each other. Pfeffernüsse. Her mother had never made pfeffernüsse. June had never heard her mother say the word pfeffernüsse. She didn’t know her mother knew what pfeffernüsse were.

She put the card in her back pocket without deciding to.

The kitchen took forty minutes. She moved to the bathroom.

In the bathroom cabinet: Tylenol, a blood pressure prescription three months expired, dental floss, a tube of hydrocortisone cream, a comb with several teeth missing, and a man’s watch. A Seiko, silver band, not running. She held it in her palm. It was heavy the way watches used to be heavy. Her father had worn a Casio. Her mother hadn’t dated anyone — or hadn’t told June, which was different, and June understood the difference but was not going to pursue it in the bathroom of an apartment she was cleaning out professionally.

She put the watch in the box with the dishes.

The mirror had a crack in the lower left corner that she’d never noticed. Or had always noticed and never registered. She couldn’t tell. She cleaned the mirror with the peroxide solution and the crack stayed. Obviously. She cleaned around it.

The bathtub was Bon Ami clean. Her mother had cleaned it the morning of the day she left for assisted living. June knew this because her mother had told her, twice, on the phone, as if the bathtub were a pet that needed to be in good condition for the transfer. I cleaned the tub. You should see the tub. June saw the tub. It was immaculate. She cleaned it again because that was the protocol.

She was on her knees, running the scrub brush along the grout line, when she realized she was using the same motion her mother had taught her. Circular, overlapping, from the drain outward. She didn’t change the motion. It was the correct motion. It worked. The fact that it had been given to her by the person whose absence had created this job was not relevant to the grout.

The bathroom took twenty-five minutes.

She ate lunch in the van. A sandwich from the deli on Geary, turkey and Swiss, which she ate with her gloves off, sitting on the bumper. The fog had come in while she was inside and the street had that midday grey that makes noon feel like dusk. A man walked past with a dog that stopped to investigate the van’s tire. The man pulled the leash. The dog resisted, then didn’t. June ate her sandwich and watched them go.

Back inside, she started the bedroom. The bed had been stripped. Her mother’s clothes were still in the closet — June’s sister was supposed to have come for those, but Karen lived in Portland now and supposed-to was Karen’s particular idiom. June pulled the clothes out in armfuls and laid them on the bare mattress. Her mother was a small woman who wore dark colors. The pile on the mattress looked like a collapsed shadow.

She bagged the clothes. She did not smell them. Smelling them was something a person in a movie would do, and June was not in a movie. She was doing a cleanout. The clothes went in the contractor bags, four bags total, knotted at the top, carried to the hallway.

In the back of the closet, behind the shoe rack: a shoebox. Not shoes. June opened it. Letters. A stack of maybe thirty, rubber-banded, addressed to her mother in handwriting she didn’t recognize. The postmark on the top envelope: 2014. Three years after her father left. The return address was a town in Oregon she’d never heard of. The handwriting was not her father’s. The rubber band was brittle and snapped when she moved the stack, and the letters fanned across the closet floor like a hand of cards.

She did not read them. She put them in the box with the dishes and the watch and the recipe for pfeffernüsse.

The bedroom took thirty-five minutes. She was ahead of schedule.

The living room was last. The couch was too heavy to move alone but the landlord hadn’t asked her to remove furniture — just clean around it. She vacuumed the carpet with the shop vac, which was overkill for residential carpet but was what she had. The shop vac didn’t care if the carpet was in a meth house or her mother’s living room. It extracted particulate at the same rate regardless.

The bookshelves were mostly empty. Her mother had donated the books to the library before moving, one of the few tasks she’d completed without June’s help. Three books remained on the middle shelf: a James Patterson, a bird identification guide for Northern California, and a clothbound copy of The Joy of Cooking with a cracked spine and a torn dust jacket. June opened the cookbook. Inside the front cover, in her mother’s handwriting: Margaret Kowalski, 1987. Her mother’s maiden name. The year she got married. She’d written her maiden name in the cookbook the year she stopped using it.

June closed the book and put it in the box.

She finished the living room. She checked the closets, the crawlspace above the bathroom, the cabinet under the bathroom sink a second time. She ran the shop vac over the kitchen linoleum. She wiped the window in the bedroom — it faced the air shaft, and the light that came through was the grey of a photocopy. She checked the oven. Empty. Clean. Her mother had cleaned the oven too.

She stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the apartment. Twelve hundred square feet of broom-clean. The laminate counter with the stain near the stove. The carpet with the vacuum tracks still showing. The crack in the bathroom mirror. The couch, which would be someone else’s problem. The light through the air shaft window making the bedroom look like it was underwater.

She picked up the tote and the shop vac and the unused contractor bags. She picked up the box. The dishes shifted when she lifted it. The watch slid against the cookbook. The letters were quiet.

She locked the door with the landlord’s key. She left the key under the mat, as instructed. She carried everything down three flights and loaded the van.

In the van, she sat with the engine off. The fog was thicker now. Clement Street had its headlights on at noon. The box was on the passenger seat. She could see the corner of the cookbook through the flap.

Her next job was at two-thirty. A foreclosure in the Excelsior, three-bedroom, the bank wanted it gutted by the weekend. She had the address in her phone. She’d start the same way she always started — kitchen first, refrigerator, top shelf to bottom. The protocol didn’t change. The hands did the same thing. The degreaser sat for five minutes. The timer went off.

She started the van. The box rode beside her like a passenger, and the watch inside it ticked once — she heard it, or thought she heard it — though she’d checked, and it wasn’t running.