Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,111

had been escalating, which always made me fearful for Mia’s well-being. She spent a week at his house while I finished up classes for spring quarter, and she had returned a couple of pounds lighter. I’d taken her to the doctor for a sinus infection before she’d gone and had to take her back in because she’d gotten worse. Two pounds off her small frame was a lot to lose. She was wetting her pants again, and I couldn’t figure out why. She hadn’t done that in months.

Jamie now lived on his small sailboat, and when Mia visited, she stayed there with him. Neither Mia nor Jamie knew how to swim. I feared Mia falling off the boat or dock without a life vest in the middle of the night. I feared what sort of kid I’d get back after she spent time with him. Whenever I called, I heard several male voices in the background. When I asked, she didn’t know any of their names or where her dad was, just that she was on the boat. Picking her up started to feel like some sort of rescue operation.

I told Christy about this—about my landlord, about the pull of Missoula. School would be busy in the fall, but I had only two summer classes. I still took out a maximum amount of loans to cover my almost doubled living expenses. Mia went to day care while I worked and volunteered whenever I could.

After Alice fired me, I spent two days looking for resources, knowing I wouldn’t have enough to pay bills in June, before my student loans came through for the summer semester. I found an odd grant at school to help pay for part of June’s rent—a “homemaker” grant, specifically for women with children to help with housing costs. Even the twenty-dollar gas vouchers from the department that gave out utility grants helped.

I held my breath each time I checked the mail. Day after day, there were bills and advertisements, but nothing from the scholarship committee. The month seemed to creep by ominously. If I didn’t get the scholarship, we’d have to move out of the apartment. But if I did, we’d have more than enough money to stay. To take my mind off the scholarship, I took Mia to beaches and parks. We spent a lot of time with Kurt and the older girls, wandering off to the bay where they’d roll around in mud. When Mia was at her dad’s, I hid in my apartment, reading or doing homework with the doors open to the summer sun.

One weekend, I pulled The Alchemist off my shelf to read. The short book took two whole days to get through, since almost every page had a line that I’d underline, read again, and had to stare out the window to think about for a while. My mom had given me the book after I’d moved back to Washington from Alaska. She explained the theme was about the main character’s journey to find his destiny, only to discover it had been at home all along. I’d grimaced at this. Sure, Northwest Washington felt magical when the sun shone, and there are parts of Highway 20 that wind through Deception Pass where I knew the trees like old friends. But the feeling of home stopped there. I didn’t feel like I belonged there. I wasn’t sure I ever had.

The Alchemist’s theme, this Personal Legend, pulled at me. I’d wanted to be a writer for nearly twenty-five years.

“I think I’m ready to visit,” I announced to Christy at our next appointment.

On the way home from day care pickup, Mia and I sang along with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” I smiled whenever she said “empty as a pumpkin” to the lyrics “empty as a pocket.” The album had played regularly in the car for a few weeks—as we drove to and from day care, as we set out for our weekend adventures. Smiling and singing along to the same song might as well have been eating the same ice cream sundae.

I turned the car onto our road, and Mia started asking if she could play with the girls. “Hang on a second,” I said, slowing at the mailbox. I’d been trying to not check as much. It was too much of a disappointment to see it empty.

“Mia!” I said from the mailbox. I held up a large envelope from WISP, Inc. One of those flat-rate pocket envelopes for