Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,101
instead of working for Classic Clean. It meant spending more time with Mia.
It also meant the opportunity to volunteer at the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services as a receptionist. I thought of it like an internship that my loans paid me for. Volunteering would pay in experience, diversity on my résumé, and letters of recommendation. My classes at the community college were preparing me for a paralegal degree. The only jobs I allowed myself to dream about were the practical ones that could earn me health insurance and retirement funds.
“Your Honor, the father is a full-time worker,” Jamie’s lawyer had said three years earlier, before revealing that I was then homeless and unemployed. Standing in front of that judge, hearing Jamie obtain respect and admiration for working and for living in the stable housing he’d kicked us out of, had been demoralizing. The experience planted a deep-rooted fear in me. Even though I wanted to move to a better living situation, it would be the ninth time Mia and I had moved since she’d been born.
In most of our dwellings, she didn’t have her own room. While judges were rumored to say, “I don’t care if the child sleeps on a concrete floor! They will have overnight visitation with their father,” mothers fighting for sole custody—especially ones who’d escaped abuse—had to provide a sort of life that was simply impossible to obtain. In court, Jamie’s lawyer described me as a mentally unstable person, unable to care for her own child full-time. I had to fight for the ability to mother my nursing infant, the infant Jamie had screamed at me to abort. I had been ground to a pulp by that judge. Like I had been in the wrong for leaving a man who threatened me. I knew there were countless women out there in the same situation as I had been.
Maybe I could go to law school and become a civil rights attorney. I could help people who’d been in the same violent situation as I had been with Jamie, and I could advocate for them. But there was another voice nagging at me, a louder voice that refused to be ignored. Part of me demanded that I become a writer. But I soothed the insistent voice by telling myself this was just for now, while Mia was still little—and then I’d be a writer. This promise to myself felt like throwing buckets of water on the only fire that was left in me, the only part that dared to dream.
On one late-night search for a better place to live, I found a two-bedroom apartment built over a garage. The front door faced the mountains and the ocean. It was way out of my price range. The ad explained that the owners lived in the main house with their three little girls, three dogs, and a cat who stayed mainly in the garage on the constant hunt for mice. Instead of closing the browser window and feeling that familiar ache for another life, I emailed them and asked if they’d be willing to trade rent for cleaning and landscaping services.
The following afternoon, I pulled into their long driveway, past a large property that had been cleared of all but the largest trees to reveal the view of the bay and hills beyond. Their driveway curved to the left and became almost engulfed in large trees and lined with blackberry bushes. The house was in a neighboring town, farther from where most of my cleaning clients lived. I knew that living there would mean I wouldn’t be able to work for Classic Clean anymore. Maybe, I thought, as I maneuvered down the driveway, if I found a better place to live, one that was also farther away, it would make sense for me to quit.
When I could finally see the house, I nearly closed my eyes at the beauty of the scene in front of me. The sun was just beginning to set behind the mountains, and the entire sky had turned a deep pink. I parked in front of the goat pen, between the apartment and a house with windows lining the front.
A toddler waddled around the cement pad in front of the garage on a wooden bicycle. A tall, lanky man wearing a frayed gray hoodie and jeans watched me get out of my car. I knew from emailing his wife, Alice, that his name was Kurt. We shook hands, and I introduced myself and explained that