If I’d been honest with myself, I would have admitted to looking for a partner or that I secretly hoped to find one. My insecurities, or possibly my rational, realistic side, knew there was a very slim chance of that happening. I was on government assistance, having regular anxiety attacks, still unable to process much of the emotional abuse I’d just experienced or know the depth to which it had affected me. My life was at some sort of standstill in its new identity; in being consumed with motherhood, which I wasn’t sure I really even liked. I mean, who in their right mind would want to take a person like that on?
After only a month on the site, to my utter dismay, one did travel to see me. He lived close by, in a town called Stanwood, one I’d driven through several times on the hunt for a place to live that was anywhere but Port Townsend. Stanwood was a tiny farming community just south of Skagit County, where all of my family lived. It was close but not too close, and next to Camano Island, with countless, mostly untouched hidden beaches. This man not only had location going for him, but his emails read like John Steinbeck had written them when he talked about living on the property his great-grandfather had built a house on, and eventually shot himself in.
Travis spoke of the farm he lived on with a surprising amount of admiration, considering he’d moved from it once for a short period of time. He said he had pictures of himself as a baby, bathing in the sink he now stood next to at night to brush his teeth. His parents, who’d bought the farm from his grandfather, still lived and worked on the property, running the horse-boarding operation completely on their own. Travis’s mom did the bookkeeping between caring for her five grandchildren during the weekdays. That, more than the promise of riding horses whenever I wanted, drew me to him enough that I accepted his offer to buy me dinner.
He had to ask his dad to feed and water the horses for him that night and was more than willing to travel to Port Townsend. When I met him at the ferry terminal, he had a wide-eyed look to him.
“I’ve never been on that boat before,” he said, a little breathless. “I didn’t even know this town was here.” He laughed nervously, and I suggested that we walk down to Sirens. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, so there wouldn’t be anyone in there. I knew if someone saw me eating out with a strange, unfamiliar-looking guy, it would get reported back to Jamie. A couple of months earlier, after a long day of landscaping, I’d gone downtown for a much-needed minute to sit alone with a beer. Someone there tipped Jamie off, and he accused me of being tipsy when I picked up Mia. I tried to stay out of bars completely after that.
We found a table inside and both ordered burgers and beers. I glanced at the table on the deck where I’d sat with Mom and William six months earlier, the last time I’d been inside that building. I didn’t get the impression that Travis went out to eat very often, either, judging from how he fumbled over ordering. I assumed he was nervous, too intrigued by him to care.
“So, what is it you do, exactly?” I asked, even though he’d told me through email and over the phone.
“I clean stalls in the morning, feed at night, and fix anything that needs it during the day.” Travis didn’t seem to mind my interest and constant questions, and he laughed easily when one of us tried to be funny. “But hay season, that’s when you work all the time.”
I nodded like I understood. “So you guys grow your own hay to feed the horses people board there? How many horses do you have?”
“My parents have a couple in their barn, plus a few others they keep in there for friends.” He took a large bite of his burger, and I waited for him to continue. He’d worn what seemed to be his work clothes—blue jeans with holes and grease stains on them, brown leather boots, and a hooded sweatshirt over a faded t-shirt. My outfit sort of matched his, only I’d worn the nice pair of Lucky brand jeans I’d bought over the summer at a consignment store. “Then Susan, the woman who rents out one of the arenas, has her barn where she gives lessons. The main barn holds about 120 horses, but we only have half that now. People who boarded with us lost all their money and can’t pay for horses anymore. Can’t even pay for someone to take them.”
I’d never thought of a horse being such a large expense, but I knew they were a lot of work. When I was really young and we lived close to my grandparents, I’d spent many summer days at the property down the long dirt road where my dad had grown up. My grandpa had been a logger before he retired and took lines of packhorses into the woods. He’d put me on a horse at Mia’s age. I could ride bareback better than I could run on my own legs. My head filled with visions of Mia doing the same.
It was starting to get dark when I walked Travis back to the ferry terminal. We hugged goodbye, and I caught myself wanting to bury my face in his chest and not let go. He smelled like horses, hay, grease, and sawdust. He smelled like work, which my mind translated to stability. The combining scents brought up an amount of nostalgia that overwhelmed me. Working on cars, riding horses with Grandpa, handing nails to my dad as a kid. Travis’s embrace reminded me of all of those moments, comforted me, and somehow brought me home.
6
THE FARM
I closed my single-blade Gerber knife and put it back in the pocket of my Carhartts. The fall air was moist on my face as Travis and I worked to throw dozens of seventy-pound hay bales into a grinder, which chopped it to half-inch pieces so we could mix it with the wood chips for horse bedding. I wiped the dark yellow dust off my forehead before returning my fingers to the work glove I’d shoved in my armpit. I paused to take a breath, then yanked the red twine toward me. If I cut the twine holding the hay bale together in front of the knot, I could pull it out smoothly, and the entire bale wouldn’t move, making it easier to pick off the flakes to throw into the grinder. Cutting the twine behind the knot made it snag, stubbornly catch, sending the flakes tumbling to the ground in a heap, slowing us down.
