Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,41

to do what I did. Inside the master bathroom of the Trailer were pools of crystalized piss around the base of the toilet. The underside of the seat, the rim, and the top ridge of the bowl had speckled brown spots, which I assumed were shit, and yellow and orange flecks that looked like puke. I wore a pair of yellow dish gloves, and I was armed with Comet. But the man who’d occupied this bathroom had purchased those blue disks, perhaps seeking the façade of a clean toilet bowl, and they had left dark blue tracks at the water line and from under the inner rim where fresh water filled the bowl. I would have to reach in and scrub those dark lines with a pumice stone, again and again, until they disappeared.

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” I mumbled. Then I yelled it into the trees. I sat alone on the porch, with the rain dripping off the roof, and the rage in my voice surprised even me. I’d grown stoic by then, after enduring attacks from Jamie that came without warning, finding myself lock-kneed, my lungs seized, my chest tight like a large person had me restrained in their thick arms. The floor had dropped out from under me too many times already, and I still walked carefully on it, knowing one upset could bring me tumbling back to where we began, in a homeless shelter. I had to keep it together. Above all else, despite uncertainties in things I couldn’t control, I should remain calm. Dependable. I’d go to work and do the job that needed to be done. “You must not let yourself fall apart!” I repeated to myself. It became my mantra that I repeated in my mind, sometimes even saying it out loud.

My maroon Subaru gleamed in the rain. The clouds suddenly broke over it, letting the sun shine on the body of my car. I’d never wanted to walk out on a job so badly. I felt disrespected by that toilet, by the man who’d left it in that condition, by the company that paid me minimum wage. I stared at the Subaru, imagining my escape.

I had no choice. Travis and I barely spoke now. He was angry with me on the weekends when Mia went to her dad’s, when I slept in instead of getting up at seven a.m. to help him on the farm. I no longer cared, and he knew that. We coexisted in that anger for months. I had absolutely no means to afford a place to live. So I’d go back to that toilet. Walking out on that job would mean desperate months ahead without an income. The child support I received barely covered the cost of gas. The entire $275 a month went to the trips back and forth so Mia could see her dad. Losing my job would mean being indebted to Travis. It would mean losing respect for myself.

I balled up my fists. I stood up. I walked back into the house, clenching my jaw. This was not my fate. This was not my ending. I was determined to prove myself right.

The Trailer gave me nightmares. In my dreams, I’d be driving home, and my phone would start buzzing with voice mail notifications. Or someone would call from a number I didn’t recognize. When I answered, the woman on the other end of the line spoke so frantically I couldn’t understand her until she said “hospital.” An image of Mia, lying on a bed with part of her bobbed, curly brown hair caked with blood, flashed in my mind before the woman started demanding to know where I’d been and why there wasn’t an emergency contact listed. It’s only me! I repeated in the dream. It’s only me.

But the Trailer had its own way of coming back. After I spent twelve hours cleaning it, Lonnie called a couple of days later. Her voice lacked its usual robustness. The client wasn’t happy with the clean, she said. Something about dust on lightbulbs, or blinds, or spots on mirrors, or all of it. “I need you to go back and fix it,” she said softly. “And as written in your employee contract”—she paused and took a breath—“we don’t pay for that.”

My heart started racing, beating against the walls of my chest in huge thuds. “There’s no way I can do that,” I said, choking on the words. The drive was forty minutes one way, which