Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,23
ride bareback better than I could run on my own legs. My head filled with visions of Mia doing the same.
It was starting to get dark when I walked Travis back to the ferry terminal. We hugged goodbye, and I caught myself wanting to bury my face in his chest and not let go. He smelled like horses, hay, grease, and sawdust. He smelled like work, which my mind translated to stability. The combining scents brought up an amount of nostalgia that overwhelmed me. Working on cars, riding horses with Grandpa, handing nails to my dad as a kid. Travis’s embrace reminded me of all of those moments, comforted me, and somehow brought me home.
6
THE FARM
I closed my single-blade Gerber knife and put it back in the pocket of my Carhartts. The fall air was moist on my face as Travis and I worked to throw dozens of seventy-pound hay bales into a grinder, which chopped it to half-inch pieces so we could mix it with the wood chips for horse bedding. I wiped the dark yellow dust off my forehead before returning my fingers to the work glove I’d shoved in my armpit. I paused to take a breath, then yanked the red twine toward me. If I cut the twine holding the hay bale together in front of the knot, I could pull it out smoothly, and the entire bale wouldn’t move, making it easier to pick off the flakes to throw into the grinder. Cutting the twine behind the knot made it snag, stubbornly catch, sending the flakes tumbling to the ground in a heap, slowing us down.
“You’re not doing it right!” Travis yelled again as the bale’s flakes piled at my feet.
“Sorry!” I yelled back, trying to sound sincere. I did this over and over, through a mountain of bales, turning them into an even larger mountain of finely cut, dry grass.
We moved to Stanwood to live with Travis just four months after our first date, when Mia was nearly two. It had been a rough nine months since then. Travis worked extremely hard on the farm and outside of the house. Inside, he barely looked away from the TV. Our relationship provided stability; a home. But perhaps more important, it provided me with an invisible stamp of approval. With Travis, I was part of a family unit. I was complete. But I didn’t anticipate the loss of my independence, not realizing how much that had given my identity as a mother value. In Travis’s eyes, my value relied on the work I did outside of the home on the farm, since the work I did inside—the cleaning and cooking—had no value to him. But I couldn’t find a job, so my worth amounted to the work I did to help him. The problem was, I had only the small amount Jamie paid in child support and food stamps to use in caring for Mia. I’d watch Travis get paid for the work I did a decent part of and not get a share.
In the beginning, it was fun to go out every evening to feed and water the fifty or so horses that clients boarded there. When the weekend stall-cleaners quit, Travis volunteered to take over and earned an extra $100 a week in addition to the $100 his parents paid him for feeding. During the weekends Mia was with her dad, I got up at seven a.m. to go out and help muck stalls in addition to the feedings every evening, and I watched Travis pocket the wad of cash his parents gave him for the work, not offering me any.
“Travis,” I said the second time it happened. “Shouldn’t I get some of that? I helped.”
“What do you need money for?” he snapped. “You don’t pay any bills.”
I stifled tears from the built-up humiliation and managed to squeak out that my car needed gas.
“Here,” he said, flipping through bills and handing me a twenty.
We started fighting. Every time I refused to help feed. Every time dinner wasn’t on the table. Every time I opted to sleep in, knowing I’d get the silent treatment as punishment. I desperately applied for almost every job vacancy posted on Craigslist or in the local newspaper, submitting anywhere from a few to a dozen applications a week, but I rarely got a call back. Then a friend gave my number to a woman needing a new employee for her cleaning business, and I was hired on the spot. The