Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,90

the surfaces. When I was finished, I put on my coat, and then I paused to wave goodbye to the woman in the chair. She motioned for me to come over and reached out to take my hand. With the other, she placed a ten-dollar bill.

“That’s more than I take home in an hour,” I said, surprised that I’d blurted out that information. “That’s almost twice as much.”

She smiled, and I turned to continue walking out the door, mumbling a thank-you. Before I got to the door, overcome with the moment, I turned and said, “Boy, am I gonna get Mia a Happy Meal tonight!” Both smiled, and we chuckled a little at that.

When I had gathered my things, the husband rushed over to insist I go out the garage instead since it had started to rain a little more heavily.

We loaded my tray of supplies, clean rags, and bag of rags to be washed that weekend in the back of my wagon, and he asked me to follow him back into the garage. “We don’t get visitors much anymore,” he said and handed me a treat to give the dog. Trying not to blush at being called a visitor, I commented on the motorcycle parked by the back wall. He smiled and told me his daughter had come to stay for a week over the summer so he could go on an annual motorcycle trip down the coast with some friends.

We both stood quietly, hearing the words unsaid. I wanted to ask about his wife, wanted to know what their life was like, how he remained happy and at peace through it all. Instead, I admitted to wanting a road trip myself. “Even a day off or two would be nice,” I uncharacteristically mentioned. I never talked to my clients about the labor intensity cleaning their homes for low wages required.

“Oh, yeah?” he said with sincere interest. “Where were you thinking about going?”

“Missoula, Montana,” I said, reaching down to pet the dog, thinking how Mia would love to have one just like it someday. “I’m from Alaska. Seems like it’s the next best place.”

“It is,” he said, smiling. “Beautiful area. Unbelievably open. It’s true what they say about the sky being bigger there.”

I smiled, letting the vision, the dream, rush through me. “Hopefully we get a chance to visit,” I said.

He nodded at me, then told me to get going so I could pick up my little girl. As I backed my car down the driveway, I waved at him. Being in that house made me feel as though I’d witnessed love in its truest form. They had so much that it came spilling out of their open garage door.

That house was such an anomaly, I already sighed at the memory of it as I drove home. Most weekdays were filled with a mind-numbing loneliness. I was by myself constantly—driving, working, staying up at night to complete assignments for my classes. The exception was the two hours with Mia in the evenings for dinner, her bath, and bedtime stories. My advisor at Skagit Valley Community College had looked at me with wide eyes when I told him I was a single mom who worked full-time. “What you’re trying to do here is pretty much impossible,” he told me, referring to the course load I had signed up for on top of my other responsibilities. After our meeting, I walked out to the parking lot, sat in my car, and didn’t start the engine for a long time.

But the homework wasn’t hard, just annoying. I had to fulfill core classes like math and science, classes higher-education institutions decided you needed to complete, to pay for, to receive a degree. Some of the credits for courses I’d taken throughout my twenties transferred over, but I still needed physical education and communication, both of which I did online, sitting at my computer, alone, in total and complete irony.

If I didn’t get my assignments done during the week, I caught up on weekends when Mia went to Jamie’s. I could work ahead on assignments. Each class blurred into the other. I took an anthropology course, and one about weather, all of the information vanishing from my mind immediately after the open-book test. It didn’t make sense to spend so much time and money and energy on school. At the beginning, the end is such a long way away. And I didn’t even know what the end would look like. I just knew that