The Summer Nanny

by Holly Chamberlin

  But a competitive spirit wasn’t a bad thing to have in this world. It was just that cooperation had always come more naturally to Leda, and cooperation was fine except when it morphed into self-abnegation. Again, she thought about the notion of success and how it could be defined in so many ways. She remembered how Charlie used to say that as long as he had his wife and his daughter he felt he was the richest man in the world. His career ambitions had been limited, but his understanding of success had been, Leda thought, simple and wise. In Charlie Latimer’s view, to love and to be loved in return was what made a life a successful one. It was too bad Amy seemed to be forgetting that.

  Leda picked up the basket of folded laundry and climbed to the second floor. After stowing the clean towels in the linen closet, she opened the door to her daughter’s room and carried the fresh sheets to the bed Amy had stripped that morning. As she turned to leave the room something on the top of the dresser caught her eye. It was a sort of hat, like a fascinator but made of fur. What, Leda wondered, was Amy doing with such a thing? She picked it up and looked at the label sewn onto the silk lining of the hat. It had been made by a milliner in Paris. Leda frowned. How much had Amy paid for this? And where would she ever wear it?

  Leda returned the hat to the dresser and left the room. How Amy spent her money was no business of hers as long as Amy was putting aside enough to cover the cost of a move to Boston. But was she? Leda didn’t think she would get very far by asking.

  Chapter 42

  For the past fifteen minutes or so Lily and Layla had been sitting on the carpeted floor of the den, happily occupied building and then knocking down towers of old-fashioned wooden blocks. Hayley had been observing the girls closely since the first day she had met them. There were more differences between them than just size and eye color. Lily, for example, was a whiz with puzzles and seemed never to tire of asking questions like “What’s that?” and “Why?” Layla was by far the more physically active of the two and seemed to have no fear. She was like a little monkey, climbing on anything in her way, while Lily preferred to stay grounded, though she could walk up the stairs to the second floor unaided and her dexterity was on a par with her sister’s. Both girls were heard to say “I do it!” several times a day, and when for some reason or another Lily or Layla could not do what she believed she could, there might be a small tantrum. But only a small one.

  Hayley, sitting in one of the many high-backed rocking chairs scattered around the den, found herself wondering what the twins’ brother was doing at that very moment. She knew so very little about Ethan Whitby and how he spent his time other than the fact that he was passionate about history. Only that morning she had found herself looking forward to asking Ethan if he had ever read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Thomas More, but that was assuming he would want to engage in conversation. Their past conversations could be chalked up to simple good manners on Ethan’s part.

  Hayley felt her face flushing at the memory of the crazy idea that had come to her the other night. Getting Ethan to marry her? Just as she had expected it would, in the illuminating light of day the fantasy of the night seemed absurd.

  It wasn’t that Hayley was holding out for true love. She had never dreamed of finding a soul mate and walking hand in hand into the proverbial sunset. People like her weren’t made for such things. They were made for more prosaic ends. They were made for drudgery and mediocrity. True romance played no part in the lives of the Franklins. Brandon regarded women as bedroom playthings and not much more. As far as Hayley knew, her brother had never gotten a girl pregnant, which seemed a bit of a miracle. The fact that her father didn’t cheat on her mother was also a surprise. Hayley supposed she should feel grateful that her mother was spared the particular indignity of a cheating husband, but feeling grateful for anything as far as her father was concerned was a serious struggle.

  Layla swiped the latest block tower to the floor, and Lily clapped. Suddenly, Layla climbed to her feet and toddled over to Hayley. With a big grin she pulled up her shirt and said, “My tummy!”

  “Yes,” Hayley said quite seriously, “that is your tummy.”

  Lily then climbed to her feet and lifted her shirt. “My tummy, too!” she announced.

  Hayley laughed. Most times she would so much rather be with small children than with adults. At least, she thought, an image of Ethan crossing her mind, most adults.

