Page 2

Zoe

Two beds, a mini fridge, and a coffee machine.

It was a step up from the last rent-by-the-week motels we’d been staying in.

“What do you think, Lainey?” I asked, leaning down to press my lips to her mostly bald head. “Not too shabby, right?”

I mean, it wasn’t great.

The whole thing looked straight out of the seventies. I was half-expecting to find some newspaper on the nightstand with headlines about the Hillside Strangler.

But, hey, while the orange-tinted paneled walls were kind of tragic, and the pea-green drapes in no way matched the canary yellow bedspread, it all seemed reasonably clean.

Even the carpet (beige wall-to-wall in a heavy-traffic motel room was certainly a choice ) was almost spotless and had comfortingly fresh vacuum lines on it.

The TV was a good decade old and screwed to the top of a dresser bench, which provided a second seating area, aside from the two full beds.

There was no desk, but I felt like the little fridge and coffee area more than made up for the lack of one. I didn’t need a desk anyway.

The whole space had the lingering scent of bleach and lemon Pledge, despite none of the “wood” in the room being real.

It was a kind of nostalgic smell that brought me back to my childhood for just a moment.

So many “Sunday resets” with my mom. She’d worked too much during the week to get much cleaning done, so we both rolled up our sleeves on Sundays to start the week with a clean house.

She’d get hard to work on the kitchen and bathrooms while I would vacuum the living room and Pledge all the wood surfaces, leaning down to take long sniffs of the lemon scent.

A whole lifetime ago, it seemed now. Though I did still do Sunday resets, even while living in temporary accommodations.

I moved toward the closet, finding several hangers still inside, along with a random laundry basket that someone must have left behind.

That was another perk to this hotel: there was a laundry room on the lower floor. No more dragging things to the laundromat. Or, let’s face it, washing things in the bathtub, since babies went through a metric ton of clothes and burp cloths in a week. And, well, I didn’t have a lot of extras.

“Let’s get your bed set up, huh?” I said to my daughter as I hauled her playard up onto the bed to unzip it from its bag, then pull it out.

I’d sprung for a somewhat fancy one that had a bassinet area and a changing space, since I’d known from the day the stick turned blue that I was going to be doing this all on my own with no stable place to live, so having everything in one neat package was going to be the best bet for us.

Was it ideal to have a growing baby in a portable crib? No. Obviously. Cribs were bigger and had thicker mattresses. But my research said they were just as safe.

Besides, literally nothing about the situation we found ourselves in was ideal. We just had to do the best we could with what we had.

“I know. I’m almost done,” I assured Lainey as she started to grumble and pull her little legs up against my stomach.

“There,” I said when the playard was up and the two top sections were in place.

“Alright. Hungry?” I asked, pulling my sweet little three-month-old out of the carrier and placing her in the playard.

“Give me a minute, alright?” I said in the singsong voice she liked.

I grabbed the diaper bag and made my way into the bathroom to get the hot water running as I shook the scoop of formula into the bottle, pretending not to feel that familiar pang of regret that I didn’t get the chance to nurse.

The idea of nursing had been a small comfort when going through the absolute hellish fear and uncertainty of my pregnancy. If nothing else, I knew I would be able to feed my baby, no matter how much I was struggling financially.

Then, in the cruelest twist of fate, the milk never came in.

The lactation nurse had worked with me for days, trying to calm my fears and pretending not to notice my frustrated tears, until ultimately telling me that sometimes periods of extreme stress can mess up your body’s ability to create oxytocin, which is needed to help the milk release.

And, yeah, you could say from the ninth week when I knew I was pregnant to after I gave birth had been nothing but a never-ending panic attack or depression.

Hell, most days I was still fighting off the panic.

I was full of what-ifs and and-thens.

What if I didn’t earn enough money one week and then we couldn’t pay for a room?

What if my car broke down and then I couldn’t do my work?

What if my phone broke and then I couldn’t take more jobs to make money?

It just went on and on and on.

I would just lie in bed, dead-tired, but unable to shut my brain off so I could fall asleep.

