Brother's Best Friend Unwrapped

by Aria Ford

  “Can you do it, Daddy?”

  “What do you think, Anna?”

  “Dunno. Hope so.”

  As she watched, I laid Mr. Bunny out with all the reverence typically reserved for a real live patient and went about the business of healing him. The stuffing went back into the already worn little body, and then I stitched him up, trying not to laugh as my baby girl covered her eyes for the “yucky” part. In no time flat, her beloved animal friend was good as new, and Anna trotted off to play with Janelle. I was sure she’d be much happier playing with my daughter than with putting up with my shit. For my part, I didn’t feel any better than before the almost-crisis. In fact, I felt a hell of a lot worse. My daughter’s meltdown reminded me of one glaring thing on my to-do list I had yet to check off.

  Summer had just started, which meant my daughter didn’t have to go to school for the next few months. Back when my wife was still around, Anna would have spent the months of freedom gleefully getting up to mischief with her mom, and on the evenings I had time to be with them, they’d fill me in on the details of all their fooling around. But now? Now there was no Mom to play with. There was only me, and I couldn’t give up all my patients to stay home with Anna, as much fun as it would be. What I needed was a nanny, and I needed one fast. The world wasn’t going to stop in its tracks for me and my daughter, whether her mother had died or not.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jessica

  “Hear ye, hear ye,” Abby announced, marching proudly into the living room. “The most important thing of the evening has arrived. I’ve got the wine, ladies!”

  “Hear ye, hear ye?” Katy repeated. “Jeez, Abby. What are you, like four hundred years old?”

  “What are you?” Abby retorted, a bag full of booze in one hand while her other rested easily on her hip. “Like, the biggest bitch in all the land?”

  “Someone’s cranky!” Katy said. “What’s the matter, Abbs? Another boyfriend decide not to call you back?”

  “Jesus, you really are an asshole, you know that? Like, the biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Katy said, grinning. “Now come here and let me see what kind of wine you brought.”

  “Guys!” I shouted, wondering if either of them had taken the time to see if somebody was already in the kitchen they were taking over with their never-ending noise. “Seriously, do you have to be so loud? Some of us are trying to work, okay?”

  “Trying to work, huh?” Katy asked me brightly, the tone of her voice such that I already knew what she was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “Does that mean you found a job? I had no idea. Looks like it was perfect timing for the wine, then.”

  “No, actually, I didn’t. I did not find a job, and I seriously doubt that I ever will if you two insist on wandering through the house, making all kinds of noise, without checking to see if people are trying to concentrate!”

  My outburst was met by complete silence, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Out of the three of us, me and my two roommates, I was typically the calmest. The one who was least likely to randomly flip her shit over trivial things. I figured in a house full of chicks, it was important that at least one of us didn’t get her feathers ruffled easily.

  Katy was older than me by a couple of years, twenty-five to my twenty-two, but she was also quick to get pissed off when it came to Abby, our twenty-one-year-old roommate who hadn’t yet gotten old enough or broke enough to stop being a bit stuck up. The two of them were annoyingly quick to bicker, and seeing as I was naturally a laid-back kind of a girl, it made sense to me that I would be the one to take on the role of peacemaker. It had been easy to keep things cool between the three of us, right up until I finally graduated from college. Actually, it had been easy until a couple of months after I graduated, when the glow of my accomplishments began to wear off and the realization that I still didn’t have any kind of a reliable job set in earnestly.

  Once that happened, keeping my cool became a whole lot harder, and everything Abby and Katy did suddenly annoyed me at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t really their fault, which made me feel super bad on the rare occasions when I could take enough time to think about it. The only one who had changed in this situation was me, and it wasn’t a change that was particularly easy on them.

  “Whoa, there,” Katy said slowly, putting both hands up in a “don’t shoot” kind of a gesture. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get in your way, Jessica. You’re right; we should make sure you aren’t trying to work before we just barge into a place, making a bunch of noise.”

  “Or she could just work in her room like normal people,” Abby grumbled to herself, picking at invisible lint on her shirt with an expression full of serious discomfort. “That would be another option.”

  “Are you for real right now?” Katy cried in exasperation, looking at Abby like she was the pettiest person ever to live. “Maybe you should, I don’t know, try and cut her a little slack or something.”

  “No,” I interjected, rubbing my eyes vigorously and trying to stave off what was already promising to be a wicked headache. “No, she’s right, actually. It’s totally unfair for me to lose it at you guys over something like that. I have my own space, and it’s not like you just barged into my room, making a bunch of noise.”

  “See?” Abby answered sulkily, taking one of the bottles of wine out of its bag and opening it up as she did so. “I’m right. She has a bedroom, right? And it’s the master, too, so there’s plenty of room in there for her to freak out.”

  “She’s not freaking out,” Katy said immediately, coming to my defense as she almost always did while simultaneously pulling three wine glasses out from one of the cupboards. “She’s just stressed. Right, Jess? That’s all it is, right?”

  “No, actually, Abby’s got it on this one. I’m most definitely freaking out. I’ve got to find a job, you guys! It’s been like, almost four months since I graduated, and there hasn’t been so much as the hint of a prospect, never mind an actual offer. I’m starting to get really nervous.”

  Abby and Katy exchanged looks at that, quick looks that broke off just as quickly. Abby poured generous glasses of wine, and Katy pulled some snacks out of the pantry. I didn’t know with absolute certainty what that look meant, but I could venture a few guesses. The first thing that came to mind was what I’d studied in college.

  My parents fought me on my choice to double major in art history and French. We argued about it so much it resulted in a year-long standoff, during which I hardly spoke to either one of them, and I didn’t go home for a single family holiday.

  They warned me that my degrees wouldn’t get me anywhere in the real world. They insisted art history and French were impractical. I scoffed, waving a lofty hand in the air and telling them they knew nothing about the way things worked in “modern” times. Much to my dismay after graduating, I found out my parents knew a whole lot more than I’d given them credit for.

  I was extremely qualified for certain jobs. Working in an art gallery immediately came to mind. But no one had openings for those types of jobs. Like, at all. Or if they did, they weren’t anywhere close to my San Diego home with Katy and Abby, and despite my parents’ increasingly overbearing suggestions, I had no plans on moving back in with them. San Diego was my home now, and moving away would be the same as conceding defeat.

  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 next 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.