The Summer Nanny

by Holly Chamberlin

  Food and wine, too, meant a lot to the seriously wealthy. Rather, food and wine that was in vogue. There was something called a Yubari King melon that sold for between thirty and fifty dollars in Japanese department stores. White truffles cost between $3,000 and $5,000 per pound. Osetra sturgeon caviar would set you back about five hundred dollars per serving.

  And if you were wealthy enough to buy white truffles and Osetra caviar, you were wealthy enough to afford clothes by designer houses like Versace and Gucci and Saint Laurent. Hayley looked down at her thrift store chinos and frowned.

  After a mind-numbing two hours, Hayley gathered the stack of magazines and returned them to their slots in the wooden bookcase alongside ragged copies of Sports Illustrated; O, The Oprah Magazine; and People.

  How rich, she wondered, did you have to be to be considered a part of the infamous 1 percent? A billionaire? A multibillionaire?

  Trying to ascertain the habits of the rich was pretty daunting, Hayley thought as she slid behind the wheel of her humble Kia Spectra. Suddenly she recalled a line from a short story called “The Rich Boy,” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She had read it in high school sophomore English class, along with The Great Gatsby. The line went: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Indeed, if the content of the magazines Hayley had just perused was anything to go on, the divide between those born to privilege and those not seemed an impossible divide to breach.

  Hayley started her car and pulled slowly out of the library parking lot with the unhappy conviction that it would take a person far savvier than herself to even attempt such a feat.

  Chapter 55

  The temperature was already well into the eighties and it was only ten o’clock in the morning. Amy hoped that she wasn’t sweating through her linen blouse. Cressida, walking at her usual breakneck pace through downtown Ogunquit toward the parking lot where she had left the car before her eight o’clock massage appointment, didn’t seem to be aware of the rising temperature. Maybe she could handle the hot weather because she was so skinny. Maybe, Amy thought, if she lost the weight Cressida had advised her to lose, she wouldn’t sweat so much.

  “Sometimes I just want to shake that man,” Cressida was saying.

  Amy hadn’t been able to hear all of what Cressida was saying, not with lagging behind her long and purposeful strides. She assumed that Cressida was taking about Will again. On the ride into town Cressida had been listing her husband’s latest mistakes and misdeeds. Amy, while nodding and making what she hoped were appropriate murmurs of agreement, had actually been doing her best not to listen too closely. Her mother and Vera were probably right about it not being cool of Cressida to bad-mouth her husband to her employee.

  “He’s the most ineffectual person I’ve ever met, and I’m afraid the apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” Cressida went on. Suddenly, she looked over her shoulder. “Well?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to ask what I mean?”

  Amy’s step faltered. “Sorry. Are you talking about Jordan?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m talking about Jordan. That boy is too much like his father for his own good. Sometimes I think he’s a lost cause. I’ll have to pin any hope I have of raising a successful child to Rhiannon, though there are times I despair of her, too.”

  Amy gulped. Jordan and Rhiannon were only children. It wasn’t right to judge children so harshly. But there was that word again—successful. Cressida knew about what it took to be successful in everything she did, including parenting.

  Thankfully, they were forced to come to a stop by a red light. Amy tried to catch her breath without letting Cressida know that she was winded. Cressida shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Suddenly Amy saw a familiar black pickup truck just across the street. She smiled when she saw Noah Woolrich striding toward it. As he began to climb into the driver’s seat he spotted Amy and waved. Amy returned his wave and watched as Noah started the truck and then pulled slowly into the traffic of Main Street. The license plate read WOOLY. It had been Noah’s nickname in grade school.

  “Who in God’s name was that?” Cressida asked as she stepped into the street with the green light. “That creature with the black truck.”

  That creature? “His name is Noah Woolrich,” Amy said. “We went to school together.”

  Cressida frowned. “He looks like one of those awful professional wrestlers, the ones who prance around the ring in those ridiculous costumes pretending to fight one another. I mean, how many tattoos does he have? And that beard! Revolting.”

