Six MONTHS LATER”
Right this moment Daphne knew she desperately needed a job to keep body and soul together, the clock beside her bed shows 2:45am in the morning and she was carefully looking for a vacancy application with a cup of tea in her hand, five different newspapers and surfing through almost ten internet site. Her present condition could be termed pathetic! Or Maybe desperate completely.
After her painful break up with manuel, all through that period she could not think of anything meaningful to do with her life, she couldn’t go to work resulting to her being fired since there was no concrete excuses as to why she did not show up in her workplace for over four weeks.
Daphne couldn’t bath, eat well or sleep well, all she did was to lock up herself in the room, cry, drink and stalk Manuel with his new found love until Lelia dragged her out of the apartment to stay over at her place for sometime.
It took Lelia two months to help Daphne overcome the trauma and heartache she suffered from her break-up, but here she is again, seated on her bed, with the light on frantically scanning the newspaper and different websites for A JOB!
In the last months of the painful experience she passed through, she had lost a lot of weight, she had no one to run to. Manuel was her life, her hope and her family, she was thankful for Lelia’s help so far but she wanted nothing to do with Manuel’s family anymore since Lelia was his cousin, when Manuel introduce her to Lelia as his girlfriend, the two ladies took instant likeness for each other, always looking out for each other even when her relationship was experiencing Rocky times.
Manuel was the only one Daphne looked up to after they met in her workplace when she was a waitress, it was love at first sight for the duo and they were inseparable, Daphne lost her mum in a car accident two years ago in her two years with Manuel, now her mum was gone, and the only Pilar of support who had swore to stay with her till the end was also gone and his absence was the most painful.
After staying with Lelia for four months Daphne decided to leave the city for good, she decided to go back to her mother’s house in NYC, she had been under a lot of stress that caused not having money and no one to run to for support, being awake at night became a ritual, she could not sleep because of everything that was going on in her life, there has been a lot of nights when she would just sit on the window ledge of her mother’s house, looking at the snow covered NYC Street which were illuminated by street lights and very few people walking on them.
When she was little her father always told her that she should never give up on the things she wanted in life, that she has to fight to get them, her father was her role model, a very honest and quiet man until her mother cheated on him, the pain and trauma was too much for him to bear which caused him his life and the woman in question never showed any remorse whatsoever, Daphne had woken up one morning by his side and his heart wasn’t beating anymore, she could still remember the words he said to her the night before.
“Daphne never give up on yourself, I love you and will always look after you” and she believed her father, even now that she is currently beaten down on the floor she knew he was looking after her, encouraging her to be strong and make something out of herself as always.
Daphne couldn’t stand the way her mother took advantage of her dad even when he was on his sick bed, she continued going on with other men just because she wanted to live an extravagant life, after her father was buried she swore never to take after her mother’s footsteps neither would she ever see her mother again until the woman she called mother died in a car accident on the spot, according to the report given she was coming back from the club, dead drunk with her partner driving on the highway.
Hot tears slid down her cold cheek as those painful memories kept on playing in her head, she quickly wiped it, ” I must not cry anymore” for months she had often cried when going to bed and when she wakes up the next morning that she thought there was no more tears to shed and because of that she forced herself to go through the newspaper all over again.
When she started looking through the newspaper paper again, she noticed a short notice that caught her attention for some reasons, it was written tiny in the Middle, at the back of the newspaper which says
“Looking for a housekeeper”
There was a contact under the advertisement, she went through the notice few times which made mention of the specific age needed, between 22-35 years, workday from 7am-9pm Monday to Saturday, accomodation and feeding would be taken care of and the salary…… her eyes widen.
$400 per hour.
She read the vacancy notice few times to assimilate what was written, even though she desperately needed the money, she could not earn it as a maid for completely unknown people, is she even qualified for the job atall? Daphne shook her head to clear her thoughts and then decided to write down the number, ready to call in the morning.
When she continued looking at the other newspapers , writing down some contacts of the vacancy notice she found there she felt her eyes were getting heavy and it was harder to think straight, she looked at the clock and it was showing 4:35am, she picked the newspapers, put the empty tea mug on the nightstand and settled in her bed where sooner than expected she was wrapped in a restless sleep as many nights as before.