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“Are you married, Kenna?” Maggie asks, and I choke on my wine.
“I’m not,” Kenna says easily, smiling.
“But you have a boyfriend,” Eli pipes up, surprisingly. I wonder if he’d overheard my conversation from this morning.
“Sure I do,” Kenna says, just as easily, and I stiffen. “His name is Eli.”
Eli blushes a cherry red and hides under the table while Maggie laughs, and the subject is dropped, just like that. Kenna’s good with that, too, changing the kids’ conversations away from topics that might be hard to talk about, but listening to them, too.
She really is the perfect nanny.
“Have you decided about your relaxing weekend?” Kenna asks me.
I look over at Maggie and Eli. “How do you guys feel about staying with Nana this weekend?”
Eli pops up from the table and his eyes light up. “Will Nana have peas to shell?”
“I don’t know why you like shelling peas,” Maggie grumbles. “It’s boring.”
“You likeeatingpeas,” Eli shoots back, scrunching up his nose.
Kenna smiles. “I like peas, too.”
“Gross!” Eli groans, fake gagging and falling over dramatically.
“Okay, okay, I think it’s bath time, isn’t it?” I stand and sweep Eli up over my shoulder. Maggie follows primly.
I stand outside the door when Maggie showers. She’s gotten to the age where she enjoys her privacy, so I just stand there to make sure she doesn’t need anything or make the water too hot. The door stays cracked open and she calls to me.
“What's up, Magpie?”
“Why don’t you marry Kenna?”
I freeze outside the door, banging my head slightly on the wall behind me. “Because she’s our nanny, Maggie.”
“There’s no laws against marrying nannies,” she says matter-of-factly, but luckily for me, she drops it, singing a song and dancing around in the shower. I smile, hearing her shuffle around.
When she comes out, she only has her top on backward, so I remove it and put it on the right way.
“You’re getting good at dressing yourself,” I praise.
Maggie beams and crawls into bed. She likes her sleep and doesn’t fight it, like Eli always does. I spent many nights awake, trying to get him to sleep, even before Suzanna left.
I spent so many nights not sleeping after she left, for more reasons than just helping Eli calm down.
I’m so glad that now I have full custody of the kids, and that Suzanna wasn’t able to upend our lives like she wanted, but I know that when Maggie and Eli are older, they’ll have questions. They might even want to see her.
I can’t stop them, can’t protect them from her. Not then, at least. But I can now, and I have. Thanks in part, to Kenna.
It’s possible that I still would have won the case without her testimony, but I think it went a long way to convincing the judge that I have a stable life for the kids. Not to mention her praise about me being a good dad. It made my heart swell.
Eli’s bath takes longer, and he doesn’t want to go to bed, whining.
“Kenna sings me a story,” he says, and I chuckle.
“You mean sings you a song?”
“No,” he says pointedly, pouting. ”She sings me astory.”
