The Summer Nanny

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Can I talk to you about something?” Marisa asked suddenly.

  Hayley’s stomach knotted. Had Marisa caught her out somehow, divined her thoughts in the way some women could?

  “Sure,” Hayley said. “Of course.”

  “There’s this student in my class I just can’t figure out. I mean, she’s perfectly nice and always on time, and she completes the assignments I give, but she seems to have absolutely no aptitude for languages. She can memorize vocabulary but not rules of grammar, and she’s completely unable to speak a coherent sentence.” Marisa paused. “I can’t quite figure out why she signed up for the course. It’s not inexpensive, and clearly she’s not getting much out of the experience. I hesitate to talk to her about her work—the class isn’t a part of a degree program—because I’m not quite sure what I’d say. Any thoughts?”

  Hayley considered for a moment. “How old is this woman?” she asked.

  “I’d guess in her late sixties.”

  “Does she socialize with the other students?”

  Marisa nodded. “Yes. She’s very friendly.”

  “I think,” Hayley said with a smile, “that your student is lonely. I think she signed up for the class to be with people. It probably doesn’t matter that she’s not absorbing the lessons as long as she’s out of the house and interacting with others.”

  “Of course!” Marisa said with a laugh. “Thanks, Hayley. I think I’ll just let my student alone. And now if you can handle the girls’ bath I’d better get going. I hope they’re good for you today. You will be good for Hayley, won’t you?”

  Both girls chorused, “Be good!” Marisa kissed her daughters good-bye and left the bedroom.

  When Marisa had gone, Hayley realized that she felt disoriented. It was rare that someone treated her as an intelligent equal. Sure, her mother relied on her for just about everything, but being asked for advice from someone like Marisa Whitby was different. It had made her feel validated in some way to have an educated, sophisticated person seek her advice. Validated and disoriented.

  “Bath time,” Hayley announced, lifting each girl into an arm. “Grab your rubber duckies.”

  “Rubber duckies!” Layla cried.

  “Rubber duckies yellow!” Lily added.

  Hayley kissed each girl’s head. Children rule, she thought. And nobody should ever forget that.

  Chapter 67

  Amy tried in vain to suppress a yawn. She was still groggy and wondered why she hadn’t had a second cup of coffee at breakfast. Maybe Hayley had a point about eating a good breakfast to set you up for the challenges of the day. Didn’t people say that breakfast was the most important meal of the day? She debated going down to the kitchen to see what sort of snack she could grab but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. She had never eaten anything of her own accord under the Priors’ roof. Amy wasn’t sure how the situation had come about. There had been nothing in the guidelines she had been given at the start of the summer about staying away from the fridge.

  Anyway, at any moment Cressida might need her. In fact, Amy thought, maybe she should check to see if Cressida needed anything now. For the past half an hour she had been in the room the family was using to store their luggage, doing something or other.

  Amy left the office and turned right into the hall. The spare room was two doors down on the left. As Amy approached she heard the low murmur of a voice other than Cressida’s. When she was a few feet from the open door she stopped. Will was in the room with Cressida; Cressida was in the process of lifting a plastic storage box filled with files. Amy began to turn around to go back to the office when she saw Will reach out to take the box from his wife’s hands. And then she saw Cressida deliberately let go of the box and slap her husband’s face. Amy flinched as she heard the crack of flesh on bone. “Don’t touch me,” Cressida spat. “I can do it myself.”

  Amy didn’t hear what Will said in response; maybe he said nothing. She dashed back to the office, and a moment later she heard footsteps heading toward the bedrooms at the back of the house. It dawned on Amy then that she had no idea where Jordan and Rhiannon were that morning.

  Her heart pounding, Amy sat upright in the chair across the desk from Cressida’s. What she had just witnessed had upset her deeply. All Will had been trying to do was to help his wife. He hadn’t deserved to be hit for his efforts. But maybe he had said or done something wrong before Amy had arrived. Still . . . How, Amy wondered, could anyone tolerate a marriage in which physical violence played a part?

