“I don’t think I can afford to visit Montana,” I said to Henry after he asked what was wrong. He waved in the air like my words smelled bad. For a year now, he’d heard me mention Missoula, but only in an “oh-I’d-like-to-visit-there-someday” kind of way. My face must have looked so mournful that he saw the weight of that statement. So much so that he got up from his desk, walked over to the shelf, and started looking through travel books and maps. Then he handed me a book about Glacier National Park and a large folded map of Montana.
He spread out the map across his desk and pointed to places I needed to go. He refused to believe that the trip to Missoula was an impossible option. While I appreciated the gesture, encouragement, and support, my smile wasn’t sincere. A huge part of me was scared. Not of the journey—though I did fear my car breaking down—but of falling in love with Missoula and then having to return to the Skagit Valley, to the mold in my studio apartment above the freeway. It would be like saying goodbye to a better life, one that I would not get to have.
In wanting that life, in wanting to get ahead, my job at Classic Clean stopped making sense. Over a third of my wages went to gas. After bringing this to Pam’s attention, she did offer a small travel allowance, but it was a quarter of what I spent just to get from one job to the next. Plus, the anonymity started to wear me down. Between working alone and taking online classes, my life was one of solitude. I craved human interaction, even if it was a situation where I’d been hired by someone to work. I needed my job to have purpose, meaning, or at least feel like I’d helped someone.
24
THE BAY HOUSE
One afternoon, I walked into the Financial Aid Office at Skagit Valley Community College and said I wanted to take out the maximum amount of student loans. This hadn’t been an easy decision, and I started shaking as I waited for the person behind the counter to help me. Taking out these loans meant I’d turn down work, available work, and go into debt instead. But my exhaustion had reached a level of impossibility. There wasn’t any other way to explain this rash decision. Mia seemed constantly sick, and I spent only three hours a day with her. My back hurt during the day and would stiffen while I slept, the pain waking me up at four a.m. Loan money meant I could focus on finding private clients and landscaping, instead of working for Classic Clean. It meant spending more time with Mia.
It also meant the opportunity to volunteer at the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services as a receptionist. I thought of it like an internship that my loans paid me for. Volunteering would pay in experience, diversity on my résumé, and letters of recommendation. My classes at the community college were preparing me for a paralegal degree. The only jobs I allowed myself to dream about were the practical ones that could earn me health insurance and retirement funds.
“Your Honor, the father is a full-time worker,” Jamie’s lawyer had said three years earlier, before revealing that I was then homeless and unemployed. Standing in front of that judge, hearing Jamie obtain respect and admiration for working and for living in the stable housing he’d kicked us out of, had been demoralizing. The experience planted a deep-rooted fear in me. Even though I wanted to move to a better living situation, it would be the ninth time Mia and I had moved since she’d been born.
In most of our dwellings, she didn’t have her own room. While judges were rumored to say, “I don’t care if the child sleeps on a concrete floor! They will have overnight visitation with their father,” mothers fighting for sole custody—especially ones who’d escaped abuse—had to provide a sort of life that was simply impossible to obtain. In court, Jamie’s lawyer described me as a mentally unstable person, unable to care for her own child full-time. I had to fight for the ability to mother my nursing infant, the infant Jamie had screamed at me to abort. I had been ground to a pulp by that judge. Like I had been in the wrong for leaving a man who threatened me. I knew there were countless women out there in the same situation as I had been.
Maybe I could go to law school and become a civil rights attorney. I could help people who’d been in the same violent situation as I had been with Jamie, and I could advocate for them. But there was another voice nagging at me, a louder voice that refused to be ignored. Part of me demanded that I become a writer. But I soothed the insistent voice by telling myself this was just for now, while Mia was still little—and then I’d be a writer. This promise to myself felt like throwing buckets of water on the only fire that was left in me, the only part that dared to dream.
