Page 5 of Grump's Nanny

“Gentlemen, please. He’s just a kid.”

“Get a damned nanny like a civilized human,” said one of the wrinkly old bastards. I didn’t bother to tell him I’d hired several, all of whom had run from my house screaming like they were being chased by Michael Myers.

The call ended, and I nearly cried. Working in the tourism industry was hard enough with your friends being your competitors, let alone having your own spawn sabotage you.

I rounded on Ben. “Are you kidding me?” I shouted, the volume a little louder than I meant it to be. Ben burst into tears, throwing one of the aforementioned laser swords at me and running away to his room.

I slumped down into my office chair, putting my head in my hands. This meeting was really important, and I’d been preparing for it for months, only to have it sabotaged by three children under ten. I never missed my wife as much as I did in these moments. She would have known what to do.

I got up out of my chair and resisted the urge to Don Draper my day with some gin. I walked slowly to the playroom to find my daughters looking up at me with guilty faces.

Apparently, they had given up on playing “baby” and had moved on to “fresco painters.” All over the walls were giant hand smudges of color, and while I usually encouraged their creativity, this nearly broke me.

“Do we paint on the walls?” I asked them, barely keeping my cool.

They both shook their head no, vacant expressions really selling their remorse.

“So why are we painting the walls with our hands, girls?”

Leann shrugged, and Katie tried to hide her hands behind her back. I sighed and grabbed them both by the elbows, leading them to the bathroom.

Carefully I washed their arms from elbow to fingertip and rinsed a few splotches of stray paint from their hair. Then I helped them change their clothes and sat them down at the kitchen table with a snack.

“Please stay here,” I begged them. “We can go get ice cream if you stay here while Daddy gets Benny. Okay?”

The girls nodded in unison and I went hunting down my son.

I found him hiding in the laundry basket underneath the clothes. I had to give it to Ben; he saw the world in a very unique way.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, crouching down next to where I saw his little nose uncovered and a foot sticking out. “What are you doing in there?”

“Hiding,” he replied.

“Hiding from who?” I asked, wondering if this was an imaginary friend thing or if he was about to tell me that a little dead girl was visiting him at night.

“You,” he replied.

I would have preferred the ghost.

“Why are you hiding from me?” I asked.

“Cause you’re mean,” he screamed, sitting up in the basket, clean clothes going everywhere. “You’re the mean daddy monster, and I’m gonna vanquish you.”

Honestly, it was a fair assessment, whether I liked it or not. Could I claim insurance on an attack by a seven-year-old?

“Come here,” I said, grabbing him by the arm and lifting him to hug him.

It wasn’t as easy as it once was. I remember when he used to fit in the palm of my hand, and we would call him Ben Beanbecause he was so tiny. Even as a little guy, he wasn’t too hard to lift. But now he was all limbs, and he was tall, taller than most of the kids in his class.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Benny,” I said. “You know Daddy loves you, right?”

Ben, being the shit stirrer that he was, shook his head no.

“What would convince you that Daddy loves you?” I asked, opening myself up to a whole new can of worms.

Ben got a very sneaky look on his face before turning it into a puppy dog pout. “A Nintendo Switch with Pokémon.”

He couldn’t have said cake?

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