by Andrew Hart
“Well?” Mary Beth demanded.
“Well, what?” asked Anna.
“What’s she like?” said Mary Beth, as if Anna was being stupid on purpose.
“Really nice,” said Anna.
“Nice?” said Mary Beth, making a face. “I hate her already.”
“Capable, professional . . . ,” Anna began.
“Great with the kids,” said Josh.
“Oh, so long as she’s great with the kids,” said Mary Beth, rolling her eyes but managing a playful smirk at Josh at the end. Josh smiled, meeting her eyes so frankly that when Anna glanced at him, he looked caught out and turned quickly away.
“She was a rock when we had to go to the ER,” Anna said with just a hint of defiance.
“That’s right,” said Josh loyally, rallying, and drawing another amused eye roll from Mary Beth.
“When did you go to the ER?” asked Tammy.
“Couple of days ago,” said Anna. “Grace spiked a fever and was throwing up . . .”
“But she’s living in your house,” Mary Beth inserted. “Isn’t that weird?”
“We have a babysitter all the time,” said Tammy. “You get used to it.”
Mary Beth shot Tammy’s husband a knowing look but managed not to say that some people got more used to it than others. Tommy was gazing stupidly around the house, as if he was appraising for resale, and didn’t seem to notice.
It was a nice enough house, older than the others on the street and less ostentatious, but it had been remodeled before the Kleins moved in, and it still had something clunkily eighties about it. Four years on and some of the rooms still had their gaudy brass light fixtures, and the upstairs bathroom looked like something out of Pretty in Pink. Anna and Josh had put more work into the kids’ rooms than their own, and according to Tammy, they had really gone to town with the nanny’s quarters, even installing a gorgeous new shower studded with metallic glass tile. You could almost forget that the nanny was actually being paid.
“Oh my God!” Mary Beth exclaimed in mock horror. “You have a cat!”
The brownish thing was skulking around the baseboards by the fridge. Then—as if sensing everyone turning to stare at it—it slunk away, its body low to the stone slab floor.
“What the hell?” Mary Beth persisted. “A cat?”
“It’s Oaklynn’s,” said Josh noncommittally. “Bit of a surprise, to be honest, but he’s OK.”
“She brought a cat without telling you?” Mary Beth said, her jaw dropping and eyes widening as if the nanny had brought an elephant. “Oh, I don’t think so! Why didn’t you tell her to get it out of your house?”
“Well, the girls like it,” said Anna, her head on one side as if that was a real point in the creature’s favor.
“Of course the girls like it,” said Mary Beth, pausing in her outrage long enough to sip her wine. “They’re kids. They’re practically animals themselves. And they sure as hell aren’t paying for the furniture the beast shreds and pees on.”
“It’s fine,” said Anna. She looked embarrassed, though whether that was because she felt she’d been exposed as weak or because she was afraid the nanny might overhear, Mary Beth couldn’t say.
“Wouldn’t be fine in my house,” Mary Beth said, shooting Kurt a warning look in case he had been secretly planning to bring home a cat himself.
“I’m allergic,” said Tammy.
Of course she was.
In fact, Mary Beth thought, Tammy looked as if her husband had brought home several cats, and she’d eaten them. Still, better than the other kinds of pussy Tommy was chasing. She snorted at the joke, even though she hadn’t actually said it, and drank some more, privately storing the line away to share with Anna later. Or Josh. She liked amusing Josh, especially if it was with something that might make him blush. He was cute when he blushed.
The guys had already spun off into their own group. They were still in the same room and were only a couple of feet from the women, but they had turned in on themselves, and Kurt was pontificating about the Panthers’ weakness at the goddamned wide-receiver position. He’d probably pulled that line from ESPN the night before. It was all he watched on TV. Josh was nodding along, sage but bored, while Tommy watched Anna moving around the kitchen, pretending to listen to what she was saying while he was actually checking out her ass.
