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It was an odd time in my life.
There were many smart and switched-on fourteen-year-olds, but I wasn’t one of them.
I was awkward and flat-chested, with a bad haircut that my mom had given me trying to save money. My brothers teased me mercilessly and I had nobody to talk to. My mother was too busy keeping our family fed and in clean socks, while my father watched TV far down below in the basement, with the volume turned up high to drown out our voices.
A romantic fantasy was a wonderful way for a frustrated teenager to escape.
I decided that even though the fortune teller was probably wrong, there was a small, sliver of a chance she was right.
And if she was, I could make it easier for the man to find me.
From then on, I signed up for every hiking, canoeing, mountain expedition I could find. I imagined him tending bar or flipping burgers at a grill. I would dream about me walking into a lonely diner one night somewhere south of the Appalachian Mountains and our eyes would meet over a greasy counter and there would be Frank Sinatra crooning in the background and fireworks would light up the sky.
You get the picture.
A Hallmark channel teenage romance triple deluxe.
None of that happened, of course.
Instead, I went to college and dated plenty of athletes who went to bed at nine pm so that they could get up at four to quickly run to Boston and back and be in time for class. Guys who never ate bread or drank alcohol and came back from the Tour de France with their arms in slings.
In my final year at college, I applied for an internship at Rustic Rockies, a resort in Colorado. I got the job and would start a few weeks after writing my final exam. My best friend, Simone, was doing her apprenticeship at a restaurant chain in the city. We’d be giving up our student apartment and were talking about where to send all our stuff. I was feeling rather nostalgic about the two years we’d spend sharing the loft.
My phone pinged. I’dgotten an email.
“Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?” Simone was packing boxes and drinking cheap red wine.
She was wearing only a T-shirt, her lustrous blonde hair spilling over her back. I walked over to her, showed her my screen.
“The job fell through.”
“What?”
“They can’t take on as many summer staff as they wanted due to a ‘budgeting problem’”.
I made air quotes.
“They ran out of money?”
“Looks like it. It’s been a weird summer apparently, the weather wasn’t great, blah-blah.”
“Bummer.”
It was more than just a bummer.
It was a nightmare for me. I needed the money to pay off my studies as well as handle some debts I’d run up over the year. I’d borrowed some money from a loan shark, and I needed to pay him, or I’d be in trouble.
“If you need a job, you could always work for Will,” Simone said, as she wrapped plates and put them into a box.
“What do you mean?”
Will was her older brother. I’d gotten to know him over the years, mostly from a distance, when he dropped Simone off after a weekend at home, or sometimes at her mother’s, when I was invited for supper. He was quiet, serious. I remembered him as irritable and unfriendly, but he wasn’t bad looking in a way, I guess. I knew he had made a lot of money in some computer business, and there was a mess with a girl, a break-up, leaving him with a daughter. I had babysat her once and she was cute.
Liked her more than Will, to be honest.
“Another nanny has quit. I spoke to him yesterday. He’s quite desperate to find someone, but he doesn’t want to go through the agency again.”