  She thought about the easy compatibility her grandparents had shared, the way her grandmother had made her grandfather breakfast every morning of the week, the way her grandfather had lovingly maintained his wife’s loom and sewing machine. Their relationship had been built on love and respect and kindness.

  Unlike the relationship between Nora and Eddie Franklin. Amy shuddered to think of what might happen if Nora needed practical assistance from her husband. He certainly wouldn’t be there for his wife if she got sick, and at the rate he was going he almost definitely wouldn’t be alive to care for her in her old age. That’s where Hayley’s scheme came in. Hayley was attempting to set in place a safe and secure future for her mother, as well as for herself. Really, Amy thought, who was she to judge?

  Nervously, Amy glanced toward the door of the office. Earlier, she had hoped to ask more about the Atlanta offer but now realized she didn’t have the nerve to broach the subject, not after the violent scene she had witnessed a few moments earlier.

  Amy looked at her watch; her mother had given it to her for high school graduation. It was only ten thirty in the morning but already the day seemed way, way too long.

  Chapter 68

  Leda was reviewing her bank statement. The water bill had been significantly higher last month than the month before. Well, Leda thought, the summer had been a dry one and gardens did need to be watered. And there had been an unexpected expense in the form of a new tire for her Subaru. Still, at the moment things were all right, but come September and Amy’s move to Boston there would be a fairly big outlay, especially if Amy hadn’t been saving as much money as she was supposed to be saving.

  And that was likely. The evening before, a package had been delivered for Amy. Usually Amy loved receiving packages and was always eager to show her mother what was inside. But not this time.

  “It’s just a little something I bought,” she had said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  “Come on,” Leda had urged.

  With obvious reluctance Amy had opened the package to reveal a large red shawl fringed with glittering black beads. “It’s real velvet,” Amy had told her mother. “And the beads are Swarovski. That’s why they have so much sparkle. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  “How much did it cost?” Leda asked quietly.

  Amy had lowered her eyes to the shawl draped across her arms. “It was on sale for half price. Two hundred dollars.”

  With Leda’s professional wholesale discounts, she could have made a very similar piece for a fraction of that. “Where are you planning on wearing it?” she asked.

  Amy kept her eyes lowered. “I don’t know. When I’m in Boston. It will go with the black sequined evening bag.” And then she had looked up at her mother. “Come on, Mom, I’m making real money this summer. I can afford a few splurges.”

  “As long as you’re putting away a significant amount of money each week,” Leda reminded her. “You know I can’t foot the entire bill for the relocation.”

  “I am saving, I swear. And doesn’t the shawl remind you of the one Grandma is wearing in that old photo?”

  That shawl, Leda remembered, had been a cheap cotton thing and borrowed at that. “Yes,” Leda said. “I suppose it does a bit.”

  Leda gave her accounts another quick check and closed her laptop. She had been very lucky that for the past several years she had been able to support herself and her daughter on the profits she earned from her craftwork. Still, Leda was well aware th
at one day she might be required to take a part-time job in order to make ends meet. After all the years working from home as her own boss and under her own steam it would be difficult to make the transition to someone else’s employee, to doing work that didn’t engage her the way crafting did.

  Suddenly, Leda recalled one of her favorite quotes about creativity. Creativity, Albert Einstein had said, is intelligence having fun. And if the fun didn’t involve balloons and cake, it was valid all the same. Right then and there Leda decided to place a call to the YCC art gallery, the organizer of the open studio tours each October. At the very least she could obtain what information she needed and decide later on whether to actually participate. More exposure might mean more income, and that dreaded part-time job might never have to become a reality.

  Chapter 69

  “Baa baa blah shee, have oo ana wuul!”

