Page 6 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

I’ve answered some version of that in a hundred interviews, and I’ve given a hundred good answers. This time I build the sentence first, and what comes out is true. “Ordinary days. School runs that happen on time, dinners that happen at all. Somebody steady enough that when I’m on the road, nobody in this house has to be brave about it.” I stop, and then I say the last part anyway. “And nobody performing. The kids get enough of that from me.”

She doesn’t write any of it down. She looks at me a beat longer than she has all morning, and then she nods, slowly, like I’ve finally answered a question the way she would have.

I sit down across from her. “The job’s yours if you want it. The room’s at the end of the upstairs hall — it’s been ready for three candidates, so it’s very ready. Six days a week to start, until we’re steady. I know that’s a lot. The number the agency quoted stands, and if it stops feeling fair, I’d rather hear it from you than lose you over it.”

“Friday,” she says. “I can be here Friday.”

“Anything you’d want from me before then?”

She thinks about it with the pen still in her hand. “It’d be easier if the kids hear it from you today, plainly. That I work here, that I’m staying, that I’m not company. Kids can smell a houseguest.”

Teddy, who is terrible at silence, has been holding his breath in the pantry doorway. He lets out a whoop and falls out of the pantry.

* * *

Thursday night I put a better lamp in the room at the end of the hall and moved the desk so it faces the window instead of the wall. I didn’t look too hard at why.

Margot asked me, over Wednesday’s dinner, how long the new one would stay. “They leave,” she said. Not like an accusation — like a fact she’d checked twice. I said this one seemed likely to stay. She looked at me like she’d heard that one before, and went back to her book.

She moves in Friday afternoon with one suitcase and four boxes. One of the boxes says WINTER on the side in marker. It’s August. I don’t ask, but I like what it means. I carry the boxes up. She lets me take two of them, and even that takes her a second. I watch her decide, at the bottom of the stairs, whether she’s willing to be helped on day one. Then I take the stairs two at a time and don’t make anything of any of it.

Before dinner, Teddy gives her the tour. I hear it happening above me — his voice doing the ceilings and the closets, her questions filling the pauses. They stop a long time at the window on the landing, because it’s the best place to watch for raccoons. Margot’s door stays shut for all of it. June doesn’t knock on it, and I add that to the list of things she gets right without being told.

Dinner is chicken and roasted potatoes, and everybody survives it. Teddy talks enough for six people. Margot eats, answers two questions, and excuses herself with the good manners that are worse than rudeness. June carries her own plate to the sink and washes it before I can tell her she doesn’t have to. Then she stands in the kitchen doorway for a second — not in, not out — and says goodnight to the room, generally. Then she goes up.

The house sounds different tonight. Four people breathing in it instead of three. I’d forgotten I knew that sound.

Tomorrow there’s a sponsor breakfast, where I’ll tell the burnt-pancake story to a table of strangers. They’ll laugh harder than it deserves, because of who’s telling it. Tonight nobody in this house needs me to be anybody. I stand in the dark kitchen a minute longer than I have to.

My phone lights up on the counter while I’m closing the kitchen. Mitch: Heard you finally hired somebody. Is she a fan? I look at that question for a while. No, I type back. That’s the point. He sends a thumbs-up and leaves it there.

I check the doors, start the dishwasher, climb the stairs. The light under her door at the end of the hall is still on. Margot’s is off. Teddy’s night-light is on. Everyone accounted for. I do a headcount every night, the same way we did getting on the bus for twenty-one years. The bus doesn’t leave until everybody’s on it.

Tonight, for the first time in four months, I think about not checking. The thought lasts a minute.

It’s late when I open the laptop. I type the address myself, every letter, the way I have most nights since April. The page takes a moment, and then it says what it always says.

USER NOT FOUND. I close the laptop, turn off the light, and lie there thinking about a woman I never met and never will, while the new nanny sleeps in the room at the end of the hall.

June

By the third day I know the house. Which burner runs hot. Which window sticks. Where the afternoon sun hits the couch, which is where a five-year-old will fall asleep if you time it right. Other people’s houses give themselves up fast if you pay attention, and paying attention is the entire job.

This one is big, warm, about ten percent too quiet — like somebody turned the volume down three years ago and never touched the knob again.

I’m good at this. By the end of the first week the lunches are handled and the swim bag packs itself the night before. The lost library book turns up where lost things always are — under the third couch cushion, with one sock and a fossilized cracker. When Teddy can’t find his left shoe, I’m the one who knows it’s in the bin by the back door. I watched him take it off there. That’s the entire secret. Somebody has to be watching.

Gus told the kids on my first night, plainly, the way I asked him to: June works here, June is staying, June is not a guest. Teddy wanted to know if that meant I could open the fridge without asking. Margot said, “May I be excused?” So — one for two. In this line of work that’s a strong opening week.

Teddy decided about me somewhere around the second breakfast. On my third morning he climbs onto the counter stool with his notebook and announces he has one more interview question, the most important one, which he forgot.

“Ask it.”

“What’s your favorite dinosaur?” He asks it with his pencil already touching the paper.

“Maiasaura,” I say.

He stares at me. Whatever he was braced for, it wasn’t a real answer. “Nobody says that one.”