Sneak Peak at Other People's Things

Oh my God! It’s less than three weeks until Other People’s Things is out in the world on shelves and Kindles and being read and hopefully loved!

Remember being a kid at your birthday or Christmas and having to wait to open the presents? That’s how I feel right now! All excited and jittery and like I want to sneak frosting off the cake when nobody is looking, only there isn’t any cake. I could probably fix that. Or, hell, I could just cut right to the chase and make myself some frosting and eat it out of the bowl. My mother is watching from the great beyond, but I think maybe she’ll understand.

Anyway. I thought maybe while I’m waiting, I’d share a little taste of the book with you! Two tastes, actually: a super fun book trailer (with thanks to Terry Shepherd, who made it) and the first couple of pages of the book.

Here you go! Enjoy!

Chapter One

NICOLE

Better than jail.

This is my new mantra, and I’ve repeated it a gazillion times already this morning. When Roberta shook me awake at the god-awful and ridiculous hour of five a.m.—this is better than jail. When I realized that the coffee in the pot was decaf and there was no cream in Mom’s house—this is better than jail. Now, shivering in the car with a travel mug half full of bitter, zero-zing coffee that has already cooled too much to even warm my hands, the mantra is wearing thin.

Snow is falling in the early-morning darkness, a mesmerizing mosaic in the beam of the headlights. Visibility is nearly zero, and Roberta inches along in silence, white-knuckling the steering wheel, straining toward the windshield as if those few extra inches will offer an advantage. Normally I’d point out that by cruising at the speed of an elderly glacier, she is creating a traffic hazard the polar opposite of traveling too fast.

But for once in my life, I keep my mouth shut. My sister has given me—me, Nicole Angelica Marie Wood Brandenburg, jailbird, nutcase, and spectacular failure to launch—a job. This is an act of such beneficence that I’m indebted to her through at least the next three reincarnations, so I need to keep my mouth shut and try to be civil. Since I’m utterly incapable of really keeping snark to myself, I text my best—and only—friend, Ash, instead.

Nicole: OMG! Send help.

Ash: LOL. Housecleaning is that bad?

Nicole: We have entered a cautious driver time warp and will never reach the house. If we don’t make it out, you get my wedding ring.

Ash: <shocked face emoji> Don’t you inflict that on me. Bad Karma.

Nicole: Sell it.

Ash: If it’s real.

Nicole: Ha. Very funny.

“Here we go,” Roberta says, finally easing her well-worn Subaru hatchback into a white expanse of driveway marked by a single set of tire tracks. The neighbors on either side are engaged in snow management, one with a shovel, the other with a snowblower. An exercise in futility, in my opinion, given how fast the flakes are falling.

I hate winter. Five years ago, after Kent and I got married, I started a let’s-leave-Spokane-and-move-someplace-warm campaign. I sent him videos of Mexico. Planted flyers about communities in Arizona and California on his desk. Now that I’ve utterly destroyed my marriage along with my chances of ever having enough money to move out of my mother’s house, all exotic locations are out of the question. Winter will be with me forever.

With a sigh, I accept my fate and open my door, shivering as the cold insinuates itself through my thin coat and my thin flesh and right into my bones. My warm winter clothes and my boots are still at Kent’s condo, and I am neither going back for them nor asking him to send them to me.

“Nickle.” Roberta’s voice holds a warning. “Leave your backpack in the car.”

“But—”

“You get toilet duty. Scrub the bathrooms and the kitchen floor. And I will check your pockets before we leave. Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I salute her, slamming the door harder than necessary. Gratitude for this chance to earn a living has not quite quashed my inner rebel, or my annoyance that she still talks to me as if I’m a child. Better than jail, I remind myself. Also, I owe Roberta both of my kidneys and my immortal soul. As the owner of Sunny Side Up Cleaning Services, she has taken a huge risk in hiring me, since she has every reason to believe that I’m an incorrigible kleptomaniac. But she’s also not stupid, and she’s not about to set me loose dusting curios. I’m unlikely to try to stuff a toilet brush or a mop into my back pocket.

Slipping and sliding in the snow, I wrestle the vacuum cleaner and a bucket full of rags and cleaning solutions out of the hatch, leaving Rob to manage her clipboard, a mop, and a duster. Snow cakes between the tops of my sneakers and my socks as I half wade, half skate to the porch like some ludicrous cross between a clown and an ice dancer. Roberta, her feet snug and warm in boots with serious grips on the soles, has the door unlocked by the time I join her on the porch.

Our eyes meet, and my irritation evaporates. Roberta carries a lot of responsibilities on her shoulders, and it’s beginning to show. Her hair, short for convenience rather than style, is more gray than brown. There’s a permanent furrow in her forehead and lines around her eyes. Her face is kind enough but clearly shows that her life has been mostly hard work and worry, with little time for fun. By the time she was twelve, she was babysitting three younger siblings and helping Mom with meals and housework. Now she runs a busy cleaning business while also managing two teenagers and a husband.