“You’re not doing it right!” Travis yelled again as the bale’s flakes piled at my feet.
“Sorry!” I yelled back, trying to sound sincere. I did this over and over, through a mountain of bales, turning them into an even larger mountain of finely cut, dry grass.
We moved to Stanwood to live with Travis just four months after our first date, when Mia was nearly two. It had been a rough nine months since then. Travis worked extremely hard on the farm and outside of the house. Inside, he barely looked away from the TV. Our relationship provided stability; a home. But perhaps more important, it provided me with an invisible stamp of approval. With Travis, I was part of a family unit. I was complete. But I didn’t anticipate the loss of my independence, not realizing how much that had given my identity as a mother value. In Travis’s eyes, my value relied on the work I did outside of the home on the farm, since the work I did inside—the cleaning and cooking—had no value to him. But I couldn’t find a job, so my worth amounted to the work I did to help him. The problem was, I had only the small amount Jamie paid in child support and food stamps to use in caring for Mia. I’d watch Travis get paid for the work I did a decent part of and not get a share.
In the beginning, it was fun to go out every evening to feed and water the fifty or so horses that clients boarded there. When the weekend stall-cleaners quit, Travis volunteered to take over and earned an extra $100 a week in addition to the $100 his parents paid him for feeding. During the weekends Mia was with her dad, I got up at seven a.m. to go out and help muck stalls in addition to the feedings every evening, and I watched Travis pocket the wad of cash his parents gave him for the work, not offering me any.
“Travis,” I said the second time it happened. “Shouldn’t I get some of that? I helped.”
“What do you need money for?” he snapped. “You don’t pay any bills.”
I stifled tears from the built-up humiliation and managed to squeak out that my car needed gas.
“Here,” he said, flipping through bills and handing me a twenty.
We started fighting. Every time I refused to help feed. Every time dinner wasn’t on th
e table. Every time I opted to sleep in, knowing I’d get the silent treatment as punishment. I desperately applied for almost every job vacancy posted on Craigslist or in the local newspaper, submitting anywhere from a few to a dozen applications a week, but I rarely got a call back. Then a friend gave my number to a woman needing a new employee for her cleaning business, and I was hired on the spot. The job felt promising. I would be paid $10 an hour, and Jenny, the owner of the company, hoped to have twenty hours of work for me each week: $200 a week of my very own money. And I could maybe even quit working on the farm.
“It’s a great job. All of the houses they clean are in Stanwood,” I told Travis as he climbed down from the tractor. “I don’t think they even have a training period. I just go to work and get paid under the table.” I tried to smile sweetly, even though we hadn’t said more than a few words to each other in days. “It all feels kind of meant to be.” Mia, now almost two and a half, was incredibly happy living with Travis. If I were honest with myself, I was, too, but mostly because in being with him, a shroud of stigmas from being a single mom fell off of me.
“What?” Travis asked, looking annoyed and like he’d heard only half of what I’d said. He had on the same outfit that he’d worn when we first met. I tried to remember what it had felt like to hug him that first time. A year ago, I’d felt safe, comforted in his arms. Now they were too full of resentment to embrace me.
“If I work part-time in the mornings,” I reasoned, following him as he connected the trailer to the hitch on the back of the tractor, “then Mia could stay in day care for the rest of the day, and I’d be able to help on the farm?” I’d convinced myself that working on the farm was like working off my share of the rent and bills. It was the asking for gas money that I couldn’t handle.
He looked at me without expression.
“I’ll work hard. I’ll clean stalls,” I said, ignoring my lack of dignity in almost begging. “I’ll feed and water horses. I’ll try my hardest to cook dinner, even though I hate it.”
“I don’t care about dinner as long as you work on the farm,” he said. Then he sighed.
I waited.
“Help me grind up these loads of hay,” he said, climbing back into the tractor.
“So you think the job’s okay?” I yelled at him over the tractor’s engine. He glanced at me roughly but didn’t respond. My only choice was to sulk behind, following the trailer piled with bales of hay to the barn.
It was early winter of 2009, during the recession, when people couldn’t afford horses for recreation or for anything else. Travis and his parents’ boarding operation was at an all-time low, while the cost of alfalfa and wood chips they used for bedding had increased. Most of their equipment was ancient and failing. His parents had wearied of keeping the business afloat and relied on Travis to run the bulk of it. He worked around the clock during hay season, spending up to twelve hours a day on the tractor, and in the cold months, he tended to repairs and frozen pipes while mucking out anywhere from forty to eighty horse stalls every morning.
I looked up through the hay dust floating in the air, surprised to see Travis smiling at me. We were about halfway through grinding the second load. Hay covered the top of his red baseball cap and the shoulders of his hooded sweatshirt. When he reached out a gloved hand to rustle my hair, I ducked and then threw a handful of twine at him. Travis laughed, his blue eyes lighting up his entire face.
