Page 2 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

Assembly takes no thought at all. That’s the part I’d warn somebody about, if there were anybody to warn — not the deciding. The remembering. My hands know the tripod. The lamp goes on the floor, aimed at the wall, never straight on. There’s still a strip of painter’s tape on the floorboards marking where the back foot goes. Four months, and I never peeled it up.

The mask is in the bag with the cables. Black, soft-edged, covers me from the hairline to the tip of my nose. Twelve dollars online, three years ago. It has out-earned everything else I own. Everything above my nose stayed hidden, always. Everything below it — mouth, chin, smile — was on camera for two years, because a mouth and a chin can’t be matched to a stranger on the street. That was the theory, and for two years it held.

Velvet keeps a closed page in cold storage for a year, in case you change your mind. They know their business. The password autofills. Two taps in, a screen comes up that I never bothered reading the first time around:

REACTIVATE JUNO? Your page and archive will be restored. Subscribers from your previous run will be notified that you’re back.

Restore.

Good, I think. Saves me the announcement.

And there it is, loading the way I left it. Two years of work — masked, cropped, careful, never my face, never my name, nothing that ever showed the window. I had rules, and I never broke one. Shoulders down was fine. The little mole on my hip got cropped, every time, because anyone who’d seen it in real life could recognize it. I checked every frame twice before it posted, and in two years, nobody found me. It’s 3:40 on the worst Tuesday in recent memory, and the person who built all that is back in business.

I’m not sad, looking at it. That’s the thing nobody would believe. I’m efficient. On the envelope, under the rent numbers, I start planning a comeback post for Friday. That should scare me. It doesn’t. Being good at this is the only thing that has ever paid my rent on time.

I’m reaching for my phone to draft the caption when it rings in my hand. Unknown number, local. Four months out of debt, and my stomach still drops at unknown numbers.

“June Ashby,” I say, like a person whose badge still works.

“June! Deanna Cobbs, Evergreen Placement. Tell me you’re still on our books. Tell me the marketing thing didn’t take.”

Deanna placed me in four houses over five years, back when houses were what I did. She has a voice like a school principal who likes you. “The marketing thing took eleven weeks,” I say. “It ended at two o’clock today.”

A pause. “Are you all right? That’s — today, of all days—”

“No.” It’s out before I can dress it up. I straighten the envelope against the edge of the counter. “I will be by tomorrow. What do you have?”

“A live-in, up in Queen Anne — the nice old neighborhood on the hill, north of downtown. Widower, two kids — nine and five. Full-time, room and board on top of salary, immediate start. And June, listen, the client needs discreet. There’s an NDA before I can even tell you his name.”

“What happened to the last nanny?”

“There’s never been one. There was a grandmother, and then a run of housekeepers, and now there’s him doing all of it himself and pretending that’s going fine. The five-year-old will interview you harder than the father will. The nine-year-old won’t look up.”

“Discreet like a felon, or discreet like famous?”

“Discreet like you sign first.” She lowers her voice, as if we’re being overheard. “I’ll say this much. It is the saddest nice house I have ever stood in, and I’ve stood in all of them. I’ve sent him three candidates. All three were wrong before they got their coats off.”

“Wrong how?”

“They performed. Big warmth, big resume, presenting to the kids like a cruise director. He went gray in the face every time. Whatever the opposite of that is — that’s what you do.”

“I got laid off at two o’clock and I’m doing arithmetic on an envelope. There’s no performance left in me this week.”

“That’s why I called you first,” Deanna says. “It pays eighty.”

I stop straightening the envelope. “Eighty. Thousand.”

“He wants someone who’ll stay. When I brought up the rate, he said — this is a quote — “whatever the fair number is, go past it.”

“What’s the schedule?”

“Six days to start, until everyone’s settled. He knows it’s heavy.”

“What’s he like?”

“On the phone, polite. In person, tired.” She pauses. “Kind, June. Kind, not okay, and very committed to looking like both. Can you interview at ten tomorrow?”

“It’d be easier if it was ten tonight.”