Epic by Ginger Voight Page A

glitz and commotion of the Strip. By the time I reached Maya’s house that afternoon, I was laden with a few bags that might have been inadvisable for me to bring, but I couldn’t go back to that run-down little house in that scary neighborhood without doing something, anything, to alleviate the suffering.
    Maya was surprised that I returned. She happily folded me into a hug as I stepped over the threshold. She wore the same dirty housecoat. Many of the containers that littered her coffee table were the same ones I had seen the day before. It was all I could do not to clear the mess. Instead I insisted that Maya sit so I could give her my gifts.
    “Jordana!” she admonished at once. “You didn’t need to bring me anything.”
    “I know,” I said. “But I wanted to.”
    She smiled as she took the first bag into her lap. She pulled out a cheerful yellow robe made of soft fleece, with embroidered roses on the yoke. “Oh, Jordana,” she breathed as she stroked the fabric. “This is so lovely.”
    She dug a little deeper in the bag to find a pair of matching slippers and pajamas. “I had to guess at your size,” I told her. “If they don’t fit, I can take them back.”
    She shook her head. Her eyes were filled with tears as she looked up at me. “It’s the most perfect gift I ever got. Besides you showing up on my door yesterday, that is,” she added.
    It was what I had hoped my mother would always say to me. Tears sprang into my eyes but I blinked them away. I knew it was a bad idea to get emotionally invested in this woman before I knew for sure what she wanted from me. Instead, I turned to another bag. It was from a grocery store. “I didn’t know what you needed,” I said as she unpacked a half-gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, some bread, some cheese, a box of teabags, a jar of sauce, a bag of pasta and some tomato, lettuce and cucumber for a side salad to the meal. It would get her through the next twenty-four hours, and that seemed like a safe enough investment for the time being.
    I put her groceries away while she changed into her new clothes. The kitchen was in even worse shape than the living room. It was a tiny, dingy room with one dinky window that looked out over the equally depressing back yard. The dining table had two chairs, but it was clear no one actually sat there. Bills, phone books, junk mail and electronic parts filled the Formica surface that was small enough to fit into one corner of the room. The countertops were covered with old takeout containers and dirty dishes, which also stacked haphazardly in a sink that hadn’t been used for washing these dishes in a very long time.
    Worse, there was no dishwasher.
    Instead there was one corner of the stained, cracked sink that she used for her coffee. Everything else was set aside and forgotten.
    The smell from the fridge nearly knocked me down as I opened it. There was a 24-pack of beer, an empty milk carton, and a few plastic containers with black lumps that had surely been food once. It was as good a place to start as any. I opened up the cabinet under the sink to get some cleaning solution, but that was empty, too. She didn’t even have paper towels. With a sigh, I turned back to the refrigerator and did the best I could. I threw away the empty carton, replacing it with the new.
    I couldn’t do the dishes without any dish soap, either. It was clear I was going to have to go back out to store if I wanted to get the kitchen in any kind of shape to cook anything.
    When I joined Maya in the living room, she looked so pretty in her new clothes that I was immediately happy I bought them for her. How could it be a bad idea to do something nice for someone? Clearly the gesture made her day. After the life she had, she deserved someone being nice to her for no reason.
    I told her that I was going to have to head back out to the store, that I forgot a few things. She waved her hand away immediately. “I can’t let you do that. You’ve done too