  Chapter 43

  There was more than the usual traffic on the road this morning, and Amy was worried she would be late arriving at Cressida’s house. She wasn’t sure Cressida would accept any excuses for a lack of punctuality other than something major, like death. That was silly. Illness would probably be an acceptable excuse. Maybe.

  Amy’s mood wasn’t the best. The women’s teasing the night before had upset her and not only because she had been hungry. The problem was that she wasn’t quite able to put her finger on what about the teasing had gotten to her. Whatever it was, Amy had decided not to tell the others that Cressida was acting as her mentor that summer, or that Cressida had chosen to call her by the French version of her name. The other nannies didn’t deserve that information.

  When Amy had gotten home after leaving the pub she had gone straight to the freezer, where she found an unopened pint of chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream. She had eaten the entire thing. After, she had felt guilty and had realized that before she had met Cressida Prior, pigging out on a carton of ice cream wouldn’t have made her feel anything but happy and full. But that’s because before she met Cressida Prior she lacked self-control. Cressida was teaching her about self-control as well as about self-respect.

  Amy pulled into the driveway and parked. It was exactly eight o’clock. Cressida was waiting for her just inside the door as she often was, wearing leggings, a tank top, and running shoes.

  “I need you to undertake a very important mission for me, Aimee,” Cressida said by way of greeting.

  Amy smiled. No one had ever asked her to undertake an important mission before. Certainly not her mother. “Sure,” she said eagerly.

  Cressida turned and walked in the direction of the kitchen. “I need you to hand-deliver a very sensitive document to one of my company’s lawyers in Hartford.”

  “Connecticut?” Amy asked, following her employer.

  “Yes. I’m asking you to do this because I trust you, Aimee. And there are not many people I trust.”

  Amy felt a glow of satisfaction. What would those other nannies say if they could hear Cressida right now? “When do I go?” she asked.

  “On Wednesday. But we’ll talk more about that later.” Cressida came to a sudden stop and turned around. “Right now, I want to talk to you about curating your life. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “Not really,” Amy admitted. She had only ever heard of curators in museums and wasn’t quite sure what they actually did. “But I’d love to learn.”

  “Good. Let me just juice a few cucumbers for us and we’ll begin.”

  Amy smiled, though she didn’t relish the idea of drinking cucumber juice. But it was probably very slimming, and she still hadn’t lost the weight Cressida had told her to lose, so she would drink the juice as her mentor suggested she do. And she would learn about curating her life.

  And on the way home that afternoon she would stop at The Yellow Buttercup and buy the sequined evening bag she had fallen in love with weeks ago. It was only $150 and would definitely come in handy once she was living in Boston and meeting other people who believed in her potential to succeed.

  Chapter 44

  Amy frowned and poked at one of the embroidered pillows piled on the couch. “Cressida is a highly discriminating person,” she announced.

  “Oh?” Leda said, prepared to be annoyed. She had been enjoying a good mystery novel until Amy had come into the living room and begun to wander, sighing as she went. “How is she discriminating?”

  “She thinks about everything very carefully before she does it. Like how she dresses a
nd what she eats and how she spends her free time. She curates her life.”

  “How interesting.” Leda cast a longing eye at the novel in her hand.

  “I’ve been thinking, Mom,” Amy went on. “Maybe we should clean up the place a bit, get rid of some of this junk.”

  Leda laughed. She didn’t know why. She was not amused. “Excuse me?” she said. “Nothing in our home is junk. And the house is cleaned from top to bottom every week.”

  “I don’t mean that it’s dirty,” Amy explained. “Just that it’s kind of stuffed. Like, what about all the throws on the couch and chairs? Do we really need them? And maybe we could toss a few of the pillows in here.”

  “I like this place just the way it is,” Leda said stoutly.

