Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,95

house” game with her. Visualizing where we’d end up, where we’d live, what we’d do, seemed to be just as important for her as it was for me.

This was the start of our journey. The beginning. Sitting at that table, I felt time pause for a moment, for as long as a stroke of her brush. For that moment, we were warm. We had each other, we had a home, and we knew the strongest, deepest kind of love. We spent so much time scrambling from one thing to the next, getting through it, getting to the end, and starting over again, that I would not forget to fully breathe in the minuscule moments of beauty and peace.

Pam called that afternoon, and I talked to her from where I sat at the kitchen table, staring out at the snow. “Are you able to get out?” she asked with a wince or thread of hope in her voice.

“I tried to move my car earlier,” I said, standing to walk into our closed-off bedroom to look out the window. “It rolled out of its parking spot to the street and the tires spun in place from there.” I shook my head, a former Alaskan in every sense of the word. “My neighbor had to come out and try to get it back in the spot I had it, but we couldn’t.” I scratched at the frost on the window. I had left Pearl parked where she was, her bumper barely out of the road. The cold spell wasn’t supposed to let up for another day or two. Although most of the main roads were fine, several of my clients were tucked back in the woods or on hills. If I got stuck, I risked not being able to pick up Mia in time, and I didn’t have anyone to call in a pinch.

I wondered for a minute if Pam would fire me for not being able to work. I’d never missed this much work before, and that history at least seemed to work in my advantage. But for a few seconds, I didn’t care. I hated the job almost as much as I hated relying on it. I hated needing it. I hated having to be grateful for it. “I’ll make it up,” I said to Pam.

“I know you will, Steph,” she said, and we hung up.

I scratched at the frost on the window some more. Mia had the television on again. My breath came out in little clouds. When I reached to pull a few of Mia’s stuffed animals away from the window, little bits of their fake fur stuck, frozen, to the glass.

Dusk grew on the horizon outside. I decided to make Mia pancakes for dinner with a small spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream on them. For myself I chose a package of ramen with two hard-boiled eggs and the remaining frozen broccoli. Mia took a bath, and I wrote in the online journal under its new name and posted photos from our walk through the snow to get the sled. Mia’s cheeks were bright red, her hair sticking out of her hat just long enough to curl around the sides as she carefully licked snow off the tip of her pink mitten. It had been so quiet. The only sound was our feet compacting the snow.

Along the rim of the bathtub, Mia lined up her herd of My Little Ponies, hand-me-down gifts from a friend. “I’m done with my bath, Mom,” she called out to me, and I lifted her, still covered in bubbles, her skin rosy from the warm water, onto the towel I’d laid on the toilet lid. She was getting so heavy. So much time had passed since she was a tiny infant in my arms.

That evening, we slept on the pull-out sofa bed for the second week in a row. Mia jumped up and down, excited for another sleepover with me, another viewing of Finding Nemo.

She fell asleep halfway through the movie. I got up to turn down the heat. It would be three hours before I could start to doze off, and I found myself wishing for wine or even decaf coffee—something to keep me warm. Instead, I crawled back into bed next to Mia’s warm body, feeling her breathe and twitch in her sleep. Finally, I drifted off as well.

PART THREE

23

DO BETTER

Em-i-lee-ah?” the nurse called out. I roused Mia by moving my shoulder out from under her head.

“Here,” I said, standing