by Aria Ford
Even worse, it would have been the same as telling my parents they had been right all along, and there wasn’t a shot in hell that I was ready for a thing like that. That was the kind of thing I planned on saving for when it got down to a life or death kind of a situation. I knew that much, but in the meantime, I had no idea what I was supposed to do to live from one day to the next. Abby and Katy were really good roommates for the most part, but that didn’t mean they would, or even should, take on the burden of taking care of me financially. Which left me, as far as I could tell, absolutely screwed.
“Have you considered going back to school again?” Katy asked me tentatively as she handed me a glass of wine. “Maybe asking them if you can have your bookstore job back until you find something else?”
“I’ve tried that already,” I answered glumly, feeling worse about my situation with every passing second. “They made it pretty clear that those jobs are only for current students.”
“Did you tell them they should have given you a degree for something other than how to be a super-duper pretentious person?” Katy asked me with a completely straight face, something that put a look of horror on Abby’s face while causing me to burst out laughing.
“You know what? That question slipped my mind. Maybe I’ll call them back in the morning, see if that argument carries any weight.”
“You could always just go back to school,” Abby said breezily, sipping her wine casually as if going to grad school was the easiest thing in the world. “If you go to grad school, you’ll be able to get your job back.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, trying very hard not to lose my temper. “There are two things I see wrong with that plan. First of all, that’s a terrible reason to go to grad school. That’s a really big undertaking, and there’s no point in going unless you’re really passionate about the whole thing.”
“Preach it, sister,” Katy said loudly, sipping on her wine and watching Abby and me, like she watched a tennis match instead of a conversation. “Tell her how it is.”
I shot Katy a smile that was also a warning. If she wasn’t careful, she would get into yet another fight with Abby. “Secondly,” I went on. “Grad school is crazy expensive, and there’s not a chance that my parents would pay for it. There’s a chance I could get a scholarship, but I doubt it. Besides, all the deadlines for that have passed. I would have to wait a whole year, and in the meantime, I’d still have nothing to live on.”
Abby shrugged her shoulders and grabbed for the box of crackers Katy munched on. She didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, which was painfully obvious, but it was difficult to blame her. She was still young and not out of college, and her parents seemed to have an unending supply of patience. She wasn’t going to be worrying about finances any time soon.
Katy frowned. “I know you don’t want to do this—”
“I’m not moving home,” I interrupted quickly, not even wanting to hear her speak the words. “I’m just not, okay? It’s not an option.”
“Good! That’s not what I was going to say. What I was going to say was you should expand the jobs you’re looking at. I know you want a job in a gallery or something, and I totally get it, but if you have to find something totally unrelated in the meantime, then so be it, right? Believe me, I’m not thrilled to be a waitress, but it’s what pays the bills right now, so it’s what I’m doing. Maybe broaden the parameters of your search and see what you find. If nothing strikes your fancy, no big deal. But if you find something, then awesome. Just think it over, okay? And also, drink up, because we’re not going to let all this good wine go to waste.”
I took a sip to satisfy her, but it was difficult to enjoy it. Katy was right, and I knew it. Looking for something that had nothing to do with my degree felt like another form of failure to me, but it was more like a theoretical failure. I faced the very real possibility that I would blow through what was left of my meager savings and not be able to pay my portion of rent. Given those two options, I was willing to take the failure.
With this in mind, I searched online for something, anything, as long as it the paycheck would be halfway decent. I was so sure that it wasn’t going to work that I almost didn’t click on the ad for a nanny, something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. I wasn’t even sure why I clicked on it, even when I did it, except that it was a job opening and I always had and still did love kids. That was the reason I clicked on the listing for the job. When I saw the pay, I knew I had to apply. I looked at other jobs after sending in my resume for the nanny position, but when it was all said and done, and I was free to enjoy the wine with my two roommates, the nanny job was the one I couldn’t get out of my head. In my mind, that was going to be it. That was going to be the job that would become the answer to all my problems. It just had to be.
CHAPTER THREE
Matt
Never in my life had I considered myself to be a man who could be described as dramatic. My entire life, in fact, had been built around not being that kind of person. I was reliable and hard-working. I was tough when I needed to be, and I refused to take shit from anyone. I was not the kind of man who jumped from point A to point Z, panicking about a situation long before that panic was warranted. These characteristics made me the man I am today, and they’d never wavered, not even when I was dealing with Lizbeth, Anna’s mother. If somebody had asked me six months ago if there was anything that could change those most integral parts of who I was, I would have told that somebody to fuck off. The very idea was crazy and stupid. It was the kind of thing that would happen when pigs flew.
“Looks like the little squealers sprouted wings,” I muttered to myself, drumming my fingers manically on my home office desk. I may have never hit a situation that made me feel panicked to the point of being dramatic, but the pickle I was in now had me very, very close. My need to find a babysitter for Anna had not diminished by any means, but my options certainly seemed to be.