  Hayley smiled. “Yes, Lily. That’s very good.” Lily loved to recite her favorite nursery rhymes. Layla, while enjoying the rhymes being read to her, let her sister do the talking.

  Hayley and the twins were sitting on the floor of the den among a slew of toys, coloring books, and puzzles. It was ridiculous but Hayley had been hoping for some word from Ethan. While it was true they hadn’t exchanged contact information, it was conceivable that Marisa might have given him her cell phone number. Maybe something she had said the last time they spoke had turned him off. Maybe he had found out the truth about Brandon. It would be relatively easy to do; he could have overheard a bit of gossip in the convenience store on Main Street or at the gas station closest to the Whitbys’ house. But to say that Ethan was avoiding her was to assume that he was visiting Maine in order to see her, and of course he wasn’t. He came to visit his family.

  As the girls occupied themselves with their toys, Hayley’s thoughts turned to what Amy had told her the night before about that half-baked idea of moving to Atlanta to be Cressida Prior’s right-hand woman. Hayley could all too easily imagine her friend making a terrible mistake abandoning all of the good things about her life in Yorktide—and her sensible plans for a spell in Boston— for a very sketchy and uncertain future. It might be a mistake that could be reversed, but it would be a mistake that would take a very heavy toll.

  “Look!” Layla directed Hayley’s attention to the sisters’ latest project—grouping a handful of brightly colored rubber shapes by size and color. It warmed Hayley’s heart to see siblings at play together. It was likely that Lily and Layla would be dear companions for life; twins most often were. Maybe if she and Brandon had been born closer than six years apart they might have developed a friendship, but maybe not. Brandon had begun to show signs of antisocial behavior long before Hayley had come along, and it had only gotten worse over time. One incident in particular was burned into Hayley’s memory. She must have been about six. Brandon had pinched the skin on her forearm so hard and for so long it had actually broken. She couldn’t recall if Brandon had been punished. Her mother must have inflicted some sort of penance on him, but if she had it had had no curative affect.

  Hayley uncrossed her legs and stretched them before her. It might be nice to have two or three children within a year or so of each other, she thought, so they stood the chance of enjoying a warm sibling relationship. But you didn’t miss what you never had. That’s what “they” said, but Hayley had always taken issue with that blanket statement. She believed that you could indeed miss what you’d never had; imagination and empathy could easily show you the nature of something potentially good, even wonderful. If you had never tasted root beer you wouldn’t be likely to miss it. If you had never seen the movie Jaws you wouldn’t likely miss that, either. But travel? Access to great art in museums? A beautiful home? A good marriage? A child of your own to love and cherish?

  “I want!” Layla cried, pointing at her sister, who was clutching a pink rubber doughnut to her chest.

  Hayley scolded herself for daydreaming when there was a potential toddler crisis to solve. “Lily,” she said in her most bright and reasonable tone, “how about you keep the pink doughnut for a few minutes and then let Layla have it for a few minutes.”

  “No!” Lily shouted. “Mine!”

  Hayley sighed. So much for a two-year-old’s concept of sharing.

  Chapter 70

  Hayley was sitting at the Latimers’ kitchen table, head in her hands, a scowl on her face.

  “You look furious,” Amy said, sitting across from her friend. “What happened?”

  Hayley brought her hands away from her head and slapped them onto the table. “What happened,” she said, “was that my mother was conned out of one hundred dollars we could ill afford to lose!”

  “Oh my God, how?” Amy asked. “Was she hurt?”

  “Only her pride was damaged. Get this. She was coming out of the post office when a guy going inside bumped into her. She says that she bumped into him, but believe me it was the other way around. The guy had been holding a box and dropped it when they collided. My mother said she heard tinkling glass and the man got upset. He said there had been a vase in the box that had belonged to his great-grandmother. It was the only bit of her the family had left and he was sending it to his dying mother to comfort her.”

  Amy shook her head. “And your mother . . .”

