Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,7

he said, and smiled at me.

We sat like that for a while, listening to his favorite songs, breathing in the night air on the banks of Port Townsend’s downtown strip. Brick Victorian buildings towered above the waves lapping against the docks.

When I stood up to leave, in the excitement of meeting a new boy, I scrawled my phone number across a page of my journal and then ripped it out.

“You wanna go out sometime?” I asked, handing him the page. He looked up at me, then glanced toward the sound of laughter as people stumbled out of Sirens. He took the slip of paper from my hand, looked at me, and nodded.

The next evening, while I was driving into town, my phone rang.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Downtown.” I swerved my car, failing to downshift, steer, and hold the phone at the same time.

“Meet me outside the Penny Saver Market,” he said, and hung up.

About five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot. Jamie leaned against the back of a red, pieced-together Volkswagen Bug, wearing the same clothes from the night before, waiting for me. He smiled at me coolly, showing crooked teeth that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness.

“Let’s get some beer,” he said, throwing the butt of a rolled cigarette onto the pavement.

He paid for two bottles of Samuel Smith stout, and then we climbed into his Volkswagen and drove to a bluff to watch the sunset. While he talked, I thumbed through a New York Times Book Review that I found on the passenger seat. He told me about a bike trip he had planned—down the Pacific Coast on Highway 101 all the way to San Francisco.

“I already got the time off work,” he said, glancing at me. His eyes were a darker brown than mine.

“Where do you work?” I asked, realizing that I knew nothing about him other than his music preferences.

“The Fountain Café.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “I used to be a sous chef. But now I just make the desserts there.” He exhaled, and a plume of smoke disappeared over the bluff.

“You make the tiramisu?” I asked, pausing in my feeble attempt to roll a cigarette of my own.

He nodded, and I knew I’d go to bed with him. The tiramisu was that good.

Later that week, Jamie brought me to his camper trailer for the first time. I stood in the tiny space, taking in the wood paneling, the orange beanbag, and the shelves lined with books.

Jamie apologized when he noticed me looking around and fumbled to explain that the trailer was just to save money for his bike trip. But I’d seen Bukowski and Jean-Paul Sartre in a line of books above the table and couldn’t care less about the trailer’s appearance. I turned immediately to kiss him.

He pushed me slowly to the white down of his bed. We kissed for hours, as though nothing else in the world existed. He encased me.

Eventually, Jamie and I planned to go our separate ways—me to Missoula, and him to Portland, Oregon. When he suggested that I move into his trailer to save money, I did so immediately. We lived in a twenty-foot camper trailer, but the rent was only $150 apiece. Our relationship was one with a definitive end, each of us helping the other toward the goal of getting out of town.

Port Townsend’s work force was mainly that of the service industry, catering to tourists and those with disposable incomes who arrived in droves during the warmer months. The ferries were packed with them, crawling over the waters between the mainland and the peninsula, the gateway to the rain forests and hot springs on the coast. The Victorian mansions, shops, and cafés on the waterfront brought the city money and in turn provided livelihoods for many residents. Still, it wasn’t a ton of money pouring in. Unless a Port Townsend resident started a business, there wasn’t much more the average worker could do to build a future.

Many of the core residents already had their futures firmly set in place. In the late sixties or early seventies, a band of hippies had moved into Port Townsend, then a near ghost town barely surviving, thanks to a paper mill that employed most of its residents. The town had been built on the promise of being one of the biggest western seaports and failed when lack of funding from the Depression rerouted railroads to Seattle and Tacoma. The hippies, some of whom were now