Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,35

to the lamp, where their cat often sat. Her husband obviously sat in the chair where a basket of outdated issues of Hustler was tucked between stacks of travel magazines. For about a month, the dining room table was covered in brochures for several all-inclusive resorts, but I don’t think they ever went. Clients usually canceled a clean if they left on vacation.

In the back room, adjacent to the laundry room, a twin bed was neatly made, with folded nurse scrubs on the chair next to it. Behind it was a nook, stacked with romance novels, the kind of books lined up on grocery store racks with illustrations of muscled, shirtless men embracing long-haired women. I wondered why she slept back there. There was a king-sized bed in the bedroom, along with a narrow dresser that had an urn with a dog collar wrapped around it. Maybe he snored. Or maybe she had to get in and out of bed at irregular hours.

But the porn and romance novels struck me. I imagined them sleeping in different beds, in different rooms, each fantasizing about a different partner and possibly a different life.

Travis and I had started to resemble this. Not to that extent, but he’d come in from work, eat the food I’d made, then sit on the couch watching TV for four hours before moving to our bed to watch more TV, the tiny one with the timer. He usually set it for sixty minutes.

When I first moved in with Travis, he had a TV the size of a queen mattress sitting on a homemade entertainment center. He’d leaned it forward to get the angle straight and secured it to the wall with large chains. I’d gawked at it when I first came to his house. He’d upgraded since then to a regular flat-screen with a store-bought entertainment center. But the screens were about the same size. I seethed at it all the same.

Travis bought me a laptop for my thirty-first birthday. After Mia went to bed at night, I sat at the kitchen table, writing in an online journal I had started keeping because my right hand was so weak, I couldn’t hold a pen. Sometimes I did homework or chatted with friends online, my back to Travis while he watched TV.

9

THE MOVE-OUT CLEAN

Mothering, for me, so often meant learning to say goodbye in the hope of gaining trust in my return. Many things I learned from therapists throughout the turmoil Mia and I endured with Jamie said that, in order for children to develop emotional intelligence and be resilient, it’s important, if not vital, for them to have one stable caregiver in their life, one adult person who doesn’t waver in being there when they say they will. It didn’t matter how many caregivers came in and out of their lives, appearing and disappearing, as long as one pinnacle person remained. Through Mia’s earliest years, when the real shuffle started between day care and going to her dad’s for the weekend, I became incredibly strict in keeping our schedule, our life at home, a predictable pattern. Every bathtime’s end began a series of movements: a towel laid over the toilet, lifting Mia to stand in the center, drying her body and head with another towel, tickling her in the same way. Every bedtime story, kiss, saying, “Goodnight, I love you, see you in the morning,” fell into the same niche of familiarity. As a mother, this became my biggest gift to her, because it required so much of me to always be there when I said I would and never, ever falter. My hope was, if everything else in her life was chaos, at least she knew that wherever we called home, there’d be pancakes cut in the same way.

Saying goodbye, like learning to share my daughter with a man who’d been horrible to us, never rose above anything but hard. Dramatic scenes of morning drop-offs at day care began as soon as we pulled into the building’s parking lot. By the time we’d walked to her classroom, a worker had to peel Mia off me as she screamed, kicked, and cried out for me as I abruptly turned and walked away after saying, “Goodbye, sweetie. I love you. I’ll see you after snack.” Some day care workers took her from me and held her for a bit, but most extracted her from my body and put her on the ground, and I’d have to look at Mia