Grimm - Money Woes/Crow - Help Wanted

Abbey Grimm logged on to her computer like any other day, intending to check her finances. Find out how much they had left in the account for this month, what bills need paying, etc. She rubbed her eyes in disbelief. There was a long list on the credit card bill of expenses, a wedding dress, champagne, food, flowers.

"Your wedding is going to cost HOW MUCH?" Abbey screamed at her sister.

"Look, Ab, when you get married you'll understand. I just want it to be perfect."

"And perfection requires a thousand dollar wedding dress? You are going to take all that crap back before the wedding on Wednesday. We can't afford this!"

Nadine tried to explain that most of the items were non-refundable. "And I cut the tags off my dress!" Abbey walked away before Nadine could finish.


Across the neighborhood, another fight was going on.

"How do you not tell your husband that you are pregnant, Eve?" Ryen Crow asked, sounding defeated.

"I wanted it to be a surprise! And sometimes women lose the baby before now, so I didn't want to say anything if I wasn't absolutely sure."

"This surprised me alright. And you did it in front of the entire neighborhood. I want to make this place our home, Eve, but I can't do that if you're going to make me look like a fool in front of our neighbors."


Ryen couldn't sleep in the bed that night. He was too mad to sleep next to her. "I'm sleeping on the couch," he spat bitterly. But the couch wasn't comfortable for sleeping. He was restless. He glanced on the floor near him and saw an empty soda and a bag of chips that Eve had been munching on earlier. 'This place is filthy,' he thought. 'We should really hire a maid.'


And that's what he did. The next evening he put out an ad, searching for someone to help tidy up and do little things that were needed around the house. In the ad he typed, "will pay very well," to hopefully speed things up.

There was an email in his inbox first thing in the morning. Abbey Grimm applied for the position. The flexible hours and easy work would be just the thing to pull in some extra cash and still leave her able to work on her novel.


Abbey came in to work the next morning at eleven. Eve was in a meeting with the spokessim talking about starting a school, since she was a teacher in their old town. "Thanks for doing this," Ryen said, feeling awkward. He barely knew this woman and she was going to be cleaning up his messes. He made a mental note to be more neat.

"Hey, don't sweat it," she replied. "I've gotten pretty good at cleaning, taking care of my sister all these years. Can you show me how your dishwasher works?"

Ryen walked Abbey through how everything worked, even showing her how to make the sink faucet run "hot", as if she couldn't figure that one out. After he walked her through every mundane task, he left her to it.

She spent the afternoon getting comfortable in her new job, thinking the entire time, "This is the nicest house I've ever been in, and I'm scrubbing its counters."