  Amy sighed. “Okay. It was just an idea. Cressida was telling me today about this amazing woman named Marie Kondo who came up with this amazing way to tidy up your life. Something about only keeping things that give you happiness. Or maybe it was joy. Anyway, did you know there’s something called the National Association of Professional Organizers? You can hire someone to come into your home and totally clean it up. You can even hire someone to organize your thoughts!”

  Leda wondered if the thought organizer, too, was amazing.

  “When I’m in Boston,” Amy went on, “I’m going to keep my room seriously clean and spare. I just hope the other girls aren’t too messy. Mess means a lack of self-respect.”

  Leda refrained from asking if Amy had gotten around to cleaning out her room right here in Yorktide. She had recent evidence that it was still pretty much the opposite of clean and spare. For a moment she was tempted to ask Amy about the fur hat she had found but decided not to. Not yet, anyway.

  “Harry!” Amy cried. “Get off that chair!”

  Leda frowned. “Amy, you know full well that’s Harry’s chair.”

  “But he’ll shed all over it,” Amy complained. “I’ll sit in it and get cat hair all over my clothes, and Cressida can’t stand animals.”

  “Then don’t sit in the chair,” Leda advised. “Harry, stay where you are.” Harry did, and Leda put her novel aside. She would get back to it later. She got up and headed to the kitchen.

  “What’s for dinner?” Amy asked, following her.

  “Spaghetti with carbonara sauce.”

  Amy grimaced. “I can’t eat that.”

  “What do you mean?” Leda asked as she set about finishing the dish in the big, black cast-iron pan she had inherited from her mother. “You love spaghetti carbonara.”

  “I did like it once, but I was talking to Cressida today and she said that there’s a new study that proves once and for all that eggs are bad for you.”

  “What new study?” Leda asked.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

  Leda’s patience felt very close to snapping. “Amy, an egg here and there is not going to kill you.”

  “I’d rather not, Mom,” Amy said. “I’ll make myself a salad. Cressida eats a lot of salad but without dressing. The dressing has empty calories.”

  Leda watched as Amy inexpertly sliced half a cucumber and half a tomato and tore several leaves from a head of lettuce. She scooped the simple ingredients into a soup bowl and set it on the table.

  “There are red peppers in the fridge,” she said lightly. “And an avocado.”

  “Cressida said that avocados have too much fat.”

  Leda thought of the empty ice-cream container she had spotted in the recycling bin and decided not to comment on it. “I believe avocados have what’s known as the good sort of fat,” she said instead as she brought the cast-iron pan to the table, took her seat, and put a liberal portion of the spaghetti on her plate. “Bon ap-pétit,” she said brightly.

  Amy speared an uneven slice of cucumber with her fork. Leda was torn between laughter and pity. Amy was twenty-one. Her ability to judge and separate out the preposterous from the reasonable should be far more developed than it was. In spite of four years of courses that were supposed to teach critical thinking, Amy had graduated as pretty much the same person she had been when she had entered college.

  “What did you have for lunch?” Leda asked.

  “A glass of cucumber juice,” Amy said, cutting away a bit of brown, wilted lettuce.

  Leda lifted her glass of wine to her lips to hide her frown.

  Chapter 45

  Hayley took one of the three knives the Franklin family owned from the drawer by the old toaster. The blade was dull even though Hayley had recently sharpened it using the heavy steel sharpener Nora had inherited from her mother. The knife really should be tossed, but the cost of a good replacement was prohibitive. As long as it was even partially functional it would suffice.

  With only half a mind on the task Hayley began to slice the bunch of carrots she had already peeled. She was still wrestling with her conscience. The notion of marrying for money was absurd, but for some reason it wouldn’t go entirely away. Maybe it was because almost every moment of every day was a harsh reminder of the miserableness of her life. Take, for example, her stop at the public library that afternoon to return the book her father had destroyed. She had offered no explanation for the destruction, though she had apologized profusely and paid for a replacement copy. The librarian, one of those who had worked there for well over twenty years, had asked no questions, only smiled sympathetically as she accepted Hayley’s money. Nevertheless, the experience had been mortifying.