He was such a lowlife. Kind of cute in an annoying man-child kind of way, but definitely a total skeeze. It was hard to believe his wife couldn’t tell just by looking at him: the tight jeans, the shiny shirt with one too many buttons undone, the nonchalant flip of his moussed black hair, and the constant smirk that almost covered the vacancy in his eyes. Almost. He looked like a man pretending to have a personality. Kurt, himself not the brightest bulb in the light fitting, called him Midnight Cowboy, after the Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight movie. Mary Beth thought that was funny, though she hadn’t actually seen the film.
There were olives in bowls, a decent (store-bought) spinach-and-artichoke dip, and bruschetta hot from the oven, which was a good sign. Mary Beth had been worried that Anna would go full-on Asian for the dinner: bits of fucking tofu and some Chinky bean-sprout shit or something, but this looked better. Already on her second glass of wine, she decided she was going to have a good time, something that might have worried Kurt if he’d known. She hadn’t had a proper blowout for a long time, and when Mary Beth really partied, people got crushed in the wreckage. Or they used to, back in the day. She smiled secretly at the memory, laughed loudly at something Anna had just said, and topped off her glass. Maybe this nanny malarkey was a good thing, after all: weird as all hell, of course, but if it gave Anna more free time and made her fun again, she’d take it. Because Anna had been fun, briefly, before she had popped out the first kid. She’d been pregnant and increasingly anxious about that, sure, but she had also been smart and funny and so New York, and it was like the wind of a real city had blown in with her . . .
For a little while. Before the rug rats. Before the nanny.
Speak of the devil. The nanny—Oaklynn, and what the hell kind of name was that?—had just reappeared. She was smiling and nodding but looked out of her element and—the word was unavoidable—bashful. Mary Beth introduced herself, watching the woman’s response shrewdly, and pressed a glass on her, though she insisted on filling it with cranberry juice.
“You need a splash of vodka in there,” Mary Beth confided, and the nanny giggled, her hand coming up to her mouth like a Catholic schoolgirl hearing a dirty joke.
Christ.
“I hear you made the main course,” said Mary Beth, throwing her a bone.
Another smiling nod, as if to actually say the words would be outrageously prideful, then said, “Tuscan chicken. I sure hope y’all like it.”
“Oh my God,” said Mary Beth, “where did they find you?”
Anna swooped in then, pretending it was a real question, and started talking about the rigorous selection process used by the company—Nature or Nurture, Mary Beth didn’t catch which. She also didn’t care, but she saw the way Anna slipped a protective arm around Oaklynn’s broad waist and felt a prickle of annoyance. Anna was playing straight man, or doing damage control. Something. She clearly didn’t want Mary Beth’s brand of humor—brassy as the upstairs bathroom—souring her relationship with her precious nanny.
Dinner, Mary Beth had to admit, was pretty damn good. She said as much, and Oaklynn colored as if she’d just been given very specific directions for some illegal sex act. There was a place at the table set for Oaklynn, but she contrived never to sit in it for more than a few minutes at a time, spending most of her time checking on the kids and bringing out food. It was bizarre, as if she felt more comfortable with the holy innocents upstairs with their stuffed animals and crayons than she did with the grown-ups. At first, since Oaklynn clearly had nothing to say, Mary Beth assumed she was just embarrassed, out of her element, and a bit intimidated by the adult company, but after a while, she started to wond
er if the nanny’s attitude was actually an embarrassment for them, that her constant leaving the table was a judgment verging on distaste. They weren’t just too sophisticated for her down-home, wide-ass nanny self; they were morally repugnant.
Mary Beth didn’t care. Why should she? But the idea annoyed her nonetheless, and as she poured herself another glass of wine, she eyed Oaklynn, who was chewing in bovine vacancy, and slopped some of it on the table.
“Easy there, Mary Beth,” said Kurt, leaning over to blot the spill with his napkin. “Maybe you’ve had enough.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have to pour my own damn wine, Kurt,” she snapped back.
“More chicken?” suggested Oaklynn sweetly.
Mary Beth shot her a look, then bit her tongue and shook her head minutely.
