Good help is hard to find, chochacho.

Damn. So, as you know, last year Conchita quit on me, and even the chick who was tendin' the vegetable garden ended up gettin' herself fired at the peak of vegetable season. Not to mention Waterbury bein' a famous spy or whatever and then leaving. Between these three, I been havin' a pretty bad run with the help lately. Today was no different.

For a couple months I been havin' this kid Darius come clean the pool, and he's been doin' a fine enough job. He gets all the maple leaves out, and disposes of the dead potato bugs in the incinerator like I ask, and even is careful about scrubbing all the grout. The problem? He usually comes around 9am, and I been real weird about wakin' up early lately (I still can't bring myself to get the diabetes test), so I always see him, and he smiles WAY too much. The kid smiles even after he says "good morning!" and gets back into his work. I'll go back inside while he's smilin' at his scrub brush or whatever, and maybe get some fresh shorts outta the dryer, then look slyly out the window and he'll still be smilin' away like a nut. Shit drives me crazy at 9am when all I want in the world is to be left alone with my Bloody Mary and morning calamari. To have a young man constantly smiling at you is no way to live.

So, I gave him his notice this morning. He wandered into the yard, and I was standing there with a hardhat and a couple rolled-up scrolls of paper, looking extremely tense. He started to smile and asked me what was goin' on, so I laid it out real simple for him: I said I was tearin' out the pool because historical maps revealed that there used to be a graveyard where my property is, and I was worried about skeletons and the spirit world and such. He smiled real big and said that if I ever needed any help around the yard to give him a call, and then he gave me a smile and left. Shit almost destroyed me.