Page 36 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Correct,” she says — her word, the one she’s spent four months using to hold me at a distance — and for the first time it comes out sounding like thank you. She nods once, business concluded, and takes her cereal bowl to the sink. That’s when the smallest thing happens, the thing I’ll be replaying at two in the morning. On her way past, she leans her shoulder against my arm. One second. Shoulder to arm, her whole side a careful two degrees of weight, exactly the lean she gave her mother in the photograph. Then she’s gone upstairs to guard her hair from her brother, and I stand at the sink holding a hairbrush, being careful not to want all of this more than a nanny is allowed to.

* * *

The school gym smells like floor polish and punch nobody will drink. We’re four seats from the front — Gus flew back from the Arizona trip this afternoon and came straight from the airport, tie loose, garment bag still in the car.

He didn’t see the braid until we were leaving the house. Margot came down the stairs with it fixed and re-pinned, ready for inspection. I watched Augustus Vaughn — the man with a voice for two hundred donors — stop existing for a second, everything on his face gone somewhere years away. Nobody made it a moment. That’s the house rule and we all keep it. He said, “Good crowd tonight,” rough, and went to find the keys that were in his hand. He looked at me over her head for exactly as long as we’re allowed in front of the kids, which is not long. I looked away first, before my face could say anything back.

Now Margot’s class comes onto the risers. She scans the crowd the way every kid up there does — the naked thirty seconds of finding your people before you can pretend not to care. She finds her dad first. Then Teddy, upside-down against his seat back. Then me. Her eyes stop, and she touches one hand to the back of her head — the crooked part, our part — and faces the music teacher.

I do not cry at winter concerts. And I am the nanny — fixing one braid is not the same thing as raising her. I tell myself both of those things while the first song starts. Neither one holds. Gus, without looking away from the stage, passes me the handkerchief he has apparently carried since the airport.

“You’re doing the thing,” he murmurs.

“What thing?”

“Dry eyes, busy hands.” His hand, in the dark between our seats, finds mine and holds it, five seconds, six, seven — reckless, in a gym full of parents — before letting go. “Off duty,” he whispers.

Somewhere behind us a phone flash fires against the gym lights. Then another. Parents document everything, all night, from every angle — a school gym is one big camera pointed at itself, and every frame is somebody’s keepsake. It’s nothing. I take my hand back anyway and keep my eyes on the risers, and the place where his hand was stays warm through the whole first song.

The first-graders sing their song, which is mostly shouting. Teddy waves at Margot from the audience the entire time. Margot, on the top riser with her mother’s crown on her head, moves nothing except two fingers, low, at her side, waving back.

Here’s what I could lose now, counted honestly, by the only person who knows the whole list. In September it was a paycheck. By November it was him — and him twice over, because I’ve loved this man in two different lives: the stranger in the chat window, and the one holding my handkerchief in a school gym. Now there’s a girl on the top riser wearing braidwork I learned with my own hands from a dead woman’s photograph. This morning she leaned on me at the sink like it was nothing, like it happens all the time, like it might.

He was FOURTEEN. I’m JUNO. The three people that sentence would wreck are all in this gym — the man beside me, and the two kids who own the rest of my heart. And this morning one of them stood in my doorway and handed me her mother’s crown.

The music teacher raises her hands. Margot finds my face one more time before the song, checking the crowd the way you check a mirror — making sure the part she can’t see is still there.

I’m still here. I clap until my hands hurt.

Gus

The Foundation’s holiday dinner is the small one — forty people, board and families, a private room downtown with candles and a jazz trio that knows better than to play loudly. No auction, no speeches over four minutes, no press. It’s the one night of the Foundation calendar I’ve historically enjoyed, and I spend this one coming apart quietly by a window, one polite conversation at a time.

Because June is here, in a dark green dress, doing absolutely nothing wrong.

That’s the problem. She’s not flirting with me. She’s not even near me. Across the room she’s making herself unremarkable — one step outside every photograph, the way she stands at these things — keeping Teddy’s shirt tucked in and Margot supplied with punch. I know where she is the entire night without once deciding to. A man asks the board treasurer who she is, and the treasurer says “the Vaughn nanny.” Something in me sits very still and hates the sentence.

Margot wears the crown braid. She asked June to do it before we left — stood at the bottom of the stairs with the brush and the elastics like it’s routine now, because it is. I watched from the kitchen doorway and made myself useful with cufflinks.

The trouble starts in the coat line, and it starts with my tie.

“It’s crooked,” June says — quietly, in passing, both kids in tow — and then her hands are up and doing it before either of us thinks. Four seconds, the same four seconds as the gala in the fall, except we are not who we were in the fall. She realizes mid-knot. I watch her realize. She finishes anyway, because stopping would be worse. She pats the knot flat once and moves off with the kids toward the coat check as if nothing happened at all.

Mitch is standing six feet away with two coats over his arm, keeping an eye on the whole room, as usual.

He doesn’t say anything until an hour later. Then he collects me at the quiet end of the bar with two glasses of the good scotch, which is how Mitch schedules meetings.

“Good party,” he says. “Kids look great. Margot’s smiling this year.” He hands me my glass and looks out at the room instead of at me. “You looked one direction all night, Gus.”

“Mitch—”

“I’m not asking.” He says it with the finality of a man closing a folder. “Thirty years, Gus. You think I don’t know your tells. Tonight you’ve barely looked anywhere in this room except wherever June was standing.” He takes a slow drink. “Back at the gala I told you to protect whatever was helping you sleep. I didn’t know I was giving you romance advice. That’s on me.”

“It’s not—”

“Don’t finish that sentence, it’s beneath both of us.” Still not unkind. That’s the thing about Mitch — he can tell you the hardest thing you’ll hear all year in a perfectly friendly voice. “Here’s my whole speech. People notice where a man looks. Tonight it’s me noticing, and I’m your friend. Next month it’s a board member’s wife, and the month after that it’s a gossip account with a screenshot. So decide what this is, Gus. Decide it yourself, before somebody out there decides it for you, in public, in the worst possible words.”

He clinks his glass against mine, says, “Great scotch,” and walks back into the party, leaving me holding the truth at a holiday dinner.