  Hayley looked to where her mother was scrubbing a stubbornly dirty pot. This latest apartment didn’t feature a dishwasher, nor was the hot water always hot. But there was some bit of good news for the Franklin household. Miraculously, her father had gotten a job on a construction site where a friend of a friend was foreman. Eddie Franklin was not skilled, but he could handle basic tasks if closely supervised. Personally, Hayley wouldn’t trust him within ten miles of a power tool, but that wasn’t her concern.

  “I hope Dad doesn’t blow this job like he blew the last one,” she said. “Who gets fired from a dishwasher position?”

  “He didn’t blow the job,” her mother corrected mildly. “The man in charge of the kitchen staff was very rude to him, and your father has too much pride to stand for someone treating him rudely.”

  Hayley restrained a sigh. “When’s he supposed to be home?” she asked.

  “Well,” Nora said hesitatingly, “I’m not sure. He said something about the site closing at three, but he also said not to expect him home for dinner.”

  Hayley knew what that meant. It meant that when the day’s work was over her father would be heading directly to the pub—one of the few that hadn’t banned him—where he would get happily drunk until he was unhappily drunk. Which meant that either he would pass out somewhere between the pub and home or one of his cronies would drive him to the apartment, and that meant that Hayley would have to stay awake in order to keep him from disturbing her mother and everyone else who lived in the building until he was passed out on the couch.

  “We’re going to make rent next month,” Hayley said. “Dad’s paycheck can help with the electric bill. He will be giving his paycheck directly to you, won’t he, Mom?”

  Nora Franklin suddenly found a spot on the pot she was washing deeply interesting.

  Hayley didn’t bother to restrain her sigh this time around. Her parents’ checking account—they had no savings account—was of necessity in Nora’s name; if her husband had access to the account it would always be empty. This bit of progress hadn’t come about without a fight. When Hayley had announced the new plan, her father had raged that as head of the house he had the right to make the big decisions. Her mother, too, had privately argued that by removing her father’s access to the money Hayley would be insulting his manhood. “Manhood?” Hayley had scoffed. In the end, through sheer force of will and a bit of luck thrown in—her father came down with a bad case of the flu and was more than usually incoherent for a few days—Hayley had gotten her way.

 
Of course, with no bank account in his name, whatever paycheck Eddie Franklin might earn could not be directly deposited anywhere but his grubby fist. Still, Nora’s earnings were now safe from Eddie’s grasp, except for the occasions when he managed to wheedle or bully sums out of her. It was a constant struggle to maintain control of the household finances, one Hayley often despaired of ever truly winning.

  “Do those people you work for treat you nicely?” her mother asked suddenly, turning from the sink. “I was talking to Sally, one of the girls who work in the bakery department, and she said she heard that all sorts of terrible things go on in those big homes with those people having so much money.”

  “The Whitbys are very nice people,” Hayley assured her mother. “Look, I’ll finish making dinner, okay? And put down that pot. You look as if you could fall asleep on your feet.”

  Nora smiled gratefully. “Thank you, Hayley. Will you be going out after dinner?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got a book I want to start. It’s about the scientific advancements in the last forty years of the seventeenth century.”

  Her mother smiled blankly. “That’s nice.” Then she went off, and a moment later Hayley heard her bedroom door close.

  Hayley finished slicing the carrots and filled a pot with water for boiling. Her mother had graduated from high school and had even completed two years of college before Eddie Franklin barreled into her life. But sometimes Nora acted as if she had had no education at all. It wouldn’t surprise Hayley to learn that years of domestic fear and misery could alter a person’s intelligence for the worse.

  And that was something else to think about. Marrying an educated, wealthy man might help elevate her both intellectually and morally. Environment mattered enormously; no one could deny that. There was a limit to the refinement of thought, feeling, and behavior she could achieve living the way she did, in a series of substandard apartments with two parents who needed continual managing.