Page 10 of Falling for the Nanny

It was strange–Lily had been just shy of her second birthday when Chloe left. So young she didn’t remember a time when her mother had lived with us and not in the dimensions of a screen. But three days after Chloe left, Lily had begun gnawing on things. Her crib, the ears of her stuffed animals, even her thumb sometimes. Now she had nearly broken the habit, but it reemerged when she was anxious about something.

And I had a bad feeling I knew what she was anxious about now.

“I really want Cat,” she told me, coming around to stand at the end of my desk. Her upper incisor started to go to work again on her lower lip, but she stopped herself with effort and pursed her lips together.

“You really want Cat,” I repeated. “You know she’s a person, right, Lils? It’s not like she’s a doll I can wrap up and put under the tree for you for Christmas.”

“Lily isn’t asking you to indenture the woman,” Mrs. Barnes said crisply. “She’s asking you to hire her. On a probationary basis.”

“Yes,” Lily agreed. “No dentures. Probation.”

I struggled between amusement and irritation. “How about I give you a probationary no and you bring me a few other candidates. Then I’ll make a decision.” I directed this at Mrs. Barnes, but of course, Lily answered.

“Please, Daddy.” And when I looked at her, her incisor was indenting her lip again.

I felt like I was being suffocated between the two of them. “Why do you want Cat so much, honey?” I turned my chair, and Lily came around my desk to stand beside me. I tapped my front tooth to remind her, and she tucked it behind her lip again.

“She’s nice to me,” Lily said clearly, and then in a whisper, as though it were a betrayal to the elderly Mrs. Barnes, “And she’s pretty.”

“There are probably lots of other pretty nannies.” Or at least, ones that used to be pretty forty years ago and now were suitably matronly and grandmother-like. I kept that thought to myself, though. Lily clearly had decided that young was a potential advantage. And maybe she was right. Someone Cat’s age would have an easier time keeping up with her.

“The problem is,” I went on, as if Lily and I were in a strategy session, “I don’t know how much experience she actually has working with children.”

“I wouldn’t bring you someone who wasn’t qualified,” Mrs. Barnes interjected, looking offended. “She has eight years of experience working with children aged three months to ten years old.”

“So she’s been working since she was what, twelve?” I snorted. I knew the agency was supposed to vet these people’s work experience, but they’d clearly let this one fall through the cracks. Either that or she was counting experience with younger siblings.

“She’s twenty-six, David, and she’s been at an accredited facility since college.” Mrs. Barnes sounded exasperated now. “You seem to think I recruited her out of the local high school.”

Cat looked closer to the age of a high school graduate than a twenty-six-year-old, but it was all the same to me. Under fifty was not under consideration.

And though it killed me to see my daughter’s face fall, I told them both so in no uncertain terms.

Lily and Mrs. Barnes both left my office disgruntled.

“Under fifty,” Mrs. Barnes repeated, shaking her head in annoyance.

“I really wanted her,” Lily said forlornly.

Mrs. Barnes clacked the double doors to my office closed with unnecessary force, and dinner was a solemn affair that night. She was still mad, and Lily was still upset, and I was still resolute. There was no way I was hiring Cat Bowen.

Mrs. Barnes put Lily to bed that night and then left immediately. She had the pool house for her own. When Chloe left, I’d had it renovated so that it was essentially a small, one-bedroom apartment. A room just big enough for a queen-sized bed, a bathroom, and then a bigger multipurpose space. It didn’t have a full kitchen, but that wasn’t why Mrs. Barnes generally preferred to stay in one of the guest rooms rather than go out to it. She liked being near Lily, even now that she’d outgrown waking up in the night.

So when she made a point of walking past me, out to the pool deck, I knew she was still angry. Bemused, I let her go without a word. There was nothing else to say. I didn’t know why Mrs. Barnes had gotten it in her head that it was Cat Bowen or no one, but she was wrong. If I had to go to the agency myself and find a more suitable candidate, I would.

But when I walked past Lily’s room and heard a barely audible sniffle through the door, I couldn’t let it go. I turned the handle and pushed the door open a crack. “Lils?” I whispered. “Are you awake?”

I was hoping I’d misheard a snore, but no, in the crack of light that fell across her bed, I saw her eyes were open. And wet. My heart cracked the way it always did when Lily cried. She wasn’t like some kids who cried over everything. In fact, she swung too far the other way, in my opinion. A seven-year-old shouldn’t be stoic when their mother stands them up, but mine was.

She wasn’t stoic now though. I pushed the door open wider and came in to sit beside her. Lily curled up tighter, her arm hooked around a stuffed rabbit we’d gotten at Disney World last year. “What’s wrong, Lils?” I asked as if I didn’t already know.

“I want Gramma Barnes to stay,” Lily whispered.

My stomach unclenched a little. This, at least, was out of my control. I could blame it on Mrs. Barnes’ screenwriter daughter and her bizarre decision to have a baby in the land of droughts and wildfires. “I want her to stay, too, honey, but she needs to help her family.”

“Aren’t we her family?” Lily asked pitifully, fresh tears squeezing from her eyes.

“Yes, of course, but you don’t need her as much as the new baby will.” I smoothed her fine blonde hair back off her warm forehead. I handled big personalities and delivered hard truths and negotiated with tyrants all day at work, but I was floundering here. I’d always been better with Fortune 500 CEOs than I was my own family. That was why I’d hired Mrs. Barnes seven years ago.

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