On one late-night search for a better place to live, I found a two-bedroom apartment built over a garage. The front door faced the mountains and the ocean. It was way out of my price range. The ad explained that the owners lived in the main house with their three little girls, three dogs, and a cat who stayed mainly in the garage on the constant hunt for mice. Instead of closing the browser window and feeling that familiar ache for another life, I emailed them and asked if they’d be willing to trade rent for cleaning and landscaping services.
The following afternoon, I pulled into their long driveway, past a large property that had been cleared of all but the largest trees to reveal the view of the bay and hills beyond. Their driveway curved to the left and became almost engulfed in large trees and lined with blackberry bushes. The house was in a neighboring town, farther from where most of my cleaning clients lived. I knew that living there would mean I wouldn’t be able to work for Classic Clean anymore. Maybe, I thought, as I maneuvered down the driveway, if I found a better place to live, one that was also farther away, it would make sense for me to quit.
When I could finally see the house, I nearly closed my eyes at the beauty of the scene in front of me. The sun was just beginning to set behind the mountains, and the entire sky had turned a deep pink. I parked in front of the goat pen, between the apartment and a house with windows lining the front.
A toddler waddled around the cement pad in front of the garage on a wooden bicycle. A tall, lanky man wearing a frayed gray hoodie and jeans watched me get out of my car. I knew from emailing his wife, Alice, that his name was Kurt. We shook hands, and I introduced myself and explained that my daughter was at her dad’s. He rubbed his hand through messy brown hair in an attempt to make it lay flat. “Follow me,” he said, catching the toddler and picking her up. “I’ll show you around.”
As we walked, I felt an intense pull toward this property, one that, if I believed in those things, was like the universe pushing me in the direction I was supposed to go, as if this had been decided for me and all I had to do was follow along. I followed Kurt to the side of the garage and stood next to a garden bigger than our entire studio apartment. He motioned to raspberry and blueberry bushes and then to a large patch of grass next to it.
“Part of the renter’s deal with us is that they mow this,” he said, crossing his arms. “Our last renters kind of had a problem with that.” I watched his daughter toddle toward the grass, imagining Mia with her.
“In addition to the barter?” I asked.
“Barter?” he repeated, looking at the sky, like that sounded familiar but he wasn’t sure why.
I nodded and said, “I emailed Alice, and she said it might be possible for me to trade part of my rent working in your yard and cleaning your house?”
His face changed a few times from confusion to possibly recalling her saying something like that to nodding in agreement at the idea. Though he probably wasn’t, he seemed stoned, like most of my Fairbanks friends were at any given hour of the day. My kind of person, I thought. I liked him immediately.
He looked down and smiled at me. “Just wait until you see up there.” He nodded to the apartment above the garage.
Kurt walked ahead of me up the stairs, carrying the toddler on his hip. He and Alice and their growing family had lived in the apartment above the garage while they built their house, he explained. When we rounded the first bend in the stairs, I stopped following. Kurt turned and smiled at the awe on my face.
The last of the sun’s ra
ys had painted everything a reddish orange. At that moment, I couldn’t recall seeing a more beautiful sunset.
“Is it like this every night?” I asked, my voice just a whisper.
Kurt laughed. “Well, when the sun is actually out,” he said. He was making a joke, because in Northwest Washington there were entire winters, nearly half the year, with less than a dozen days of sunshine. “Good thing it’s almost summer.”
The apartment had two bedrooms that were separated by a bathroom with a tub. There was a cabinet under the sink and shelves for towels. The kitchen had a propane stovetop, a dishwasher, a full-sized fridge, and a window that looked out onto the backyard where the family kept chickens.
All the floors were wood. In the front room and kitchen were two skylights, and there was one in the bathroom. Glass French doors opened to the covered porch. Insulated windows lined the western wall of the living room.
“Cable’s included,” Kurt said, and nodded to the wire coming out of the wall. I looked at him and blinked. “If that’s important to you,” he continued. “I’m a bit of a football fanatic.”
