Shutting myself in the tiny room with the toilet seemed a natural response to blaring emptiness pulling at me from every direction. Bathrooms were a good place to hide. I wanted to crouch, belly-down on the floor, fingers laced over the back of my head like a tornado drill, like everything was about to fall on top of me. After the accident, the Clown House, a massive, three-story home with views of the town I used to live in with Travis, seemed to amplify how out of control my life was. How unsure I was of our future. How, financially, we might not survive.
I sank to my knees in front of the toilet and took a breath in, counting to five while I let it out, before stopping to fold the toilet paper into a triangle on the bottom—one corner tucked under, then the other, until a neat point formed. My hand dropped down to my cleaning tray to pull out my yellow gloves. Bits of glass from the crash flew all over the floor.
The tears blinded me. The toilet closet, which moments ago had comforted me like an embrace, now seemed like a trash compactor. I reached for the door handle and bolted out, gasping for air. From my throat came the sound of a guttural yell before I broke into sobs. The day before, Jamie had glared at me on the ferry dock after he rushed to take Mia from me like he was some kind of superhero rescuing his daughter from the evil witch who’d put her in danger. Mia started crying, reaching for me. “No, my love,” he’d said, “you need to come with me.” Then the glare.
I sat in front of the shower, my forehead resting on my knees, running the fibers of the maroon rug through my fingertips. The sound of car windows exploding shook in my ears, an overwhelming tightness rising in my chest. I’m on the clock, I said to myself. I’m having a nervous breakdown on the clock.
There were pieces of glass in the fingers of the gloves. I shook them out and put the gloves on, but the tears kept blinding me, so I pulled them off and put my hands over my face in an effort to hide.
I reached for my phone and pressed the button to call Pam at home. “I can’t stop crying,” I said. “Pam, I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop crying.” I gulped for air.
“Stephanie? Are you okay? Where are you?” Her voice sounded so concerned, so motherly, I let out more sobs.
“I’m, uh,” I said, putting my hand on my mouth before any more embarrassing noises could escape. I couldn’t think of the owner’s name. “The big house with all the clown paintings.”
“The Garrisons’?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. That sounded right. “I’m doing the downstairs today, too.” My words came like I’d been running. “There’s glass in my supplies. Glass sprayed all over Mia. She could have died.”
“Well,” she said, then paused, like she was searching for words. “You had no way of knowing…they say people drift toward things they’re looking at when they’re driving…but you didn’t park there thinking that would happen, right?”
I thought of the driver—who I assumed had been texting or lighting a cigarette or distracted in some way—instead, looking at me, standing in the median. Had I been the distraction that caused him to drift?
Pam knew my financial situation. She knew I needed these hours, that I couldn’t afford not to work them, not to get paid for them. That morning, she listened to me tell her about having to drive—how my hands shook, how I had to pass the scene of the accident again, how I had tried not to look at the black tire marks and broken glass on the side of the road, but how I had seen them anyway. I had only one house to do that day. But I couldn’t do it.
“Why don’t you take today off?” she suggested gently after listening to me. “And tomorrow, too.”
“I’ll be able to work tomorrow,” I argued. It was just the Farm House. It’d be a challenge. “I’ll be fine.” I tried to assure myself more than her. “Maybe if I take today to call the insurance company and make a plan, then I’ll feel more in control of everything,” I said, starting to believe it myself.
“Okay,” she said, probably smiling. “Then I need you to get back to work. You need to get back to work. It’s not going to do you any good to keep falling apart like this.” She paused. I heard the TV in the background. “Trust your strength,” she added. But it was hard for me to trust it was still there.
When I ended the call, I sighed, not realizing how much I’d needed some compassion. The day before, my dad had yelled at me over the phone because I’d posted about the accident on Facebook. He said anyone would be able to see the photo of my mangled car and use it against me.
“They’d have to be my friend to see it,” I said, annoyed at his paranoia and hurt that it was the only thing he seemed to care about. “I need to be able to tell people, Dad.”
