Page 3 of Worst Nanny Ever
“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified.
“We’re having fun,” my son said, giving me a dark look. The first of many.
“Oh, relax,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “I took out all of the bad cards.”
“But they’reallbad,” I stammered. “That’s the whole point.”
I mean…who plays Cards Against Humanity with a seven-year-old kid?
Ollie might be a genius, but he’s still a child.
I announced it was time for her to go home, Ollie told me he hated me for the first time, and now he asks about her every few days, like clockwork.
“Hannah’s not a nanny,” I remind him for the hundredth time.
“She doesn’t have another job right now. She told me.”
“That doesn’t make her a solid employment prospect. And, again, she has no relevant childcare experience.”
“She helped raise her little brother,” he counters. “Now he’s a chef in Boston, so he must have turned out okay.”
“Every chef I’ve ever met is mentally unbalanced.”
He gives me a hard look. “That’s not very nice, Travis. You told me not to make assumptions about people.”
After he’d told another boy he mustn’t be very smart because he thought theTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtleswere real.
I massage my temples again, which doesn’t help at all.
“Why don’t I have one of those?” Ollie asks, pointing at my forehead.
I rearrange my hair over the port-wine birthmark, which is small enough to be hidden. “Genetics works in funny ways. Consider yourself lucky you inherited my fingers instead.”
“You can’t inherit fingers, Travis,” he objects.
But he did. His hands are tiny versions of mine. It filled me with awe the first time I noticed, a more profound kind of wonder than when I first heard a song I’d recorded broadcast on the radio.
“Well, you’d know. You’re the brains in this operation, Ollie.”
“I didn’t get those from you either.”
I sigh.
“Or from my mother. She doesn’t care about facts.”
That’s for damn sure. Lilah is wild. The time we’d spent together was fun, but it had felt like riding a roller coaster with no exit or ending.
This is a guess—an assumption, if you will—but Hannah is a bit like that too. She’s the life of every party she goes to, but bright lights can be blinding.
I’m a man who believes in learning from the past, so I’ve tried to stay away from her.
It’s hard, and not just because Ollie is so fixated on her. She’s Rob’s girlfriend’s best friend, and Sophie goes to a lot of our shows. So Hannah does too. And whenever she’s there, I find myself watching her. Soaking in the details of her, even the slight look of contempt she seems to reserve just for me.
But I don’t want to think about Hannah right now. I don’t want to think about anything but my pillow….and whether it’ll hurt to lie down now that I’ve bruised my forehead.
“Will you be able to get back to sleep?” I ask.
“I’m going to read my science facts book for a while,” Ollie says, flicking on the small lamp next to his bed. “And then I’ll try. Are you going to call Hannah?”