“I haven’t had cable for most of my adult life,” I said. I wanted to laugh hysterically. I wanted to pinch myself.
“It’s really small,” he said, opening the closet in the bedroom, “so I added a lot of closet space. Those cabinets on the wall above this are totally open and huge. I think Alice put bedding up there or something.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s amazing.”
“Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“No, really,” I said. “My closet right now is a glorified broom closet. Our whole place is half the size of this whole apartment.”
“Huh,” he said, to fill an awkward moment. Then he seemed to remember something, and walked toward the kitchen. “You can have the eggs when we go out of town,” he said, pointing down to the chicken coop. “I mean, if you move in here.” I smiled and asked where they were going. “Oh,” he said, snapping his fingers, like he’d forgotten to tell me, “we go to Missoula for a few weeks every summer with some friends. It’s a great place to raise a family. Have you been?”
My breath caught in my chest. I didn’t know how to answer, how to tell him that I’d pined for that town for the past six years, that my only regret in life was not leaving for college as planned, not telling Jamie that I was pregnant, and having the baby by myself. I had a sudden urge to tell Kurt all of this, but I bit my lip.
“I haven’t,” I said, shaking my head, trying to remain calm. “But I’d like to.”
I followed Kurt inside the main house to meet Alice, who was busy at the stove preparing dinner. The oldest two girls played on the floor with an entire bin of Littlest Pet Shop toys. I had never seen so many all at once and thought about how Mia carried around a single frog from the series. I could imagine her playing on the floor with the girls, just as I imagined laughing with Alice and drinking wine together at the table. Maybe I wasn’t just finding a new place to live, but new friends as well.
Alice called over to the girls to get cleaned up for dinner. “Would you like to join us?” she asked, gazing at me. She stood a few inches shorter than me, barely as tall as Kurt’s chest. Her brown hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, revealing ears that stuck out a bit. She looked like she’d been one of those cute girls in high school—someone I would have envied.
“Sure,” I said, smiling, trying not to let happy tears brim over my eyes. “I’m happy to meet you.” Though I sincerely was, Alice intimidated me a little. Without even knowing her, I assumed she was like the mothers at Mia’s day care who limited screen time, scheduled craft projects, limited sugary snacks, and served appropriate servings of fruit and vegetables at every meal. A mother with the privilege, time, and energy to mother well and who might judge me for not doing the same.
Alice put my plate on the table, opposite the two older daughters, who dutifully ate their carrot sticks first. Kurt offered me a beer, and I accepted. It was the same generic kind from Costco that Travis used to get, and the taste brought me right back to his house. When they asked me what I did for work, I said that I cleaned houses, but I wanted to be a writer. Kurt said he’d read a bit of my blog, which confused me for a second, but then I remembered that my email signature contained a link to it.
“I don’t know how you do it on your own,” he said, staring at me for a second too long. The look in his eyes made me squirm, and I sensed awe in his voice. From the corner of my eye, I saw Alice furrow her eyebrows and look down at her plate.
That evening, it felt like my feet weren’t touching the ground. Alice and Kurt said they had an inflatable pool and that the girls played outside most of the day in the summer. Alice worked full-time at a bank, but Kurt, a teacher, had the season off. He said Mia would be welcome to go down to the beach with them or play in their yard. They even had a fire pit where they roasted marshmallows.
By the time I got home, Alice had already emailed me to officially ask if I wanted to move in. I emailed back an enthusiastic yes. She immediately responded, saying I could start moving my stuff in anytime. Over dinner, we’d discussed the barter arrangement, which would make my cash rent a full fifty dollars cheaper than my rent at the studio.
It was mid-March. I had two weeks to move to avoid paying rent on two places. My financial aid award letter had arrived a few days before. It felt like things were falling into place—so much that I started to grow suspicious. Maybe it was too good for us. Maybe we didn’t deserve something that good.
