Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,20
couldn’t afford it. Earlier that week, he’d told me that I needed to move out. When I told Charlotte, she’d reassured me I could stay as long as I needed. I wondered how much they argued about me.
Dad’s breakdown felt ominous in that we’d have to live somewhere else. As much as I tried to feel compassion for him, the thought of Mia and me living in a place where I’d have to pay rent was so impossible without me being employed, I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like. I hadn’t had any time to recover from the shock of being homeless with a baby. Charlotte was right. He was scaring me, but probably not in the way she thought.
When Charlotte came back inside for the third time, she returned to her seat on the couch, and we didn’t say anything to each other. She unmuted the TV and we continued watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I couldn’t turn my head to look at her but I tried to remain still. Calm.
Finally, I stood up to go to bed. My uncle had brought over a short camper trailer and parked it in the driveway. Mia and I had made a temporary home there. The roof leaked over the door, and we couldn’t use the teeny kitchen or bathroom, but it had an electric heater and a space for us to sleep.
“You goin’ to bed, Steph?” Charlotte asked in an attempt to act like it was a normal night.
“Yeah, I’m pretty tired,” I lied. I paused at the door and looked at her. “Thank you so much for letting us stay here.”
Charlotte smiled, like she always did, and said, “You can stay as long as you want,” but now we both seemed to know that was no longer true.
When I peeked my head inside the door of the trailer, I saw Mia sleeping soundly on the fold-out sofa bed. I crawled under our blanket, teetering on the outer edge beside her. I wasn’t tired, I just wanted to lie there and listen to her nighttime noises, to forget everything else in our new world. I turned over to my back, then to my side, but I couldn’t get the sound of my dad’s sobbing out of my head. Maybe I could rent a lot in an RV campground for a while and park the trailer there. Or maybe we could move it back behind my grandpa’s house in Anacortes, but I couldn’t imagine living so close to Grandma, who I’d heard had taken to feeding fifty feral cats.
An hour later, through the thin walls of the trailer, I heard doors slamming at the main house. Dad and Charlotte were having a fight, and I heard a series of crashes and thuds. Then silence.
I slipped into the house to see what had happened. In the kitchen, magnets from the fridge were scattered on the floor. The table had been moved out of place. There was an uneasy stillness. And then I heard them on the back porch. My dad was still crying but now apologizing to Charlotte over and over again.
When Mia and I went in the next morning for breakfast, Dad had already left for work. Charlotte sat at the kitchen table, still in its off-centered place. I sat down, then instinctively reached for her hand. She looked up at me, her eyes puffy and dull.
“He’s never done anything like that before,” she said, her gaze locked on the opposite wall. Then suddenly, her eyes met mine. “He’s such a teddy bear.”
The events of the previous night began spilling out: how she had told Dad that she was leaving for her sister’s and started packing a suitcase, how she’d even said that she was taking the dog. I looked at her in admiration, wishing I’d had the strength to leave when Jamie’s outbursts started once I was pregnant. To be as strong.
“That was my mistake,” Charlotte told me, looking down at Jack, curled up on the floor by her feet. “That’s where I went wrong.” She put her coffee cup down on the table and carefully rolled up her sleeve, exposing deep purple bruises.
I looked down at Mia, who was playing happily next to the dog on the kitchen floor, patting his back, saying, “Dog, dog” with each one. Her hair was mussed from sleep, and she still wore her footie pajamas.
I closed my eyes. I had to leave.
That day I started calling homeless shelters. A shelter would, at the