  “Actually,” Amy ventured, “Noah is a gentle person. He’d never get into a fight.”

  “A coward, then. What can he possibly do for a living?”

  He’s not a coward, Amy said, but she spoke the words silently. “He works at a craft mead brewery. He’s a product developer.”

  Cressida laughed. “He makes mead? Really? That’s disgusting. What does he eat for breakfast, gruel? I certainly hope you would never get involved with someone like that. You’re worth more than to throw yourself away on a . . . on whatever it is he thinks he is. Here’s the car. I can’t wait to get back to the house and away from these pathetic tourists.”

  Silently, Amy slid into the passenger seat.

  * * *

  Amy sat slumped at the kitchen table, a half-empty glass of iced tea in front of her. She usually put a teaspoon of sugar in her iced tea, but since starting work for Cressida she had eliminated that bad habit. Iced tea just wasn’t the same without sugar, but that was the least of what was bothering Amy.

  She was really bothered by what had taken place earlier that day. She knew that in the past she had proved not the best judge of character, but in this case she knew for a fact—everyone in Yorktide knew!—that Noah Woolrich was a genuinely good person.

  Cressida had had no right to call Noah a coward. She didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t know that back in high school Noah had saved the life of a little boy by dashing into the street to snatch the child out of the path of an out-of-control truck. The little boy was unharmed, but Noah had suffered a broken arm for his pains. Now, if that wasn’t courage, what was? Cressida also didn’t know that in his time off from the brewery Noah worked at his uncle’s place, The Clamshell, for no pay. That was Noah Woolrich, always willing to lend a helping hand. And Amy liked his beard. It was well groomed. And his tattoos weren’t images of devils and naked women. They were really beautiful, Celtic symbols and ivy vines and the name of his long-gone but still beloved grandmother.

  Amy rubbed her temples. She felt ashamed for not having stood up for someone she knew to be a good person. Why had she accepted Cressida’s harsh and unfair judgments without protest? She had remained silent when Cressida had mocked Noah’s appearance, and there was no excuse for that. She had learned when she was quite small that to mock a person for the way he looked was wrong and never, ever justified. So why had she so casually ignored that lesson? What was it about being with Cressida that made her act . . . well, that made her act in a way she would be ashamed for her mother or Hayley or Vera to know about.

  “Hi. I didn’t hear you come in earlier.”

  It was Amy’s mother. She was wearing a pair of denim overalls and her feet were bare. Cressida Prior wouldn’t be caught dead in overalls and bare feet.

  “Hi,” Amy muttered. She wondered if she had ever really congratulated her mother on being interviewed for that magazine, whatever the name of it was. She couldn’t remember.

  “I thought I’d start dinner.” Her mother looked at her closely. “You okay?”

  Amy felt the blood rush to her head. “I’m fine!” she cried. “Why are you always asking me if I’m okay?”

  Leda Latimer stuck her hands into the pockets of her overalls. “I wasn’t aware that I was doing any such thing.”

  Amy took a deep breath. It was wrong to transfer the frustration she felt about her own conduct to her mother’s innocent behavior. “Sorry, Mom,” she said. �
�I guess I’m just in a bad mood.”

  Her mother removed her hands from her pockets and went to the fridge. “Did anything upsetting happen at work?” she asked.

  “No,” Amy lied. “Work was fine.”

  “A frittata for dinner okay?”

  “Sure,” Amy said. “Just don’t put any cheese in it, okay? I don’t need the calories.”

  Chapter 56

  The morning had dawned much as any other morning, with two enormous felines pawing at Leda’s face and demanding breakfast with a series of earsplitting howls. But as Leda stumbled out of bed and went to the kitchen to feed the beasts and start the coffee, an idea had come to her, less of an idea really than a sort of internal mandate and one that took her very much by surprise.

