Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,98

First thing in the morning, I cleaned the master bathroom. The bedroom was pink-carpeted and contained two litter boxes and three scratching posts. While I moved the litter boxes and vacuumed where they’d been, four cats stared at me from plastic carriers lined up on the bed. My presence was an inconvenience to them, and it meant they were trapped in boxes for the day. They growled if I came too close.

The days I cleaned her house, I doubled up on my dosage of over-the-counter allergy medication. But when I ran out, it felt like I’d snorted cayenne pepper. On those days, I cracked the windows, desperate for some relief. But I never told Lonnie or Pam.

When I did my taxes through TurboTax that spring, I nearly fell out of my chair. With the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, I’d get a refund of nearly $4,000. “That’s more than I make in three months,” I mumbled out loud, into the darkness of our apartment. It didn’t seem possible to get that amount. I anxiously waited for the IRS to accept my forms, feeling like I’d gotten away with something. In a notebook, I listed things I could do with the money—get a tune-up, oil change, and CV joints for the Honda; pay off the credit card debt; finally buy kitchen sponges and dish soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and conditioner, bubble bath, vitamins, and allergy medications. Or we could maybe go on a road trip.

Like many, most of what I knew about Missoula I had read in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. People who visit Missoula in search of places to fly fish can attest to the pull of that particular novel, or the movie made from the book. But for me, it was the way John Steinbeck wrote about Montana in Travels with Charley that convinced me to leave Alaska and begin heading toward Big Sky Country. I chose Missoula not because of Maclean, but for David James Duncan, author of The River Why, who, at a reading in Seattle, admitted to living and sometimes teaching at the university there. What compelled me to dream about waking up one summer day to drive east for nine hours was, plainly, a hunch. A hunch that had grown into a constant hum. One I’d had for more than half a decade.

Missoula’s wages are low and housing costs are high. That much I knew from conversations I’d had with people who used to live there but couldn’t afford to anymore. Jobs aren’t easy to come by, and they don’t pay well in a small college town with nearly seventy thousand people. Parents of college kids rent apartments for them, driving up rent costs in sought-after parts of town, where even a one-bedroom basement apartment goes for at least eight hundred bucks. When I thought about whether or not to relocate, this conundrum remained at the forefront of my mind. But when I spoke to people who lived in Missoula, they deeply loved their town. Those who had moved there said that while they had given up competitive salaries or high wages, it was worth it because they got to live in Missoula.

I wanted to know why Steinbeck wrote so lovingly of the place. Why Maclean claimed the world increased rapidly in bastards the farther one got from Missoula, Montana. People spoke of this place like a sensational flavor of ice cream they’d had on vacation once, one that they’d never been able to find again and weren’t sure if they’d dreamed of or not.

The night the tax refund money hit my account, we went out to eat at Red Robin. I let Mia get a chocolate milkshake. We went to the store and filled the cart with food we normally couldn’t afford: avocados, tomatoes, frozen berries for pancakes. I bought a bottle of wine. Over the next week, I bought a frame and a full-sized mattress and a heated pad so I didn’t have to heat the whole room at night. I found insulating curtains and cheap rods on clearance. I bought Mia a kid-sized trampoline for her to jump on instead of the couch and bed. I bought myself something I’d been wanting for several years—a titanium, tension-set diamond ring for $200. I was tired of waiting for a man to come into my life who would buy one for me. It was more money than I’d spent on something unnecessary in years. As hard a decision as