Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,100

said and stared at me. I blinked. Her expression didn’t change.

I told her I had been there all morning, that my boss’s office was forty minutes away. I couldn’t spend another day here, waiting.

“If you want to keep your childcare grant, that’s what you need to do,” she said. I’d been dismissed. It was almost one o’clock.

Lonnie shook her head as she printed out a paystub for me. This paystub was for a pay period that was weeks ago. All my self-employment income came from checks handwritten by my clients. I had no idea how this situation could possibly make sense. But the next day, I waited outside for the office to open, then waited for hours to present my income for the past three months, a written schedule of my current work hours, and letters from several of my clients formally saying I worked in their home at the time I said I did.

Without food stamps, we would have frequented food banks or free meals at churches. Without childcare assistance, I wouldn’t have been able to work. The people lucky enough to remain outside the system, or on the outskirts of it, didn’t see how difficult those resources were to obtain. They didn’t see how desperately we needed them, despite the hoops they made us jump through.

When I cleaned Henry’s house that Friday, he noticed I seemed down. I still had about a quarter of my tax refund left. It was sitting there for the time being, until my car broke down or Mia was sick, or a client canceled, or all the above. Though I still put myself to sleep imagining Missoula—what it would be like to walk across the bridge over the Clark Fork River, or lie in a field looking up at that big sky—it seemed impossible to consider making a trip now.

“I don’t think I can afford to visit Montana,” I said to Henry after he asked what was wrong. He waved in the air like my words smelled bad. For a year now, he’d heard me mention Missoula, but only in an “oh-I’d-like-to-visit-there-someday” kind of way. My face must have looked so mournful that he saw the weight of that statement. So much so that he got up from his desk, walked over to the shelf, and started looking through travel books and maps. Then he handed me a book about Glacier National Park and a large folded map of Montana.

He spread out the map across his desk and pointed to places I needed to go. He refused to believe that the trip to Missoula was an impossible option. While I appreciated the gesture, encouragement, and support, my smile wasn’t sincere. A huge part of me was scared. Not of the journey—though I did fear my car breaking down—but of falling in love with Missoula and then having to return to the Skagit Valley, to the mold in my studio apartment above the freeway. It would be like saying goodbye to a better life, one that I would not get to have.

In wanting that life, in wanting to get ahead, my job at Classic Clean stopped making sense. Over a third of my wages went to gas. After bringing this to Pam’s attention, she did offer a small travel allowance, but it was a quarter of what I spent just to get from one job to the next. Plus, the anonymity started to wear me down. Between working alone and taking online classes, my life was one of solitude. I craved human interaction, even if it was a situation where I’d been hired by someone to work. I needed my job to have purpose, meaning, or at least feel like I’d helped someone.

24

THE BAY HOUSE

One afternoon, I walked into the Financial Aid Office at Skagit Valley Community College and said I wanted to take out the maximum amount of student loans. This hadn’t been an easy decision, and I started shaking as I waited for the person behind the counter to help me. Taking out these loans meant I’d turn down work, available work, and go into debt instead. But my exhaustion had reached a level of impossibility. There wasn’t any other way to explain this rash decision. Mia seemed constantly sick, and I spent only three hours a day with her. My back hurt during the day and would stiffen while I slept, the pain waking me up at four a.m. Loan money meant I could focus on finding private clients and landscaping,