If I were any other new employee, she’d probably have pawned me and my orientation off on somebody else and would be sitting in a warm office right now drinking coffee and taking care of the books. But I am not to be trusted, and she and I both know it.

I swear to myself in that moment that I will not remove any object from this house, or the house of any other client, no matter what I see, or feel, or how strong the temptation. But the instant I cross the threshold, I realize with crystal clarity what a bad idea it is for me to work for a cleaning service. This house is a land mine. Every flat surface is covered with stuff. Figurines. Magazines. Odds and ends of this and that.

Roberta’s voice, giving me instructions, drifts farther and farther away. My heart thuds against my ribs; my mouth goes dry. I discipline myself to take three slow, deep breaths, an act of faith that the long line of counselors who have advocated this technique might actually know what they’re talking about. Other than a sneeze induced by a floral air freshener, the results are inconclusive, but at least I haven’t gone into a full-on panic attack.

Roberta, who knows about my weird compulsion even though she doesn’t begin to understand it, sighs. “Please just get to work. We don’t have time for your nonsense.”

From the relative safety of the doormat, I scope out what I can see of the house. Everything looks reassuringly normal. No twisting or bending or shimmering of the light. No random objects demanding to be picked up and moved. But I know from experience that books are one of the worst offenders, and they are everywhere.

“Come look at this, first.” Rob leads me through a house that is cluttered but surprisingly clean. Visible bits of carpet are vacuumed. There’s not a speck of dust. The kitchen sink is empty and spotless, a dishcloth folded perfectly in half and hung over the gleaming faucet to dry. A notebook sits on the counter, and Roberta flips it open and points to a precisely written list.

“Most customers have a book like this where they leave special instructions. Mrs. Lane always writes something, so you need to remember to look. No special requests today, so we’ll just dust, scrub, and vacuum wherever there’s a space to do so. Get a move on. Your toilets are waiting.”

I stick my tongue out, very mature and professional, take a breath, and venture into the main bathroom. Here, there is no clutter. Spotless floor. Shining toilet bowl. Not so much as a stray hair in the sink. Perfect guest towels in sunshine yellow hang precisely on the rack. Unused decorative hand soaps sit in a dish on the counter. I doubt this bathroom has ever been used, and I find myself wondering if Mrs. Lane is lonely.

Reminding myself that the emotional well-being of a woman I have never met is not my problem, I queue up music on my phone, turn up the volume, and start scrubbing nonexistent soap scum from the bathtub to the accompaniment of the Three Tenors. I’ve finished the tub and sink and am pumicing the already pristine toilet when Roberta bounces in to check on me.

“What is that caterwauling?” she shouts, to make herself heard above “O Sole Mio.” She grabs my phone and shuts off the music. “I don’t get why you insist on listening to this. Or why you can’t wear earbuds.”

I shrug, trying to unstick hair from my cheek with my shoulder. “Helps me focus. Forgot to bring the earbuds.”

Rob likes the Beatles and the Bee Gees. Old-school stuff that is easy to listen to and doesn’t make you think. My tastes are weird and eclectic, and I’ll listen to anything from acid rock to opera, but when I’m feeling anxious, classical is where it’s at.

“Try something zippier,” Roberta says. “We’re not meditating, we’re working. Get a move on. We haven’t got all day.”

“I’m not Mary Poppins,” I protest. “Not magic. It takes time to scrub every—”

“You don’t have to scrub every surface,” she says.

I look up at her, Roberta in her mom jeans and oversize T-shirt, with that face that broadcasts honest and dependable as clearly as a bat signal. With a shock like the cold of a toilet swirlie, a torment with which I have way too much personal experience, I see in her eyes what she will never say out loud:

“Just wipe everything down with a damp cloth. Spray some air freshener around. No need to waste time doing what has already been done. Mrs. Lane will never know and we can be out of here and on to the next house.”

“And I’m the criminal in the family,” I say, never able to keep my mouth shut.

“Just hurry, will you?” Roberta turns and stalks away, but I don’t miss the fact that she didn’t ask, “What are you even talking about?” Which means she knows damn well, and I’m right about what she wants me to do.

And I absolutely and utterly cannot do it. If my job is to scrub this bathroom, I am compelled to scrub this bathroom. Every square inch of it. I won’t sleep tonight if I get paid for something I didn’t do. Which just highlights how screwed up I am. When I take something that doesn’t belong to me, it feels 110 percent right and I sleep like a baby, but I’m incapable of the small dishonesties the rest of the world takes for granted.

Today, I’m not taking anything, I remind myself, no matter what I see or feel, or how many damn books there are in this house. I change up my mantra and run it through my head, over and over and over again.

Don’t hurt Rob. Do my job. Stay out of jail.

