Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,50

get through work; the physical pain provided a distraction from the heartache I felt for Mia.

By Saturday night, I had everything moved in. By Sunday afternoon, her toys were in the correct bins, and our clothes were neatly folded and put away. When I picked Mia up and brought her into our little studio, I hoped, as any parent would, that she’d like the new space. I hoped she’d feel a sense of home, of belonging, but she looked around for a bit, checked out the bathroom, then asked to go home to Travis’s.

“We’re staying here, sweetie,” I said, stroking her hair.

“Travis coming home?” she asked. She sat in my lap, on the twin bed Sarah had given me.

“No,” I said. “Travis is staying at his house. He’s sleeping there. We’re sleeping here. This is our house.”

“No, Mama,” she said. “I want Travis. Where’s Daddy Travis?” She started wailing, sinking into me, heaving under the weight of her tiny crushed heart. I apologized, and I cried right along with her. I promised myself to be more careful. I could be as reckless as I wanted with my heart, but not with hers.

12

MINIMALIST

One of the greatest things about a willingness to get on your hands and knees to scrub a toilet is you’ll never have trouble finding work. To supplement where Classic Clean’s hours lacked, I started looking for more clients on my own. I posted ads online and on Facebook. I picked up Donna’s House, a biweekly, four-hour clean on Friday afternoons when I didn’t have to drop off Mia with Jamie. Donna’s House was deep in the hills of the Skagit Valley, toward the Cascade Mountains and the backcountry where my family had lived for six generations.

She was involved with the local Habitat for Humanity and mentioned a few families who’d recently been granted the ability to own their first home—much of it with what the program called “sweat equity,” where family members and friends performed physical work like hammering nails, painting, or landscaping in exchange for a down payment. If finding the time to meet those requirements sounded difficult enough, as an adult with one dependent, I needed a monthly net income of $1,600 to qualify.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that,” I said. She encouraged me to contact the program anyway. But when I really thought about it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to own a home in the Skagit Valley. With the exception of Anacortes and Deception Pass, which were unaffordable at my wages, it didn’t feel like home to me. And Habitat for Humanity didn’t offer a choice of where to live in the county.

“All your family’s here,” she said. “Can’t be more ‘home’ than that.”

“Well,” I said, dusting the tops of the pictures in her formal living room, “I kind of want to check out Missoula in Montana. I’d been planning to move there for college when I found out I was pregnant with Mia.”

Donna had been scrapbooking as we spoke and stopped going through the piles of papers, photos, and stickers on her dining room table and was looking at me now. “You wanna know how to make God laugh?” she said.

“What?” I asked, wondering how this related to my desire to move to Missoula.

“Tell him your plans,” she said. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” And then she let out a bark of a laugh.

“Right,” I said, turning to dust the molding that stretched down the hallway.

Donna paid me $20 an hour to clean her house and told me to never accept less. Classic Clean charged $25 an hour to have me work in a home, but I still only made nine. After taxes and expenses, I took home $6 an hour. Finding and scheduling clients on my own took a lot of time, especially when walk-throughs didn’t result in a new client. But the unpaid labor of finding and scheduling clients was still worth it and helped to increase my overall wages. That is, if I never managed to damage anything.

The move from Travis’s house added forty minutes to our daily commute. All but two of my Classic Clean clients were in the Stanwood and Camano Island area. But Mia’s day care was still right around the corner from Travis’s house, and driving past it was unavoidable. I almost involuntarily slowed down when I passed it, rubbernecking to catch Travis walking in the door with his muddy boots on. Besides missing the comfort