My first problem was I’d received fewer replies to my help wanted ads than I’d hoped. I had somehow expected that when I advertised my need for someone to take care of my sweet little cherub of a daughter, potential applicants would line up outside my front door the very next day. The line would be so long it would rival the one at the beginning of Mary Poppins. Instead, I’d received exactly four responses, all of which I had immediately set up interviews for. I made sure to schedule them all for the same day, a choice I’d landed on for several reasons. For starters, taking a day off and being out of the office was almost painful for me. Taking more than one day off from work, even another Sunday like the one I’d chosen to conduct my interviews, was totally unheard of and completely unacceptable. Besides, I hadn’t anticipated needing much time at all. In my mind, it couldn’t be all that hard to find a suitable person to look after my daughter. Not that I wasn’t cognizant of her safety and concerned with finding somebody that would be a suitable fit for Anna. It just didn’t strike me as the most difficult task a man could engage in. I was a doctor, for Christ’s sake. If I was able to do that, finding a nanny for a six-year-old little girl should be a breeze.
Except that, as it turned out, it wasn’t a breeze at all. The first three of my four candidates had come and gone without the slightest possibility of me hiring them. It wasn’t because I didn’t think they were good enough, either. From everything I could see, all three of the women were perfectly qualified. If it had been up to me, I would have hired any one of them on the spot and been done with it. The problem was Anna herself. After each of the women’s interviews with me, I introduced them to my daughter to see how they got along. Each time, Anna dissolved into a total meltdown.
When she’d met the first one, Anna had outright told her, told her right to her middle-aged and extremely surprised face, that she didn’t like her and didn’t want her in our house anymore. I had done my best to smooth it over, but there hadn’t been much of a point. After something like that, both the applicant and I knew that it wasn’t going to happen. The n
ext two meetings with Anna had been slightly altered versions of the same thing. So by the time my fourth interview drew near, I was sure it was going to be a shitshow. I was a pretty logical guy, and it stood to reason that if a pattern had been established, future endeavors would follow that same pattern. I was so sure of this, in fact, that when I heard my doorbell ring, I actually cringed.
“No more!” Anna shouted from her bedroom, her voice cracking with the force of her heartfelt words. “Tell that person to go away, Daddy! I don’t want more. No!”
“Quiet, Anna, that’s enough. Let’s try not to be mean to this one, shall we?”
“No!” she shouted again, sounding even more zealous than she had before. “Tell that person to go!”
Hoping that she would stop her shouting by the time I got to the front door, I approached with caution. After making it through three essentially useless interviews with three women who wouldn’t stick in my memory for longer than the short amount of time they spent in my house, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of doing it all over again. Perhaps it was this mind-set that made what I encountered once I got the door open such a shock. For a minute, I just stood there, saying nothing and looking like a total asshole.
“Hello,” the fourth potential employee stammered, shifting from one foot to the other while she looked at me anxiously. “I’m sorry, maybe I have the wrong address?”
“That depends,” I answered smoothly, silently grateful for my ability to roll with the punches and recover quickly. “What is it that you’re looking for?”
“Oh,” she answered with a nervous little laugh, a laugh I couldn’t help but notice made her whole face light up prettily. “That might help, right? I’m looking for the McCormack residence?”
“Is that a question or a statement?”
“It’s a statement. I’m looking for the McCormack residence. Could you tell me where I might find it?”
“You’re here. I’m assuming you’re my appointment? You’re here for the nanny position?”
For a minute, she just looked at me, a slight frown on her face. I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking, seeing as she didn’t exactly have a great poker face. She was thinking that I was a prick, and she was right. While she did that, I took her silence as an opportunity to look her up and down, and I definitely liked what I saw. This girl was in an entirely different league than the other three women I’d interviewed, all of whom had been rocking the Mrs. Doubtfire vibe. This girl, whose name I wasn’t even close to being able to remember, had to be in her early twenties, and she was one of the hottest girls I’d seen in a long, long time. She was possibly the hottest girl I’d ever seen, outside of a movie screen. From the way she dressed and held herself, she had no idea she was that good looking. She was tall, around five foot eight if I had to guess, with deep auburn curls cascading halfway down her back. Her eyes were bright green and full of questions, and her skin a perfect milky white, unblemished by the San Diego sun. The real kicker, though, was her body. Jesus, the body on this girl! Legs for days and a rack that could have sent a lesser man straight into cardiac arrest. She had actual hips, too, hips and an ass which was something a lot of chicks seemed to be trying not to have these days. In short, she was exactly the kind of woman I would want to take to bed, only ten times better. The problem was, she wasn’t there for me. She was there as a potential nanny for my daughter, and I was too busy checking out her tits to invite her in.
“Yes,” she answered slowly, trying to recover from the surprise of my less than conventional greeting. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Fine. Good, then come in. Please follow me back to my office. That’s where the interview will be conducted.”
