Chapter 8
LEO
“So let me get this straight,” Joe says, taking a long pull from his Camel filter and trying—failing—not to laugh. “The girl who you fuckin’ dragged outta a taxi by her ankles is about to be your new…nanny?”
He loses the battle then, his laugh erupting—a loud, unfettered bark that turns heads at neighboring booths. Maria and Allison join in, their laughter a contagion. Even I feel the traitorous twitch at the corner of my mouth because it really is just my damn luck.
We’re at The Corner Slice, which Joe insists is the best pizza place in all of Manhattan, a claim I’m not entirely convinced of but don’t argue about because the pizza is admittedly very good and more importantly, it’s close to campus.
The place is packed for a Tuesday afternoon—families crammed into red vinyl booths, college students clustered around tables covered in grease-stained paper plates, the constant din of conversation and laughter and the clatter of dishes being bused.
There’s a jukebox in the corner playing something by Alanis Morissette that I can barely hear over the noise, and the walls are covered in faded posters of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio and various other New York icons that have probably been there since the place opened in the late twenties.
The whole restaurant smells like garlic and tomato sauce and that particular yeasty bread smell that means the pizza dough is fresh.
Maria and I are sitting in one booth, Joe and Allison across from us in the other, pushed together so we can all talk.
There are three half-eaten pizzas on the table between us—one plain, one pepperoni, one with mushrooms and olives that only Maria and I are eating because apparently everyone else has terrible taste.
We’ve got sodas in classic Coca-Cola glasses, condensation pooling at the bases, and Joe’s ashtray is already a burial mound even though we’ve only been here forty-five minutes.
Emma’s spending the day with my parents at the restaurant, which means I actually have a few hours to myself for once—a rare enough occurrence that I almost didn’t know what to do with the freedom when I woke up this morning.
Allison clutches her pronounced belly, her blonde Farrah Fawcett waves shaking with laughter. “I gotta stop,” she gasps, breathless. “This baby’s using my bladder as a trampoline.”
“Wait, wait,” Maria says, and I can already tell she’s about to make this worse. “So you hired the woman who called you a dick? To your face? The one who you said called you—what was it—‘entitled’?”
“She said I was acting like an entitled dick or something like that,” I mutter. “Regarding the cab.”
“Right.” Maria’s grin widens. “And now she’ll be in your apartment. Five days a week. With your daughter. Where you live.”
Joe, Allison, and Maria all burst into another round of laughter, and I want to be annoyed but I can’t help it—I’m laughing too, because when you lay it out like that, it really is absurd.
“I’m aware,” I say, reaching for a slice of pizza. “Believe me.”
Joseph Carmichael is possibly the only person on earth who could get away with laughing at me like this without me taking genuine offense, and that’s only because we’ve been friends since my first year at Columbia when I was a terrified new assistant professor trying to figure out how academic politics worked and he was the loudmouth philosophy professor who took pity on me and explained which department heads were assholes and which ones were just eccentric.
He teaches Philosophy of Mind, which means we overlap enough professionally that we actually have interesting conversations, but not so much that there’s any professional rivalry.
Looking at Joe, you’d never guess he spends his days arguing about epistemology and consciousness.
He’s built like he should be working construction or bouncing at a club.
He’s got a boxer’s build, the kind where he looks like he could pick up a car if sufficiently motivated.
He’s got a mop of dark curly hair that never looks intentionally styled but somehow works on him, and a cleft chin that makes him look like he walked off a movie poster.
And then he opens his mouth and his Bronx accent comes out, thick enough that my students sometimes can’t understand him when he guest lectures, and you realize he’s the most New York person you’ve ever met.
He introduced me to his wife, Allison, at some university fundraiser I didn’t want to attend and I understood immediately why they worked—she’s just as loud and magnetic as he is, just as quick to laugh, just as warm in a way that makes you want to be around them even when you’re exhausted and anti-social and would rather be home reading grant proposals.
Allison’s a nurse at Mount Sinai, currently on maternity leave because she’s forty weeks pregnant with their second daughter and looks like she might go into labor at any given moment.
She’s one of those people who’s genuinely kind without it being performative.
When Rebecca left, Allison showed up at my apartment with food and didn’t ask questions.