25
THE HARDEST WORKER
When I told Pam I was moving, she understood what it meant. She didn’t fire me. I didn’t quit. We both just sort of agreed that I wouldn’t be able to work there anymore. She and Lonnie told me separately they were sad to see me go. I was their main employee, the one they could count on. That year, I’d received the highest total amount of Christmas bonuses they’d ever seen. One of my clients had recently called Pam to tell her I was irreplaceable.
I knew I was one of the hard workers, like Henry had said, but I also knew I could be replaced. I had to provide for my kid. The pull to live in a better environment was too strong, even though it meant turning down work. Staying in the studio meant that Mia would continue to suffer from illnesses she’d already had surgery for. Taking on debt and losing a job seemed an enormous risk, but I also had grown to understand something else: it would be extremely difficult to see a different future if all I could think about was making it through to the next paycheck.
As a poor person, I was not accustomed to looking past the month, week, or sometimes hour. I compartmentalized my life the same way I cleaned every room of every house—left to right, top to bottom. Whether on paper or in my mind, the problems I had to deal with first—the car repair, the court date, the empty cupboards—went at the top, on the left. The next pressing issue went next to it, on the right. I’d focus on one problem at a time, working left to right, top to bottom.
That shortsightedness kept me from getting overwhelmed, but it also kept me from dreaming. “Plan for five years from now” never made it to that top corner. Saving for retirement or Mia’s college education never made it on my radar. I had to keep an underlying faith that things would eventually get better. That life wouldn’t always be a struggle. My mom, the first in our family to go to college, had built her whole life on breaking that cycle. A master’s degree allowed her to pursue her dreams, even at the cost of losing a relationship with me. But she had grown up in a run-down house, while I had grown up in the suburbs—a privilege that perhaps created my confidence that things would get better. I wondered about the people who waited in lines next to me for benefits who didn’t have such a past to look back on. Did they share any piece of this confidence? When a person is too deep in systemic poverty, there is no upward trajectory. Life is struggle and nothing else. But for me, many of my decisions came from an assumption that things would, eventually, start to improve.
&n
bsp; There wasn’t any fanfare in quitting my job. Most of my clients wouldn’t know I’d left, that I had been replaced by a new person. Maybe they would vacuum or position the throw pillows differently. Maybe the clients would come home to find the shampoo bottles arranged in a new way, but most of them probably wouldn’t notice the change at all. When I thought about a new maid taking over my jobs, I wondered again what it would be like to know a stranger had been in your house, wiping every surface, emptying the bathroom garbage of your bloody pads. Would you not feel exposed in some way? After a couple of years, my clients trusted our invisible relationship. Now there would be another invisible human being magically making lines in the carpet.
Pam encouraged me to become licensed and insured, since I would rely purely on my self-employment income. But the suggestion conveyed a permanence and the beginning of a lifelong career. I’d need a company name, she said, something that seemed official. Pam had started out that way. But as much as I appreciated her advice, I didn’t want this to be my start. I wanted it to be a means to an end, and that end was a degree. A ticket to never having to scrub anyone’s toilet but my own.
I didn’t tell the woman in the Cat Lady’s House it was my final day, but I did hug Beth at Lori’s House. I’d miss her coffee and conversation.
When I left the Chef’s House, I smiled and waved and then flipped it off. I’m pretty sure the owner never aimed when he peed. I snuck out of the Cigarette Lady’s House the same way I’d been sneaking a look at her things. I’d miss her cashmere hoodie with sleeves long enough to cover my hands and pet my cheeks when I put it on. I’d miss trying to piece together her life, trying to figure out if she was happy or sad, eating lettuce and fat-free dressing while smoking cigarettes at the kitchen counter, watching the small television that hung from the top cabinet. I left the Porn House literally giggling with glee before gazing at the Sad House, realizing I hadn’t been there in a month. I wondered how long he’d go on suffering. How long he’d have to wait for his life to end.
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