but I had come to the walk-through with Mia balanced on my hip, and it was hard to get a good look at the space.
“Four or five hours?” I guessed, distracted by Mia, who was steadily reaching for something on the counter.
“Oh, I just figured I’d give you a hundred dollars,” Sharon said as we stood in the hallway. Then she handed me a wad of cash. I looked at her for a second, a blank expression on my face, unsure what to do. It was much more than I had been paid for any individual cleaning job before. But she motioned for me to take the money from her hand. “I liked your ad,” she said. “I remember what it’s like, to struggle when you have someone who depends on you.” She looked at Mia, who, growing timid from the eye contact, pressed her head into my shoulder.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to suppress the feeling that I was getting away with something. “You won’t be disappointed.”
After I strapped Mia in her car seat, I sat behind the wheel, staring at the dashboard. I’m doing it, I thought to myself. I’m really fucking doing it! I turned around to look at Mia, and I felt my heart swell. We had been through so much together, and yet I was still getting us through. “Do you want a Happy Meal?” I asked. The wad of cash bulged in my pocket. Pride swelled in my chest. Mia’s face lit up, and she threw up her arms. “Yay!” she yelled from the back seat. I laughed, blinking back a few tears, and yelled out for joy, too.
14
THE PLANT HOUSE
My alarm went off for the third time only thirty minutes before we had to be at the specialist’s office for Mia’s ear tube surgery. They’d instructed me to give her a bath that morning and dress her comfortably. Instead I tried calling the office to cancel. Mia’s head and chest were overflowing with thick, green snot. She’d even thrown it up the previous night, and once that morning, all over our floor. There was no way they’d do surgery on her when she was this sick, but I went through the motions, got her ready, and drove to their office on time.
Mia sort of knew what was going on. I’d told her the doctor needed to look at her ears again, but I couldn’t be in the room with her this time. We’d been to the doctor several times for her ears by then and had seen the specialist once to determine if she was a good candidate for the surgery. My nervousness about it revolved around the anesthesia more than the actual procedure.
“I put ear tubes in my own son,” the specialist had told me. “I’ll give your daughter the exact same care.”
When we arrived at the office at eight a.m., they ushered us into a room where they had already set out a gown, a hat to cover up her hair, booties, and a bag for Mia’s clothes. My stomach dropped further with every nurse who came in to ask questions. Mia remained tense and silent, not making eye contact as they weighed her, took her temperature, checked her oxygen levels, listened to her chest, and even took her picture with a Polaroid camera.
“She’s really sick,” I said to the first nurse, who barely nodded. “She’s had a bad cold. A cough, with green snot. I think it’s an infection,” I said to the next. “The specialist is going to check to see if she needs her adenoids out, he’s not just taking them out. He’s just going to check.”
One nurse, an older brunette whose hands were so cold Mia had recoiled from them when she tried to listen to her heart, asked if we had a humidifier at home.
I shook my head no, thinking about the condensation on the inside of our windows, the seams with the spots of black mold that I’d scrubbed off before we moved in and which returned after it rained. “I can’t—” I started to say.
“Well, you’ll need to get one today,” she said, writing something on Mia’s chart.
“I…” I looked down. “I don’t have the money.”
The nurse stood erect, pursed her lips, and crossed her arms, looking at Mia instead of me. “Where are her grandparents? Doesn’t she have grandparents? If it were my grandchild, I would offer to buy things like that.”
“My family can’t help with things,” I tried to explain quickly, probably