* * *
Jenny’s cleaning company seemed pretty well organized, from what I could tell. She rotated a lot of clients in a datebook she carried like a purse. My first day on the job, she gave me a cleaning kit and a roll of paper towels. I met her and a few other women outside a client’s large brown house that looked over the valley. Jenny barely introduced me by name, instead saying, “She’s the new girl,” and the women nodded without stopping to shake hands or make eye contact as they unloaded their trays from the back of their cars. The client who answered the door was an older woman, with white hair in curlers, who smiled like we were dinner guests. Everyone walked inside to designated areas of the house, and I stood there, waiting for some kind of instruction.
“Just clean the master bathroom and the bedroom if you have time,” one of my coworkers, the oldest one, said. Tracy, I thought her name was. She pointed to a room with a large, overstuffed pink chair next to the bed and left me standing there before I could ask any questions.
When I was about halfway done, Jenny came and checked my work, for a second her face showing no expression; then she smiled and said, “Looks great!” and disappeared again. Everyone was packing up when I walked outside, and Jenny said, “Just follow us to the next one.” For my entire first week, it was the same. A whole team of us descended on a house for an hour, each of us spreading to different corners and rooms, working our way back to the front entrance. Then we’d get back in our little convoy of old cars and move on to the next.
In the center of it all was Jenny, her strawberry-blond hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She carried herself like she’d been popular in high school and expected people to still appease her. When she instructed me on how to clean a room, whether it was a bed or bath, she’d smile and say, “Just make it shine!” I sprayed cleaning liquid and wiped it with paper towels, dusted with fluorescent-colored feathers, and sprayed rooms with air freshener as I left.
Every girl seemed to have a different preference for the part of the job they enjoyed doing most. Some liked cleaning kitchens; others seemed to prefer the vacuuming in living rooms and bedrooms. No one liked cleaning the bathrooms. That job went to the new girl.
A bathroom could seem clean or pretty, draped with pink toilet seats, rugs, and towels to match a shower curtain covered in roses, but that didn’t mean the toilet wasn’t horrific. At first, it was the stray pubic hairs that most disgusted me. But their quantity eventually dulled my shock. I figured out how to dump the small trash bags while avoiding—even with gloved hands—the tampons, condoms, tissues full of snot, and wads of hair. People left bottles of prescription medications all over the counters, by the toothpaste, or next to a glass. I was there to clean, obviously, but I kept expecting people to be a little tidier or to clean up their clutter. I spent at least five minutes picking up various objects, wiping them off, wiping underneath them, and putting them back in a neat way.
After that first week of following the group around, I eventually got paired with a woman with brown, shoulder-length, wavy hair about ten years older than me whom everyone complained about under their breath so Jenny couldn’t hear. Angela had yellowed teeth and fingernails from smoking, and I hadn’t been properly introduced to her until Jenny told me we’d go to the next house on our own.
“Angela knows the house,” Jenny said. “She’ll tell you where to go. Then you can drop her off and pick her up in the morning. Angie, I’ll text you tonight and tell you what houses you’re doing tomorrow, okay, girl?” Jenny waved and got into her car with two of the other women, and that seemed to be the end of my training period.
At the house, Angela chatted with the clients, a middle-aged couple dressed in ironed khakis, while I cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms. It didn’t seem like she was actually working until I heard her running the vacuum for a bit before I came out from the master bathroom to join her.
“You done?” she asked, turning off the vacuum and smiling.
After Jenny had paired me with Angela, another coworker waited for her to leave and whispered that I should keep an eye on her when we cleaned. “She steals sponges and paper towels from the houses,” she whispered, items we were supposed to supply ourselves with our own money. Sometimes after we finished a house, Angela would grab snacks out of the cupboards and jump into the car with a half-empty bag of chips or a sleeve of saltines. I’d watch her tear into them, knowing she didn’t have them before we went in.
“Do you want some?” she asked, pointing the bag toward me, so oblivious to my contemptuous glare I wanted to scream.
�
��No,” I said, waiting for the two other cleaners we’d teamed up with that day to pull out of the driveway behind me. Tracy, the driver, whose short black hair had an inch of gray roots, stopped to light up a cigarette.
“Hey, can I smoke in here?” Angela asked me for the third or fourth time, like Mia did when she knew I was tired and might give in.
“No,” I said bluntly.
“Then I’m gonna see if I can ride with Tracy,” she said, opening the door, rushing to the car behind me as it started to back out.
I never mentioned Angela’s behavior to Jenny. I kept my head down and didn’t complain, humbled and grateful to have found a job. But I also needed more hours. Jenny spoke about her employees in a caring way, and I got the feeling that Angela had been cleaning with her for a long time, possibly the longest of any of us. I wondered what the story was, why Angela had fallen to the place she had. I wondered that about all of my coworkers. What had happened to bring them here, to this place of cleaning toilets for so little money?
“She used to be one of my best employees,” Jenny told me once on a rare occasion that it was just the two of us driving to the next job. Her voice softened. “She’s going through a hard time. I feel for her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.” But I most certainly did not. In the houses Angela and I cleaned together, she’d mosey around, looking through magazines and cupboards, while I’d go at almost double speed. After a while, my fingers began to crack along the sides. I reeked of ammonia, bleach, and that powdered shit we sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming.
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