Writer's Note:

As someone who usually works late, I am often still perched at my cubicle when the cleaning lady arrives, and I usually am one of the few people who engage them, instead of simply ignoring their presence or complaining of their incompetence while they are a foot away. One night a few years back, one cleaning lady with whom I exchanged an exuberant smiling "hi!" daily, approached me. She was quite worked up, and proceeded to show me what appeared to be a picture of a baby on her cell phone and tried to explain to me in very broken english what this particular photo meant to her-- most of which I could not understand, although I did discern that she moved here from Serbia six months prior, leaving her family behind, and this photo was of a new family member back home. Later that night, I couldn't stop thinking about her, and I realized that in her loneliness, my simple gesture of hello each day was the only intimacy she had, and that was why she chose me to share what was apparently a very special moment for her. So I wrote this scene to give her a companion, someone who is going through his own share of loneliness, as he adjusts to the process of divorcing, made more complicated due to the financial crisis. And I also got to explore the idea of this smart woman who has had to downsize herself in many ways to survive in this country-- by wiping off her makeup, pinning up her hair, and changing from her vibrant clothes into the drab cleaning lady uniform.