“I don’t think you should talk about it at all,” he snapped. “Do you realize the insurance company might think it’s your fault? Have you even thought about that?” But he didn’t, or couldn’t, understand how much I’d needed support right then, even if it was from comments someone left under a photo, even if they were thousands of miles away.
“Yeah, Dad,” I said softly. “Yeah, I thought about it.” I paused, listened to him take a drag off of a cigarette and exhale the smoke. I wished he’d invite me over; offer to order me a pizza. Anything other than a lecture. “I, uh. I gotta go, Dad.” I noticed that he didn’t say he loved me before saying goodbye. Then again, I didn’t say it, either.
Instead of going home, I went to the junkyard to clean out my car. The beaded necklaces and stained-glass daisy still hung from the rearview mirror. I collected my coffee cup, made by a friend, which fit two shots of espresso perfectly. I pulled the “Alaska Girls Kick Ass” sticker off the back window. I took a dozen pictures of Ruby’s mangled back end, now unrecognizable. The back corner had been pressed in, near the gas cap, which now bent forward, crinkled like discarded tinfoil.
I put my hand on the back hatch, where the window met the edge, on the corner, beyond where the wiper could reach. My eyes closed; my head dropped. I swore I felt her pain.
This tank of a car had kept my girl safe and now faced being sold for parts and flattened. “Thank you,” I said to her.
By midafternoon, I sat on my couch, looking out at gray skies that seemed to hold the type of rain that came down by the bucketful. Tuesday had been hot and sunny, but the weather had returned to the usual cold dampness that came with fall in Washington. I tried to be thankful that we didn’t have to stand out in the rain that day. I couldn’t believe it had only been two days before.
I paced the square of open floor in my apartment, phone pressed to my ear, listening to scratchy classical music. A policeman called to notify me that the other driver had a minimum amount of insurance, so I called them right away. “Well, just send me the model number of the car seat, and we’ll send you a check for that,” the agent from the other insurance company said on the phone after several minutes. “I can get you paid for your missed work, too. Also, we’ll get you a rental and move your car to another lot. We should have reimbursement for the repairs or the cost of the car by next—”
“Wait,” I said. “So, it’s not my fault? You’re taking responsibility?”
“Yes,” she said. “We are taking full responsibility for this accident. You were pulled over to the side of the road, you had your hazards on, and you were parked. You are not at fault for this accident.”
Her voice was so full of sincerity. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. I even started to believe it.
Most of my life as a mother had been tiptoeing uneasily on a floor, both real and metaphorical, becoming hesitant to trust the surface at all. Every time I built back a foundation, walls, floor, or even a roof over our heads, I felt sure it would collapse again. My job was to survive the crash, dust myself off, and rebuild. So I made a decision to trust my gut; and when I went back to work, I told Pam that I could clean only one house a day. By the time I dropped Mia off at day care, drove to one house, and cleaned it, the prospect of driving to another and starting all over again was too much. I was done.
Back at t
he Clown House two weeks later, I lugged my supplies up the staircase, past the moving eyes to the master bathroom. The bathroom had double sinks, a stand-up shower the size of a formal dining room table, a jetted tub on a corner platform. The tub, again, stopped me. There was something about the idea of feeling cradled, or held. I sat inside with one knee up while I dialed an attorney. I still needed to figure out how to survive the financial ruin the accident had caused.
I told the lawyer everything about the incident and what the insurance company said they’d cover, but the amount they offered for my car would barely pay off the loan. I needed a car immediately. He gave me a few key phrases to use the next time I talked to the woman who’d been assigned to my case. When I called her a few hours later, my voice shook as I repeated the rehearsed lines.