  Now, cats fed and watered and her own breakfast consumed, Leda sat at her computer in her studio, ready after twenty-odd years to confront Lance and Regan Stirling, the two people who had caused such a radical redirection in her life. Why now? The answer was clear. The fact that the Journal of Craftwork had approached Leda had given her an undeniable degree of courage. She was considered an artist to watch. People she admired for their skill and devotion to craft thought her work worthy of notice. This moment was a landmark in Leda’s life, and she was smart enough to recognize it as such.

  Sitting taller in her chair, Leda chose a search engine. To date, it hadn’t been difficult to avoid any mention of Lance Stirling in the media; he was popular but not hugely popular and certainly not a name that would turn up with any frequency on the websites or blogs devoted to crafts that Leda routinely followed. But with a few keystrokes, the Wikipedia page devoted to Lance and Regan Stirling was on the screen. Much of the article focused on solo gallery shows Lance had mounted to critical acclaim. The last show the article mentioned had been at a small gallery in New Hampshire five years earlier. The article had been updated since then, so perhaps Lance Stirling’s time in the spotlight had ended.

  It was a bit like exorcising ghosts, Leda thought as she scrolled through the article. Lance and Regan Stirling were only people, not gods, and they were certainly no longer a threat. Leda said their names aloud, and as the syllables disappeared into the air of her studio she felt a lightening of the burden she had been carrying for almost her entire adult life. She scrolled back to the top of the page, where there was a recent photo of Lance, and she felt absolutely nothing, not anger or fear, not the sad remnants of love or the vaguely smoldering fires of passion. Lance hadn’t aged very well, Leda noted; his skin looked sallow, and there was a dark blotch on his left cheek. The eyes she had once found so penetrating and commanding she now found rather unremarkable. And they were oddly far apart. She had never noticed that before. No doubt she hadn’t noticed many things about Lance Stirling, and what she had focused on had been transformed into glorious things under the influence of teenaged infatuation. A tendency to be short-tempered had been in Leda’s eyes proof of Lance’s great artistic abilities. A habit of sneering at visitors to the house had been a sign of an understandable impatience with lesser mortals. And his penchant for tossing his dirty clothes over the stair rail rather than bringing them downstairs to the washing machine had been evidence of his innate rock-star soul. Love was blind. And as for lust, Leda thought, that was blind, deaf, and dumb.

  Next to the photo of Lance Stirling was one of his wife. Regan Stirling, the woman who had supported if not encouraged her husband’s habit of infidelity, didn’t look too great, either. Leda thought she saw in the woman’s eyes a sense of defeat that had nothing to do with the ravages of age. But maybe she was imagining this. Maybe Regan Stirling felt no remorse for the behavior she had allowed under her own roof. Anything was possible.

  Leda scrolled to the end of the article and was pleased to find a mention of the little girl she had been hired to care for that long-ago summer. Rebecca Stirling, now in her early twenties, was currently earning a Ph.D. in environmental science. Good for her, Leda thought. She had often wondered what Rebecca would feel if she were ever to learn of her parents’ behavior toward innocent young women. To discover that your own parents were predators.... In such a case, ignorance might indeed be bliss.

  Leda closed the Wikipedia page and went offline. She felt proud of herself for having looked her demons in the eye. And she felt proud of herself in another way, too. Some people, in a desperate and maybe unconscious attempt to erase or to make right what bad deed had been done to them, found it necessary to hurt someone else in return, someone as innocent as they had been when they had been abused. But Leda had always lived her life by the Golden Rule. She had always treated other people with the courtesy and respect with which she wanted to be treated by them. It hadn’t always been easy, but it had always been worth the effort. Leda got up from her desk and stretched her arms over her head. It was always worth the effort.

  Chapter 57

  Hayley peeled a second banana and began to slice it in rounds of about a quarter of an inch thick. The girls loved peanut butter on banana rounds. They would be up from a nap before long and ready to replenish with this snack, and not long after that Hayley would be busy supervising puzzles and games and splashing in the wading pool.