“More wine, I think,” she said, turning her gaze on Kurt and holding it like an outstretched spear. Kurt shrugged with little more than his eyebrows, his eyes half closing, then finding Josh and rolling in a “You know how it is” kind of way. Except that Josh didn’t know how it was. Not really. Because while Anna had her idiosyncrasies and had lately become a bit of a prissy stick in the proverbial mud, she was never the kind of pain in the ass that Mary Beth had perfected, the sort that made people keep track of just how much booze she was downing and shrink away in case they got hit by the shrapnel when she finally blew. Some people might have been embarrassed by such wariness around her, but Mary Beth—who was used to it—took a certain perverse pride in being the loose cannon, the rabble-rouser. Hell, at least she was honest. And then, as if deking one of Kurt’s favorite cornerbacks, she smiled amiably at Oaklynn and said, “You really are a chef. This is delicious. Anna and Josh are lucky to have you.”
Oaklynn looked momentarily stunned, then anxious, as she hunted for an irony that wasn’t obviously there, and the room pushed through its puzzlement and, eventually, relaxed. When Mary Beth caught Josh’s eye, she shot him a wink. It was satisfyingly like flicking a bobblehead toy that had finally come to rest. She caught Anna watching and gave her a smile as sweet as a bucket of southern iced tea. Anna returned it, but only after a momentary hesitation.
“You guys have a good time on Tuesday?” asked Tommy. From anyone else, the question would have been a deliberate shift of direction to steer away from the previous awkwardness, but Tommy Ward was so reliably clueless about what was going on around him that you couldn’t be sure.
Josh gave him a puzzled look.
“Tuesday?” he said.
“That golf thing at Quail Hollow,” Tommy said.
Josh started to shake his head, still baffled, but Kurt cut in.
“Tuesday, right, Josh?” he nudged. “Yeah, it was a good time. Kind of cold for the full eighteen holes, but yeah. A good time and drinks after. Sorry you missed it.”
Mary Beth’s gaze hardened, flicking from Josh to Kurt and back.
“Right!” said Josh. “I was . . . I thought you meant last Tuesday.”
It was a lie. Mary Beth would have spotted it at a thousand yards. Josh Klein was lying, and so was Kurt, but for whose benefit? Tommy’s? And if they were, what were they trying to hide? She watched her husband, the more accomplished storyteller of the two, ease into talk of fairways and wind speeds while Josh sat staring at him, his smile fixed and, she thought, anxious. All of Mary Beth’s previous alcoholic fuzziness burned off in an instant, and she became still and focused. Kurt kept his attention on Tommy, avoiding her eyes, and Josh sat silent beside him, nodding along as if the conversation were the most gripping thing he had ever heard. She could almost smell his panic.
It couldn’t be about Tommy Ward. Not really. So who was being lied to? Her? Mary Beth watched her husband, the way he refused to look at her, and she was almost sure. Kurt was lying, and Josh was covering for him, and while it was Tommy who had triggered the whole performance, he was no more than an innocent bystander. So what had her husband been up to on Tuesday that might involve Josh and that they didn’t want her to know about?
Mary Beth glanced around the room to see who else had noticed this little sideshow, but Anna was talking to Tammy about choosing kindergartens for the rug rats, and both seemed oblivious. Oaklynn was part of that conversation, too, albeit passively, but Mary Beth could have sworn she had seen the nanny watching the men for a second. There had been something in her eyes quite different from anything she had seen in her before, something thoughtful that was almost . . .
Calculation.
And that, Mary Beth thought, was very interesting indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
ANNA
The party went well, I thought. Mary Beth got a little salty early on—always a danger—but seemed to settle down over dinner. Part of what makes her fun, of course, is her sharpness. Her self-consciously slightly wicked persona that makes her both flirty and playfully cruel can be difficult to navigate, but it’s not really who she is. She’s quite sweet, really. Sometimes I wish she wasn’t quite so attentive to Josh, but she doesn’t mean anything by it. Not really.
And Josh? What does he mean when she shoots him one of those half-mocking sexy pouts of hers, and he looks at her for just a half second too long . . . ?
Nothing. He doesn’t mean anything by it. They are just friends.
Almost certainly.