Even recognizing the pattern and trying to put an end to it—if for no other reason than babies could sense that kind of anxiety and my baby deserved a peaceful, regulated mother—often wouldn’t help me stay calm until my stomach was in so many knots that I found myself dry-heaving on my knees in the bathroom, stomach too empty to even produce any food most of the time.

I glanced up at the mirror, hardly recognizing my reflection anymore.

I had the same pale blonde hair. But these days, it wasn’t carefully styled to have that ‘effortless’ loose wave. It was always pulled back in a messy bun. The cleanliness of it? Questionable. The last time it saw a trim? Almost a year.

My blue eyes didn’t look as bright as they used to, thanks to the dark purple, seemingly permanent smudges under them.

Gone was that expertly applied makeup that I’d worn even just to go to the coffee shop in the past. The spray tan dates I’d been regular about? Done. My natural pale skin was on full display these days.

The fashionista I’d once been would curl her lip at my ever-present mom uniform of shorts and a tank or tee.

Looking away from myself, I filled the bottle, shook it up, then tested the temperature before going out to pick up my grumpy, grumbly baby.

“We’re gonna figure it out, right, baby?” I cooed at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, my body rocking to both soothe her and myself.

It’s not like I had any choice in the matter. I was all she had in the world. I didn’t have the luxury of failure.

My phone dinged from the nightstand, and I gripped the bottle with the arm holding my daughter so I could reach to check my messages.

There was no choice but to take a job whenever one came in.

I was just barely scraping by, and I really needed to add some money to a savings account.

For car issues, new clothes as Lainey grew, and—most important of all—medical care, since health insurance costs would gobble up everything I was making.

I’d managed to hold down a job until I went into labor, purely because I needed the coverage for the hospital fees. But since I couldn’t afford any sort of childcare, I needed to quit after I left the hospital.

But now, we were on our own. And the idea of any sort of basic illness, let alone something serious, filled me with dread. I wouldn’t even let myself think of hospital stays.

“Oh, we have a new doggy friend,” I told Lainey as I slowly typed out a reply to the message I’d gotten on my listing as a dog walker.

I was thankful every single day that technology had created so many new ways to make a living while also being able to bring my baby with me.

Was it great to have to?

No.

But it was helping us get by.

Lainey loved long walks in her stroller. So our two dog-walking jobs not only gave her stimulation, and me exercise, it provided about sixty-dollars per day, minus the little bit I set aside for taxes.

And when we weren’t walking, we were driving from restaurants to houses or apartment buildings, dropping off food and making some tips.

Was I technically allowed to bring my baby for those jobs? No. But barring someone turning me in, I figured no one was getting hurt by breaking that particular rule.

The money for delivery wasn’t as good as the dog walking, but every three-dollar tip helped.

That said, another puppy would allow for more money without having to pay so much in gas as I typically needed to do for food delivery.

“Oh, and his mommy needs us six days a week,” I told Lainey, who was half-asleep with a little milk gathered in the corners of her mouth.

An extra thirty bucks meant that I could try to get some more food in my own body because as things stood, I was currently twelve pounds thinner than I’d been before I’d gotten pregnant. I was starting to look a little gaunt when I looked in the mirror.

Given my knotted stomach that made me worry I wouldn’t keep much down, I’d been putting most of my personal food budget toward stocking up on extra formula or diapers to have in case of a bad income week.

I dragged the playard between the two beds so Lainey would be close if she woke up fussy. I lived in fear of neighbors complaining about her crying and getting kicked out of our motel room.

Then I climbed up on the bed myself, turning on my side to watch my daughter sleeping peacefully.

“I promise I am going to get this figured out before you are big enough to know what’s going on,” I told her.

I might be willing to be hungry, to wear holes in my shoes, to neglect going to the doctor myself, but I’d be damned if my baby would ever personally know that sacrifice.

That was part of the reason why we’d changed to a new motel building.

Our last one had been closer to Miami. Which meant Miami rates. By moving a little further out, it allowed me to shave off a significant amount on our weekly rate.

I’d been worried that being further away from a big city would also mean that income would dip. But I’d been pleasantly surprised to find that being in a smaller town meant there was a lot less competition for said delivery jobs.

If all went to plan, I would have the start of a savings by the end of the week. Within a few months, I could breathe easier.