Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,69

do it if it’s early.”

“Nope,” Lonnie said. I heard her sigh. “They canceled.”

I was so quiet for a minute, Lonnie asked if I was still there. “Yeah,” I said. She asked if I was okay, and I said no. “Can you ask Pam if I can at least get some gas money for this? I’ve already spent an hour of my time and money coming out here. I don’t have a lot of that to spare, you know?” I wiped at tears that had escaped and trickled down my cheek and tried not to let my voice sound shaky. Lonnie said she’d see what she could do, but I could already hear Pam telling me how the recession had slowed business, and they had to be really careful with extra expenses. I started to regret asking.

Two weeks later, I returned to clean their house again. The husband approached me as I unloaded my supplies into the entryway. “I’m really sorry,” he said. I nodded, taking out a rag to shove in my back pocket. “We’re just not used to having someone come here to clean the house.”

“It’s okay,” I said, grabbing for a spray bottle.

“Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket, and pulled out two tickets to a Seattle Mariners baseball game. “These are for tomorrow night.” He tried to hand them to me. “You should take them.” The tickets had graphics of the players throwing pitches or sliding into third. Fancy tickets. Tickets to good seats. I’d gone to games as a kid, and during the 1995 playoffs when Ken Griffey, Jr., Edgar Martinez, and Randy Johnson were on the team, but hadn’t been since.

We stood on the stone tile in the entryway that his mother had asked us to buff. Pam had shown me how to do it before loading the buffer into the back of my car. I’d had it in there for three weeks, taking up half of my Subaru wagon’s rear storage space. He apparently didn’t want me to do it that day, either, because of the men walking in and out to re-grout the tile in their shower. I knew he couldn’t possibly know how frustrating this was.

I looked down at the tickets again. There was no way I could afford the gas and parking that going to the game would require. I looked up at his tired but smiling face, and the blue receiving blanket over his shoulder, like he’d just burped his month-old son after a feeding. I saw the familiar exhaustion in his eyes. He might be living a completely different experience than mine with a newborn—the large house, nice cars, slew of swings and bouncing chairs, and relatives coming over to bring food and available arms—but his duties as a parent were universal. Even like mine.

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to believe that it was, trying to not be angry with him anymore. “You should use the tickets or give them to someone who can. I won’t be able to go.” I wanted to tell him I couldn’t afford the gas to go, but I worried that he’d offer me money, too.

“Well, you could sell them,” he said, pushing the tickets toward me again. “I’m sure they’ll go pretty quick on Craigslist. They’re front-row seats.”

I winced. “Really?” Front-row seats to a Mariners game. It was a chance to fulfill a dream I’d had since I’d been Mia’s age. I looked at him again. I wondered if he was the type of father who got up in the middle of the night to change a diaper. The type who bounced the baby in the kitchen while the bottle heated, then fell asleep on the couch with a tiny infant sleeping on his chest. I decided he was.

“Okay,” I said, looking down at the tickets. He reached out to hand me the tickets again. When I took them, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, like he wanted to hug me.

He was right; it was easy to sell the tickets. The next afternoon I placed an ad online. My buyer met me at the Laundromat and happily handed over sixty bucks.

“They’re for my son’s birthday,” he said. “He’s turning four. His first baseball game!”

I smiled and told him to have fun.

18

THE SAD HOUSE

On Saturdays and Sundays, Mia and I got up at our usual time, even though we didn’t have anywhere to go. I made her pancakes, sprinkling in blueberries I’d picked and frozen the summer before. I sat