  Preparing a snack didn’t exactly engage Hayley’s mind in any taxing way, so she was free to cast her thoughts in another direction—that of Ethan Whitby. She had begun to wonder if she would ever see him again. She couldn’t very well flirt with someone who was absent. But then just that morning Marisa had mentioned that Ethan was paying a flying visit, so there was at least a chance she might encounter him. There was at least a chance she might—

  “Hi.”

  A slice of banana fell from Hayley’s fingers. She turned. It was Ethan. His auburn hair was tousled. He was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt open at the neck; the sleeves were rolled up. She realized that she liked his face. It had character. A smile came to her own face. It was automatic, not artful.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Ethan sat on one of the stools at the counter. “How have things been going here?” he asked with a smile. “Are the girls running you ragged?”

  “Not at all. The girls are a dream and your parents are great. I mean, your father and stepmother. Sorry.”

  “You can just say parents. It’s easier. So, I have to apologize to you,” he said.

  “For what?” Hayley asked. They had hardly spent any time in each other’s presence. For what could he possibly need to apologize?

  “For not asking the basic questions a person is supposed to ask when they meet someone new. Like, have you lived in Yorktide long?”

  Hayley’s stomach was suddenly home to butterflies. At least she could answer this question honestly.

  “Yes,” Hayley replied promptly. “I was born here.”

  “It’s a beautiful place to live.”

  Hayley smiled. “Not necessarily in the winter.”

  “None of us who live in the Northeast get off easily in winter,” Ethan agreed. “But I’ll grant you that Greenwich isn’t as hard hit as Maine must be. So, any siblings?”

  Hayley hesitated, and then the words just came popping out. “I have one brother. He’s a lawyer in Augusta. He’s six years older than me, so we’ve never really been close.”

  “What kind of law does he practice?” Ethan asked, stealing one of the banana and peanut butter rounds.

  I can’t do this, Hayley thought desperately. I can’t continue this lie. But she forced herself to conjure an image of her mother with a bruised jaw and blackened eye, an image she had seen all too often in reality. She had to do this. She had no choice. If Ethan knew the truth about her, he would never bother to speak to her again and she would be stuck battling near poverty and the constant threat of physical abuse for the rest of her life.

  “He specializes in wills and estates,” she said.

  “Do you live with your parents?” Ethan asked. “Or do you have a place of your own?”

  “I live alone,” Hayley said quickly. Anoth
er lie. “It’s nothing much, just a small cottage. I don’t need a lot of things around me to be happy.” There was some truth to that statement, but the truth only went so far because there were things that Hayley wanted around her, lovely things that would make her happy, things like books and a real painting done on canvas, something signed by the artist. “And you?” she asked.

  “Right now, I’m sharing an apartment with a friend from business school,” Ethan explained, “but come fall I’m going to start looking around for something to buy. I mean, I’m twenty-eight. I should own a place of my own.”

  “What kind of place?” Hayley asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure yet,” Ethan admitted. “I’m hoping to get married one day, and I definitely hope to have a family, so there’s probably a big backyard in my future. You know, a swing set and maybe a small pool and a grill for sure. But as it’s just me now, a smallish condo is probably what I’ll decide on.”

  To own a piece of real estate, something tangible and substantial. That was a goal Hayley had never dared set for herself. And now she knew that Ethan intended to marry. But she doubted he would be eager to marry a liar. So she would never let him know that she had lied....

  “Here’s another question,” Ethan said suddenly. “I mentioned that I went to Harvard but I never asked where you went to college.”

  Hayley forced a smile she hoped conveyed a sense of nonchalance she didn’t feel in the least. “I did two years at a local college,” she said, “and then decided to take a few years off. I feel that real-life experience is invaluable. I’ll go back one day, maybe start over. In the meantime, I keep up with my reading.”