She did as she was told, another quality I appreciated in a woman, and she did so without saying another word. I could feel her behind me, though, checking out the house and trying to figure out if this was the kind of place she could see herself working. I wanted to laugh at that and tell her that impressing my daughter was the only thing she needed to concern herself with, but I kept my mouth shut too. My daughter’s denial of this woman was inevitable, as inevitable as death and taxes, but that didn’t mean I wanted her out almost as soon as she stepped inside. If nothing else, I wanted to get another good look at her, maybe see if there was a way I could get her number before I had to show her the door. I waited to talk to her until I was back behind my desk and she’d taken one of the smaller chairs across from me.
“So, why don’t we start by you telling me your name?”
“Jessica. My name is Jessica Larson.”
“Right,” I answered, only half listening as I looked over her resume. “And tell me, Ms. Larson—”
“Oh please, just Jessica. I’m not used to being addressed so formally.”
“And I’m not used to being interrupted, but I guess we all have to get used to change. That’s fine though; it’s your right to be called whatever you like. So, Jessica, why don’t you tell me what someone with a double major in French and art history is doing applying for a job as a nanny.”
“Honestly? I need the money. It turns out that none of the galleries are hiring at the moment, and when I graduated from school, my university job was no longer an option. I can assure you, though, I’m very good with children. I spent a good deal of time babysitting when I was in high school, not to mention taking care of my siblings. And I’ve taken care of children from divorced homes plenty of times, so I understand the delicacies that come along with that.”
“Anna’s mother and I are not divorced.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry; I don’t know why, but I just assumed her mother was no longer in the picture.”
“She isn’t. My wife passed away a couple of years back. She died of a heart attack due to a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect.”
“Oh my God! I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to be so insensitive. Really, I’m appalled at myself. And I’m so very sorry for your loss too.”
“Please,” I held up a hand, trying to stop her flow of words and maybe also put her out of her misery, “you don’t need to apologize. It was a reasonable assumption, based on the position you’re interviewing for. And there’s no need for your condolences, either, although it’s a kind gesture. I still miss my wife, I do, but I’ve already done my grieving for her. That may sound insensitive, but it was necessary in order for me to keep caring for Anna the way she deserves.”
“Of course,” she answered quickly, her beautiful green eyes still wide with shock and perhaps a little bit of shame to go on top of it. “I mean, that makes sense. I don’t want to say that I understand because I’ve never been in that position, but I hope you know what I mean.”
“I believe so.”
This girl, this Jessica, seemed nice enough, and Lord knew I ached to get her into bed, but I had my misgivings about hiring her. The fact that she hadn’t worked with kids since high school didn’t exactly inspire worlds of confidence, nor did the idea that she would only jump ship the moment she found a job that was actually in her field. I got ready to vocalize these doubts when Anna wandered into my office. I was sure she would put an end to our interview in her own painfully unique way.
“Who are you?” Anna asked around the thumb that still found its way to her mouth more often than it should in a girl her age. I watched her closely, waiting for the ax to fall, and although she hadn’t started screaming yet, I was completely confident that she would do so at any minute.
“Jessica. But you can call me Jess if you want. That’s what my friends call me.”
“I don’t know you.”
“That’s right; you don’t. So maybe it’s better if you call me Jessica, at least for a while.”
As stupid as it would seem to me later, I held my breath as I watched this exchange take place. My eyes darted from my daughter to Jessica and then back to my daughter again. With the other three women I had interviewed, Anna had already been flipping her shit by this point. She hadn’
t even let any of the other three get that many words out before she’d started screaming and crying and telling anyone who would listen how much she hated them. With Jessica, it was different. Instead of starting to shout, she actually took another step into the room, another step, and then another, and then another after that. Pretty soon, she stood so close to Jessica that she could have climbed into her lap easily, something I half expected her to do. Although she didn’t do anything quite that presumptuous, she did reach out with one chubby little hand and touch Jessica’s hair, stroking it gently with wide eyes.
“This is pretty.”
“My hair?” Jessica asked gently, her voice full of the smile that slowly spread across her face. “Thank you, Anna. That’s very nice of you to say. You know what?”
“What?” Anna asked her, sounding as if she was about to learn the greatest secret of the universe.
“I think your hair is pretty too.”
“You smell nice too,” Anna went on, still stroking Jessica’s hair lightly. “You smell pretty.”
“Thanks!” Jessica laughed, never moving or disrupting Anna’s exploration once as the two of them had this oddest of all first meetings, “You’re very sweet, Anna. Very, very sweet.”
“I’m gonna call her Jess, Daddy, okay? And I’m gonna get some milk.” She announced these two things as if they were somehow related. As soon as Anna delivered her message, she gave Jessica’s hair one last longing stroke and then retreated from my office as if what I had just witnessed hadn’t been some small miracle. When I looked at Jessica, she still smiled, her face a little bit flushed. To me, it looked like a particularly juicy steak I would love to sink my teeth into. I had no idea if she could tell what I was thinking, but I very much hoped not. It wouldn’t do to start things off that way with her, not with my daughter’s new nanny.
“She’s adorable,” Jessica started, looking as if she had plenty of other positive things to say, things the three applicants who came before her would never have associated with my little daughter.