  “Right,” Hayley said. “My mother felt so bad for this guy that without any hesitation she offered him everything she had in her wallet, which happened to be the grocery money for the week.”

  “And he took it. What a jerk.”

  “When she told me what had happened,” Hayley went on, “she still had no clue that she had been conned. Can you believe it? That’s one of the oldest scams in the book!”

  “Your mother has a good heart,” Amy said. “She thought she was helping someone. And at least it was only a hundred dollars.” But the look on Hayley’s face told her that had been a spectacularly unhelpful thing to say. “Sorry,” she added quickly, remembering with discomfort the two hundred dollars she had spent on the shawl, the one hundred fifty dollars on the evening bag, the ninety dollars on the fur hat.

  Hayley rubbed her forehead. “Why does she allow her life to be so dismal?”

  With a twinge of discomfort Amy remembered the conversation she had had with her mother and Vera about people who allowed themselves to be victims. Both had rejected Cressida’s opinion that such people got what they deserved as harsh and unsympathetic. At the time, Amy hadn’t been so sure Cressida was wrong. Now, witnessing Hayley’s weariness, she felt troubled. “Maybe your mother can’t help being the way she is,” she said lamely.

  “But doesn’t she ever think about what she’s done to me by being such a victim?”

  “Your mom is a good person,” Amy said stoutly. Her feelings were clearer now than they had been a moment ago. “I don’t believe she would ever do anything she thought would hurt you.”

  Hayley laughed bitterly. “So, she’s oblivious to the example she’s setting? That makes it even worse.”

  “I didn’t mean that she was oblivious.” Amy thought she might be getting a headache. “Come on, Hayley. You’re not your mother. You won’t wind up like she did.”

  Hayley laughed bitterly. “Won’t I? Still think my idea of getting Ethan to marry me is crazy?”

  “Yes,” Amy said firmly. “I do, even though I’m beginning to understand your motives. Still, you’d be bored out of your mind as a trophy wife. You’ll never learn how to keep your mouth shut and smile and nod like you really care about what your husband and his cronies are talking about.”

  “I won’t be bored,” Hayley argued. “I’ll find things to do. Charities. I’ll support charities. That’s what rich women do, right?”

  “You’ll laugh too loud and you’ll never remember to use the proper fork. You’ll have nothing in common with the other women in Ethan’s world who probably all grew up in wealthy families and went to finishing schools in Switzerland and were groomed for the life of a consort from the start.”

/>   “All clichés,” Hayley said dismissively. “And archaic thinking. It won’t be like that. People are always moving up into a better class. This is America. Our culture is fluid. We’re the home of the self-made person.”

  “I don’t know about that. You were always way better in history than I was. And speaking of me,” Amy said, “how do I fit into this uptown future? Am I going to be an embarrassment to you?”

  Hayley sighed. “Amy, you could never be an embarrassment to me. Not like my family.”

  “And speaking of family,” Amy said, “what will you tell your children about your childhood? You’ll have to lie to them, too, like you’ve probably lied to Ethan. You have lied about your family, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Hayley admitted. “A little.”

  “Okay, so how are you going to keep those lies going over time? Your past will catch you up. Hayley, I know I’m the stupid one in this friendship but come on, this time I know I’m being smarter than you are!”

  “You’re not stupid,” Hayley replied fiercely. “And I appreciate that you’re so concerned about what I’m doing, I really do. But it’s something I have to try, no matter the risks.”

  “Well, I can’t stop you. And I promise to be here when Ethan leaves you and you’re all alone.”

  “I won’t be all alone,” Hayley countered. “I’ll have money.”

  Amy sighed. She knew Hayley was being purposely flippant. She knew that her friend was pretending a callousness she was constitutionally unable to feel.

  “Look,” Hayley said, “maybe things won’t turn out horribly. Ethan and I are both really interested in history. We have that in common.”

  Amy laughed. “It takes a lot more than a hobby to keep two people together for life.”