Everything is fine until I move on to the master bedroom. The bed is neatly made, but the room is crammed with stacks of books and magazines, games and puzzles, plastic craft bins, and other random stuff. A narrow pathway winds through the clutter to the bathroom, which, unlike the guest bathroom, shows signs of frequent and recent use.

Shampoo and conditioner, bodywash, a can of shaving cream, and three razors compete for space in a shower caddy. A hand towel, slightly damp, hangs askew on a hook by the sink. And a shelf stuffed with paperbacks lurks next to the door, waiting to ambush me.

This strikes me as manifestly unfair. There are rules. I mean, sure, keeping a reading book in the bathroom makes total sense, but a shelf crammed full of them? During my almost thirty years, I’ve relocated a wide variety of objects from one place to another, but books, above all things, are my kryptonite. Why, I don’t know, but I do have a theory.

Books absorb energy from readers. Energy doesn’t like to stagnate, it wants to move. Ergo, books want to move. And now, on this day where I must not, no matter what, move anything other than dirt and dust, here I am up close and personal with what I most need to avoid.

I deliberately turn my back on the rainbow of colors and textures created by all of those lovely spines. I will not look. I will not touch. Today I am cleaning toilets and scrubbing showers and floors and washing mirrors. I turn the music back on, then don a pair of gloves and get them wet and foamy with cleaning spray to augment my always fragile willpower. As I scrub the shower, I sing along to “Ave Maria,” hoping in my heart that maybe the Holy Mother really does exist and will extend some sort of mercy from heaven down to me.

No such luck.

The sensation of wrongness starts at the base of my spine, as it always does, creeping and crawling like a spider, tiny legs whispering upward from one vertebra to the next. I slap at it, soapy glove and all, even though I know nothing is there, and mutter under my breath, “Do my job. Don’t hurt Rob. Stay out of jail.”

I laser focus on my task. Rinse the shower clean. Squeegee the glass. By the time I move on to the sink, the spider sensation has given way to an army of ants running up and down, occasionally stopping to bite. I breathe in, the smell of bleach and chemicals crisping the hair in my nose, burning my sinuses, but that does nothing to intercept the ant parade.

The sink doesn’t need scrubbing, and I’m done with it all too fast. When I start on the mirror, I find myself staring at a reflection of the books. I can’t read the titles, but I don’t need to in order to see which book is causing the problem. There’s a blur and shimmer around it, as if I’m looking at it through a heat haze.

Do my job. Don’t hurt Rob. Stay out of jail. But I need to dust the bookshelf, which puts me directly in the way of temptation. Holding my breath, I whisk my duster over the danger zone, resolved to finish and get my hands safely immersed in a bucket of soapy water as rapidly as possible.

The book that wants to be moved is an old paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno, the binding creased and broken. Well, that’s appropriate, since I’m obviously inhabiting one of the circles of hell. I allow myself to touch the spine once, ever so lightly, and when I draw back my hand, it wants to cling to my fingers like cobwebs. I rub my hand on my jeans, trying to wipe off the lingering sensation, and with an effort of willpower, I manage to pull on my gloves and start scrubbing the floor.

Don’t hurt Rob. Do your job. Stay out of jail.

A party of enthusiastic grasshoppers takes up residence in my belly. From long experience, I know that very soon they will begin to gnaw on my stomach lining and I’ll feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out. All over a battered old book.

If I took it with me, would Mrs. Lane even notice? And if she did notice, would she know I was the one who walked off with it? Even if she figured it out, nobody is going to send me to jail over an old book with a bent cover and dog-eared pages.

“You not done yet?”

I startle and slop a puddle of water onto the floor as Roberta pokes her head in and huffs an annoyed sigh. “You’re gonna have to pick up the pace, Nickle,” she shouts, to be heard over my music. “I already did the kitchen floor for you and started packing stuff out. Wipe up that mess and come on. This is done enough.”

She vanishes and I hear her footsteps on the stairs.

Which means I am now alone with the enemy. As I peel off my gloves slowly, one finger at a time, I tell myself I will not touch the book. I will certainly not take the book. But even as I repeat the words over and over in my head, somehow, the book is in my hands. A moment later, it’s tucked into the waistband of my jeans at the small of my back, my sweatshirt tugged down to cover it.

When I get downstairs, Roberta is already out the door. I put on my coat, which provides extra concealment for my contraband. Then I lug out the bucket and dump it in the snow, well away from the house. Tuck my tools into the open hatch of the car. The motor is running, the stink of exhaust sharp in the back of my throat.

“Thought you were going to search me?” I say, sliding awkwardly into the front seat beside my sister, the book stiff as a brace on my lower back.

She gives me the side-eye as she backs out of the driveway.

“Did you steal something?”

“Nope.”

It doesn’t feel like a lie. It never does.

Want to read more? Pre-order here in the US, and here if you live in the beautiful elsewhere.