Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,24
job felt promising. I would be paid $10 an hour, and Jenny, the owner of the company, hoped to have twenty hours of work for me each week: $200 a week of my very own money. And I could maybe even quit working on the farm.
“It’s a great job. All of the houses they clean are in Stanwood,” I told Travis as he climbed down from the tractor. “I don’t think they even have a training period. I just go to work and get paid under the table.” I tried to smile sweetly, even though we hadn’t said more than a few words to each other in days. “It all feels kind of meant to be.” Mia, now almost two and a half, was incredibly happy living with Travis. If I were honest with myself, I was, too, but mostly because in being with him, a shroud of stigmas from being a single mom fell off of me.
“What?” Travis asked, looking annoyed and like he’d heard only half of what I’d said. He had on the same outfit that he’d worn when we first met. I tried to remember what it had felt like to hug him that first time. A year ago, I’d felt safe, comforted in his arms. Now they were too full of resentment to embrace me.
“If I work part-time in the mornings,” I reasoned, following him as he connected the trailer to the hitch on the back of the tractor, “then Mia could stay in day care for the rest of the day, and I’d be able to help on the farm?” I’d convinced myself that working on the farm was like working off my share of the rent and bills. It was the asking for gas money that I couldn’t handle.
He looked at me without expression.
“I’ll work hard. I’ll clean stalls,” I said, ignoring my lack of dignity in almost begging. “I’ll feed and water horses. I’ll try my hardest to cook dinner, even though I hate it.”
“I don’t care about dinner as long as you work on the farm,” he said. Then he sighed.
I waited.
“Help me grind up these loads of hay,” he said, climbing back into the tractor.
“So you think the job’s okay?” I yelled at him over the tractor’s engine. He glanced at me roughly but didn’t respond. My only choice was to sulk behind, following the trailer piled with bales of hay to the barn.
It was early winter of 2009, during the recession, when people couldn’t afford horses for recreation or for anything else. Travis and his parents’ boarding operation was at an all-time low, while the cost of alfalfa and wood chips they used for bedding had increased. Most of their equipment was ancient and failing. His parents had wearied of keeping the business afloat and relied on Travis to run the bulk of it. He worked around the clock during hay season, spending up to twelve hours a day on the tractor, and in the cold months, he tended to repairs and frozen pipes while mucking out anywhere from forty to eighty horse stalls every morning.
I looked up through the hay dust floating in the air, surprised to see Travis smiling at me. We were about halfway through grinding the second load. Hay covered the top of his red baseball cap and the shoulders of his hooded sweatshirt. When he reached out a gloved hand to rustle my hair, I ducked and then threw a handful of twine at him. Travis laughed, his blue eyes lighting up his entire face.
* * *
Jenny’s cleaning company seemed pretty well organized, from what I could tell. She rotated a lot of clients in a datebook she carried like a purse. My first day on the job, she gave me a cleaning kit and a roll of paper towels. I met her and a few other women outside a client’s large brown house that looked over the valley. Jenny barely introduced me by name, instead saying, “She’s the new girl,” and the women nodded without stopping to shake hands or make eye contact as they unloaded their trays from the back of their cars. The client who answered the door was an older woman, with white hair in curlers, who smiled like we were dinner guests. Everyone walked inside to designated areas of the house, and I stood there, waiting for some kind of instruction.
“Just clean the master bathroom and the bedroom if you have time,” one of my coworkers, the oldest one,