MBTI Type: ESFJ

Rose cares a lot about how people perceive her, and on making a good impression on them. When she meets a friend from high school at her day job of cleaning houses, she’s embarrassed that she hasn’t achieved as high a level of success and makes light of her cleaning situation by claiming it’s a temporary position while she gets her real estate license. When her married boyfriend tells her she ought to clean up crime scenes for a living, Rose immediately latches onto the idea—it’s not that much different from what she already knows how to do, and it pays a lot more. She jumps right into it with her sister, without finding out all the details involved, and then must play catch up, by going through all the proper certification programs and finding out what you do with “hazardous waste.” Rose tries to avoid a direct scene with her boyfriend’s wife in a gas station, only to get humiliated when the woman comes in and shames her for what she is doing. Shortly thereafter, she calls off the affair, because she doesn’t like it anymore (and she has finally realized, per her sister’s bluntness, that he is “never going to leave his wife for you”). Rose tries hard to fit in and seem successful in others’ eyes, including going to a baby shower where a lot of her high school friends will be, even though it means turning down a potential job that could earn them good money and get the insurance companies to trust them and throw more business their way. (It ends badly, since her unsupervised sister lets the house catch on fire!) Rose gets caught up in ideas about her future, and they change easily; she almost has her realtor’s license when she decides to become a businesswoman instead. She points out to her child that her father often promises things he cannot delivers, and that the child should not over-rely on him, based on her previous experience with her father; but then she takes her dad on as a business partner when he reboots her brand. Rose isn’t good about questioning her own motives or being detached, although she’s less bothered by a mess than her sister, who humanizes everything. Rose just sees it as a job, the person has nothing to do with us, and we can clean out their stuff. But when a real, living, breathing person is in front of her, then she is more than willing to cry with her, sit with her, and console her, even if it means neglecting her work.

Enneagram: 2w1 so/sp

Rose by her own admission is the “responsible” sister who thinks Norah is a slacker because she cannot keep down a job. She raised her sister as much as she could after their mom’s suicide, and still takes care of her, by involving her in her small business. She’s in an affair because she cannot stand to stay alone and needy, but also doesn’t want to be confronted with her misbehavior. She clings to the dream that he will leave his wife for her, as he promises her. Rose can only handle crime scene cleanup because, as she tells her friends, it’s a way to “help people… through the darkest time in their life.” She and her sister come into their home, clean up the mess and “make it a little bit better.” She is a responsible and reliable girl, willing to do the hard work involved to maintain a business, who when she finds out she’s inadvertently breaking the law, goes through all the right classes to get certified. She refuses to speak to Norah for awhile after Norah ruins their business, giving her the cold shoulder and becoming irate at her, but eventually they make up.