She told me her and Joe were there whenever I needed them and then they actually followed through on that instead of it being empty platitude.
Their daughter, Lauren, and Emma are the same age—both four, both in that stage where they’re starting to understand the world but still believe in magic—and we try to get them together for playdates as often as Joe’s and my schedules allow, which isn’t nearly as often as I’d like.
Emma needs friends right now. She needs normal kid experiences with other normal kids, not just traumatized afternoons with nannies she’s trying to drive away.
Joe stubs out his cigarette and immediately lights another one, squinting at me through the smoke. “So what happened? She showed up and Emma just like, bowed down?”
“Not exactly. Emma dumped her purse out. Everything. All over the entryway floor.”
“Oh Jesus,” Allison says, wincing sympathetically. “What’d the nanny do?”
“She told Emma she was angry and that she got it, but that it was her stuff and Emma needed to help her pick it up.”
Joe’s eyebrows go up. “And?”
“And Emma did it.”
There’s a beat of silence.
“Wait, what?” Maria leans forward. “Emma actually picked up her stuff? Willingly?”
“Willingly. Well, reluctantly at first, but yeah.” I can still see it in my head, Annie crouched down on the floor, meeting Emma at eye level, not backing down but not being harsh either.
“Then Emma found her camera and they bonded over that. Annie showed her how to use it, let her take a picture. By the end Emma was asking when Annie was coming back.”
“Huh.” Joe takes a drag, processing this. “So she’s some sort of kid whisperer?”
“No.” I shake my head. “She has zero experience with kids. She told me that upfront.”
“Then what’s the secret?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t baby-talk her, didn’t try to manipulate her into behaving, didn’t freak out when Emma acted out.
She just…set a boundary and held it.” I’m not sure I’m explaining this right.
“Look, I’ve watched six different nannies try everything—bribing, distracting, ignoring, time-outs, you name it.
Nothing worked. This girl walks in, knows nothing, and somehow gets through to Emma in fifteen minutes. ”
“So you hired her,” Joe states, a slow grin spreading. “On the spot.”
“On the spot.”
“Even though she thinks you’re a caveman.”
“I don’t require her to like me. I require her to be effective with Emma.”
“Is she hot?” Joe asks, blunt as ever.
Allison swats him on the arm. “Joe! For God’s sake.”
“What? I’m just bein’ realistic! No guy hires a woman he can’t stand to be around unless there’s some…mitigating factor.” He holds up his hands, grinning unrepentantly.
I stare at him, deadpan. “Do I look like I have time for a love life?”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Maria mutters. “Maybe you need one.”
I elbow her, not hard, just enough to make my point. “My priority is Emma. That’s it. Not dating, not romance, definitely not my daughter’s nanny who thinks I’m an asshole.”
“But is she hot, though?” Joe presses, because apparently he’s not going to let this go.
I take a sip of my Coke, considering how to answer this without giving him any ammunition.
The truth is I didn’t really pay attention to what Annie looked like beyond the basics necessary to confirm she was the same person from the cab incident.
I was too busy being annoyed and then too busy watching how Emma responded to her.
Sure, I registered that she’s young—early twenties probably—and that she was wearing a black dress that was perfectly appropriate for an interview, and that her hair was straight and dark and fell past her shoulders, and fine, yes, objectively speaking she’s attractive in that general way that most young women in their twenties are attractive.
But I genuinely don’t have the mental bandwidth to care about that right now.
“I don’t pay attention to ‘who’s hot,’” I say, using air quotes around the phrase because it sounds juvenile and ridiculous.
“I think in terms of neural pathways and whether someone’s prefrontal cortex is developed enough to handle complex problem-solving.
Physical appearance is just a collection of genetic expressions and symmetry patterns that our brains have evolved to respond to for reproductive purposes.
It’s not relevant to her ability to care for my daughter. ”
There’s a beat of silence.
Then Maria starts laughing. “Oh my God, you’re such a nerd!”
“That was the most Leo answer I’ve ever heard,” Allison adds, shaking her head but smiling.
Joe just points at me with his cigarette. “That right there? That’s how I know you noticed her. You don’t go into all of your evolutionary biology shit unless you’re tryna avoid somethin’.”
“I’m not avoiding anything. I’m stating facts.”