Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,13

Port Townsend’s job market was seasonal, too, dependent on tourists with full pockets and empty bellies. There weren’t a lot of “normal” jobs with “mom hours,” or ones I had any experience in, anyway. I’d always worked in coffee shops or at odd gigs that I couldn’t really list on a résumé. Even cleaning the preschool every Sunday wasn’t enough. But I had work, for the time being, and I tried to focus on doing the best I could with that.

I’d drop Mia off for day care by noon, and three days a week her dad picked her up and kept her until seven. Some evenings while Mia was with Jamie, I sat out on the deck, my back against the wall. One of my neighbors always seemed to be outside with her daughter, on the small strip of grass between the building and the trees. Her daughter was a little younger than Mia. They both had very fair, almost transparent skin. I’d listen to the young mother gently ask, “Are you gonna go down the slide?” as her daughter crawled up the steps of the faded red-and-blue plastic slide. It had probably been left there a few tenants ago. “Wheee!” the mother would say as the baby slid down. That’s a better mom than me, I’d think, listening to her narrate her daughter’s trips up and down the slide, knowing I could never muster the same excitement.

But on one of those late afternoons, paramedics and firemen walked past the little slide in the grass, moving it out of the way. They all went into the fair-skinned mom’s apartment. I didn’t hear the baby. I leaned forward on the rail of my porch to see what was going on. Several of my neighbors did the same. One of the firemen looked up at all of us, and I instinctively ducked back a step to hide. He shook his head from side to side. I wondered what we all looked like, women and men in transitional housing, peeking over the rails. I wondered how the police and firemen talked about the building, us; what other reasons they had been called here. I went inside before they wheeled the mother away on a stretcher. I didn’t want her to see me watching, even if her eyes were closed; I wanted to give her the dignity she deserved. I’d want the same.

An hour later, when I left my apartment to get Mia, Brooke came out, her eyes wide, cheeks red, ready to spill the gossip. “You know what happened, right?” she said, rushing toward me.

I shook my head. She said that someone had come to return the baby when they found her mother passed out on the bed. They couldn’t wake her up. She’d taken sleeping pills and chugged an entire bottle of vodka. “They found her in time, though. She’s alive,” Brooke reassured me. Then she sighed and shrugged. “So much for no alcohol.”

My first thoughts weren’t whether the lady was okay or about the little girl. I just hoped Jamie wouldn’t hear about it. I lived in fear that anything bad happening around Mia, including at the Early Head Start day care she attended, would reflect badly on my fragile permission to mother her full-time.

I’d immersed Mia in a world of poverty, surrounded her with some who tried to cope with it in sometimes tragic ways; some who had gone to prison or rehab long enough to lose their homes, some so angry from never getting a break, some who suffered symptoms of mental illness. A mother had chosen to give up completely. A choice so tantalizing, for a flash of a moment, I felt a twinge of envy.

4

THE FAIRGROUNDS APARTMENT

Is Julie around?” I asked, waiting for the woman behind the glass to write the receipt for my rent check. Each month’s rent amount was different, depending on what my reported income was, and remained around $200.

The woman squinted at the whiteboard on the back wall of her front office. “No,” she said with a sigh. “She’s out with a client. Do you want to leave a message?”

I did.

“I’m having trouble settling into the apartment,” I said to Julie the next day in the conference room.

Julie, much to my relief, didn’t ask why.

It was all overwhelming: wondering if there’d be a knock on my door by the housing authority or tiptoeing around the apartment afraid of the woman yelling at us from downstairs, pounding on the floor with her broom handle.