“This will have to do for now,” I said as I got to my feet, staring at the faded colors on the wall. “I have to go to work and you have to go to Carmen’s house.”
“Do for now,” Etta said with a shrug, making me bite my cheek in an effort to keep from laughing. I couldn’t let her see how entertaining I thought she was when she was being a pill or she’d continue to act that way.
“You ready to go to Carmen’s?” I asked, picking her up and throwing the wet rag I’d been using in the sink.
“Carmen,” she said, nodding with a small hum.
I was so glad she liked her babysitter. When we’d moved from San Diego to Anaheim, I’d had to put her in a new day care that we’d both hated. Thankfully, only a week later I’d met Carmen when she’d come into the new shop I worked at looking for her boyfriend. She was a stay-at-home mom with a newborn who had a hell of a time finding a sitter and was struggling without the income she usually made as a maid at a local hotel. Her boyfriend, Ray, was a tattoo artist and he made okay money, but they were still sinking.
Thankfully, she’d been so happy to have a little extra cash when we’d discussed her watching Etta for me, she didn’t even ask for much. We had an understanding, Carmen and I. Both of us knew how hard it was to raise a baby on an income that barely paid the rent, so I paid her what I could and she never asked for more, because she trusted that I’d never pay less than I absolutely had to. Some weeks were good and I paid her more, some weeks were lean and I paid her less, but I was always fair and she was always happy for the money that let her stay home with her son. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have managed without her.
The best part of the whole situation was that Etta loved Carmen and baby Sam. They went to the park, played in the backyard, and watched cartoons. It was pretty much a toddler’s version of a vacation every day. The guilt of leaving my daughter to go to work six days a week was eased because I knew she was having an awesome time. It wasn’t gone completely, oh no, especially not when Etta did something new that I missed, or fell down and didn’t have me there to kiss her owies, but it was manageable.
Juggling my purse and Etta’s diaper bag, I carried her outside into the warm morning. I loved the weather in Southern California. The perpetual sunshine always put a bounce in my step. It felt like nature’s way of telling me to have a good day, and it never failed to improve my mood, at least fractionally.
I grabbed the mail from our mailbox as we left, and threw it onto the passenger seat of my old beat-up Focus as we headed across town. There was a ton of envelopes, mostly for Max, and I didn’t even bother going through them yet. Nothing but bills ever came for me, and I wasn’t looking forward to new past-due notices. I tried to keep up on everything, but some months it was just impossible. It was a game of roulette deciding which ones I’d pay and which ones I’d just have to wait to pay until the next paycheck. I hated it.
Choosing which bills to pay reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d have to go through the mail stacked on our kitchen counter, searching for the ones from the utility companies. I’d always nagged my mom to pay those first, because we could live with an eviction notice on our door but we couldn’t live without power during an Oregon winter. My mother hadn’t been horrible, but she hadn’t been good, either. Absent most of the time, and hardly parental when she was there, I rarely thought about her now that I was grown. She’d had a penchant for shitty men, dead-end jobs, and hard drugs. In the end, the drugs had killed her and put me and my sister into the system. Thankfully, that had eventually led us to our dad.
I’d long ago come to terms with my mother’s deficiencies as a parent and the way she’d died, but I was self-aware enough to know that I used her legacy as a guide to how I didn’t want to live or raise my daughter. Etta would never have to worry about having enough food for dinner or her mom not coming home because she was off on a bender.
* * *
After I dropped Etta off and headed to work, I breathed a little sigh of relief. Leaving her for even a few hours always made me feel anxious, but once she was safely where she was supposed to be it got easier.