Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,102

my daughter was at her dad’s. He rubbed his hand through messy brown hair in an attempt to make it lay flat. “Follow me,” he said, catching the toddler and picking her up. “I’ll show you around.”

As we walked, I felt an intense pull toward this property, one that, if I believed in those things, was like the universe pushing me in the direction I was supposed to go, as if this had been decided for me and all I had to do was follow along. I followed Kurt to the side of the garage and stood next to a garden bigger than our entire studio apartment. He motioned to raspberry and blueberry bushes and then to a large patch of grass next to it.

“Part of the renter’s deal with us is that they mow this,” he said, crossing his arms. “Our last renters kind of had a problem with that.” I watched his daughter toddle toward the grass, imagining Mia with her.

“In addition to the barter?” I asked.

“Barter?” he repeated, looking at the sky, like that sounded familiar but he wasn’t sure why.

I nodded and said, “I emailed Alice, and she said it might be possible for me to trade part of my rent working in your yard and cleaning your house?”

His face changed a few times from confusion to possibly recalling her saying something like that to nodding in agreement at the idea. Though he probably wasn’t, he seemed stoned, like most of my Fairbanks friends were at any given hour of the day. My kind of person, I thought. I liked him immediately.

He looked down and smiled at me. “Just wait until you see up there.” He nodded to the apartment above the garage.

Kurt walked ahead of me up the stairs, carrying the toddler on his hip. He and Alice and their growing family had lived in the apartment above the garage while they built their house, he explained. When we rounded the first bend in the stairs, I stopped following. Kurt turned and smiled at the awe on my face.

The last of the sun’s rays had painted everything a reddish orange. At that moment, I couldn’t recall seeing a more beautiful sunset.

“Is it like this every night?” I asked, my voice just a whisper.

Kurt laughed. “Well, when the sun is actually out,” he said. He was making a joke, because in Northwest Washington there were entire winters, nearly half the year, with less than a dozen days of sunshine. “Good thing it’s almost summer.”

The apartment had two bedrooms that were separated by a bathroom with a tub. There was a cabinet under the sink and shelves for towels. The kitchen had a propane stovetop, a dishwasher, a full-sized fridge, and a window that looked out onto the backyard where the family kept chickens.

All the floors were wood. In the front room and kitchen were two skylights, and there was one in the bathroom. Glass French doors opened to the covered porch. Insulated windows lined the western wall of the living room.

“Cable’s included,” Kurt said, and nodded to the wire coming out of the wall. I looked at him and blinked. “If that’s important to you,” he continued. “I’m a bit of a football fanatic.”

“I haven’t had cable for most of my adult life,” I said. I wanted to laugh hysterically. I wanted to pinch myself.

“It’s really small,” he said, opening the closet in the bedroom, “so I added a lot of closet space. Those cabinets on the wall above this are totally open and huge. I think Alice put bedding up there or something.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”

“Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“No, really,” I said. “My closet right now is a glorified broom closet. Our whole place is half the size of this whole apartment.”

“Huh,” he said, to fill an awkward moment. Then he seemed to remember something, and walked toward the kitchen. “You can have the eggs when we go out of town,” he said, pointing down to the chicken coop. “I mean, if you move in here.” I smiled and asked where they were going. “Oh,” he said, snapping his fingers, like he’d forgotten to tell me, “we go to Missoula for a few weeks every summer with some friends. It’s a great place to raise a family. Have you been?”

My breath caught in my chest. I didn’t know how to answer, how to tell him that I’d pined for that town for the past six years, that my only regret