“My daughter and I have been extremely affected by this accident,” I said, trying not to sound like I was reading from notes. “She isn’t sleeping well and startles easily at loud noises.” I told her about our neighbor’s car backfiring, how Mia now jumped, startling herself, sometimes to the point of running to me in tears. I mentioned my own stress level, how I was now unable to juggle and complete tasks that I’d previously been able to do with ease. “The emotional stress we’ve been under, feeling the constant tremors from this accident, along with my financial inability to afford a replacement vehicle, have put us under great amounts of hardship.” I took a deep breath. “We need treatment for this. I need therapy, and possibly medication. Mia needs help, too. There’s no way I can afford that on top of the expense of a new car.” I paused to take another deep breath. “If your company is not willing to cover our costs from emotional trauma, I will seek legal counsel in order to be properly compensated.” I had been tracing the words on a piece of paper as I spoke, but at the last line my fingers froze. I sat, trembling and waiting.
“I’ll see what I can do and get back to you,” she said. Within an hour, she called back with an offer that would pay off my loan and give me just over a thousand dollars to use toward a new car, in addition to lost wages. I tried to stay formal in thanking her, but I wish she could have seen my smile after I hung up the phone. I hadn’t smiled like that in such a very long time.
I’d been watching online classified ads for days, but a good car for twelve hundred dollars was hard to find. Then, there she was. A little Honda Civic wagon. 1983. Light blue. Travis and Mia came with me to check her out. An older couple who owned a detail shop had put in a couple thousand dollars to get her fixed up for their nephew. They’d rebuilt the engine, replaced the brakes, and put new tires on her. The nephew decided he didn’t want the car, so technically he was the one selling her. She purred. She had a manual transmission. She’d been owned by a couple who’d saved the original paperwork they’d signed when they bought her new off the lot. I offered $1,100. They took it. Mia and I named her Pearl, the shiniest thing to come out of a dark situation.
Pearl handled our daily commuting decently well, and the relief of having her made my stress level drop immensely. My schedule, thankfully, was still full, and a good distraction. If I had an open afternoon, I filled it with a private client. I posted about my cleaning services in local mom groups on Facebook instead of Craigslist, after I began receiving too many responses asking me to clean naked or in a sexy maid costume. The first time it happened, the man framed it as helping me out. As if cleaning wasn’t degrading enough.
After paying for gas to drive to work, my take-home pay from Classic Clean was a little more than half of what I got paid an hour. After the canceled clean at the Weekend House, I tried to keep my commute to less than forty-five minutes and stopped accepting new clients that were reaching outside my radius. But Lonnie insisted I take a new one. “It’ll be worth it,” she said. “They’re really nice.” The new client had a large home, custom-built with detailed woodwork and river rock. I cleaned it only a few times and thought of it as the Loving House. To get there, I drove up a winding single-lane road through tall evergreens. On top of the hill, where the house was, I could see the farmland nestled in the valley below. The husband and wife were home when I cleaned. Photographs of their adult daughter and her children covered the fridge and shelves. The spare bedroom off the kitchen seemed constantly poised for their return.
The husband greeted me at the door, eager to help me carry in my supplies. A fluffy golden retriever wagged its tail and sniffed at my feet. I removed my shoes and smiled at the wife, who smiled back from the chair I rarely saw her leave. Lonnie, in telling me the history of the Loving House, said the husband had cared for his wife full-time through a long illness. I thought it was cancer or something else serious, maybe terminal. The TV was always on, blaring Dr. Oz or home improvement programs. But when the wife spoke, her husband rushed to turn down the volume. I had trouble understanding her; she spoke so quietly and with a slurred voice. Her husband would feed her lunch and then carry her to the hallway bathroom afterward.
They’d traveled together for much of their marriage, choosing to have a child later than most. Their living room shelves were lined with drums, wood carvings, stone statues of elephants, and mountaineering books. Whenever the husband spoke about their life, he would gently ask his wife if she could recall the happy memory. If she did, he smiled with such kindness and love that I ached a little for their life.
The first time I cleaned their house, I went over the expected hours it would take to clean. The kitchen and bathrooms hadn’t been detail-cleaned in a long time, and it took extra time to scrub 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. Mo
st 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 to get there I had to complete assignments about the names of different clouds. And, well, lie about my exercise routine.
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