I shook the thoughts away, determined not to lapse into new paranoias.
I had spent a lot of the evening chatting to Tammy, which meant that I had to do most of the heavy lifting, but things livened up once we had adjourned to the living room again. By then, the kids were asleep, and Oaklynn had said her good nights and moved downstairs, instantly becoming the main topic of conversation again. I had been steeling myself to have to defend why we had her but found I didn’t really need to. Mary Beth was enjoying a certain sense of superiority. The guys barely seemed to have noticed her, except that she had cooked—and everyone had nothing but praise for her food—and Tammy was, I think, frankly jealous. I felt a little bad for her, to be honest, because she saw how useful Oaklynn was, how easily she had already fit in, and how careful she was not to get in the way of the family. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Tammy also liked the fact that Oaklynn’s looks weren’t going to make her a target for the guys. However much Mary Beth said Tammy was clueless about her husband’s roving eye—other body parts, too, she thought, but I didn’t know that for sure—I had my doubts. She seemed sad. Not despairing or weepy, just slightly broken. Worn down, perhaps. She only became slightly animated when she was talking about her kids or—and this was harder for me to fathom—her terrier, Angus. Whatever was going on between Tommy and the leggy babysitter, Tammy knew, and I doubted she was watching it happen for the first time.
Oaklynn had managed to do most of the dishes before she vanished into her basement apartment, so there was no real work to do when everyone left a little after midnight. I was tempted to have a whiskey and sit awhile, but Josh was quieter than usual and said he wanted to go to bed.
“What was that business about playing golf on Tuesday?” I asked.
He looked momentarily startled, then shrugged, crumpling as he breathed out.
“Tommy had asked Kurt to do something with him, and Kurt didn’t want to,” Josh said. “Used me as an excuse.”
He sounded annoyed—bitter even—which was unlike him.
“What was he really doing?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Josh.
“You think he’s having an affair?”
I’m not sure why the idea came to me. All that speculation about Tommy, probably.
Josh shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “He said he wanted to get Mary Beth a surprise birthday present. Maybe it was about that.”
“Why would he lie about that to Tommy?”
Another shrug, and now the irritation with Kurt was spreading toward me like spilled oil.
“Who knows? Kurt and Tommy have a weird relationship. Very macho. Competitive.�
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“I don’t see why that—”
“I don’t either, Anna,” said Josh crisply.
I gave him a look.
“Sorry,” he added. “I’m just tired. Can we . . . ?”
He nodded toward the bed.
“Sure,” I said. “Was the party a bad idea? I thought you wanted . . . ?”
“I did. I’m just . . . beat. Work.”
“Anything particular?” I asked. As I had noted before, he seemed more than tired. He seemed troubled, tense. “Something you want to talk about?”
“No,” he said. “Thanks. It’s just the usual shit. It’s no wonder people burn out on this job.”
“I guess that’s why you make the big bucks,” I said, smiling and giving him an affectionate peck on the cheek.
“I guess,” he said, not looking at me.
Instantly, all the well-being the party had given me seemed to siphon off, and unbidden, that image of Mary Beth winking discreetly at my husband across the table floated up in my head. I tried again.
“Is there something we need to discuss, Josh?” I said.
“No,” he said. He seemed to think about it for a moment, then just shook his head wearily and said again, “No.”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted, but I let it go because while he had said, “No,” what it felt like was “Not yet.”
My stomach flexed and knotted, but I just nodded and left him alone, wondering vaguely how the success of the evening could have so quickly soured. Nothing had happened. Nothing had been said. Was I missing something that was obvious to everyone else?
I stayed up for another hour, finishing tidying up, looking for jobs that would keep me from going to bed, then poured myself the Scotch I had denied myself earlier. I even considered getting the laptop out and doing some work, but I’d had a couple of glasses of wine as well as the whiskey, so that wasn’t feasible. When I did finally go upstairs, I hesitated at the bedroom door, something I don’t think I had ever done before, listening to the sound of Josh snoring softly. Though I had wanted to talk, I found I was relieved to hear it, and got ready for bed as quietly as I could so as not to wake him.