Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,46

loved when he made it. We’d sit around the table with our steaming bowls, grinding saltine crackers in our hands and then dusting the crumbs on the floor to make my mom gasp. When Mia and I showed up at my dad and Charlotte’s the first time, about a month before Jamie punched the door and kicked us out, Charlotte pestered Dad until he made a batch of chili for me. I loved her for that. As I stared into the pot of rolling water, the lobsters awaiting their deaths, these memories came flooding back. I thought of Charlotte, how I couldn’t think of the last time I’d seen or even talked to her.

When I lowered the first lobster into the boiling water, it didn’t scream or move frantically like I thought it would. Its shell turned bright red almost instantly, and then a green foam formed on the surface. After it was done, I scraped the foam off before cooking the second.

The table was set—two steaks, two lobsters, two beers. I wondered how different our dinner table looked from Henry’s. They probably had dishes they used only for the occasion and large linen napkins draped over their laps. Travis and I ate in silence. I tried to smile at him, to ignore his displeasure at such a complicated meal. While he started a movie, I cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, cleaned the larger dishes, and wiped down the table and counters. We sat next to each other on the brown leather couch he’d inherited from his parents, but we didn’t touch. Halfway through the movie, I went out to the porch and lit a cigarette, something I now did when Mia wasn’t home. I had bought the pack a few weeks before, after cleaning the Trailer. It was becoming more and more of a ritual. Travis came out to smoke half a cigarette before telling me he needed to go to bed.

“Do you want me to join you?” I asked, tapping away ash from the cigarette.

He paused. “I don’t care,” he said and went inside.

I thought maybe he wouldn’t be as mad that I wasn’t cleaning stalls with him that weekend, because I had to work. I even hoped we might make love, rather than the usual way he reached for my hips—my little spoon pressing into his big spoon—sometime in the night, our faces never touching, the darkness and silence interrupted by headlights from a passing car.

The next morning, Henry met me at his big red door. “How did it go?” he asked, smiling as I handed him back the fancy utensils.

“They were the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said, beaming at him, then paused, suddenly realizing what he meant. “But they didn’t save my relationship.”

“Ah,” he said, looking down at the silver utensils. “Maybe that’s for the best. You don’t seem like the type who needs a man around to save you. You’re one of the hard workers.”

While Henry offered praise, I knew that I could never work hard enough. Between school, the house, Mia, and trying to earn enough to make a living, work had become relentless and never ending. My paychecks made me feel like I didn’t work that much at all. But Henry respected me. He was the first client who I knew with certainty did.

Soon after the lobster dinner, Travis and I broke up. That evening, I came home from work to make dinner, clean up, give Mia her bath, and put her to bed. I set up my books and laptop on the kitchen table, put my earbuds in to drown out the television, and began to do schoolwork. And then I saw that the kitchen trash was overflowing. I got up from the table and stood in front of Travis, blocking his view of the TV.

“Can you please take out the trash?” I said, hands on my hips.

Without hesitating, he said, “I think you should move out.” Then he stood up, physically moved me out of the way, and sat back down again. I stood, stunned, looking down at him. A laugh track erupted on TV, and Travis, his face lit up from the screen, smiled. I returned to the table and sank into the chair, the weight of those words heavy, pressing me into the ground, into a hole I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to climb out of.

PART TWO

11

THE STUDIO

Travis gave us a month to leave. I didn’t tell Mia—in part because I didn’t want to