2. Gus
Gus
The first batch of pancakes is burning, and nobody in this kitchen is surprised.
“They’re burnt,” Teddy reports from the counter, where he has been narrating my cooking since he woke up.
“They’re always burnt. Scrape the black part off and tell your sister that’s how they come.”
He considers this the way he considers everything, with full emotion on his face. “Margot says you burn them because you don’t flip at the right time.”
“Margot’s right, and also she can flip the next batch.”
Margot does not look up from her book. She’s at the table with her cereal — she stopped eating my pancakes about a year ago, quietly, the way she does everything now.
The book is the fourth one about a girl detective.
Nora read her the first one. I ask if she slept okay.
She says fine. That’s the whole conversation, and it’s longer than yesterday’s.
Teddy fills the silence for both of them.
The game he’s inventing this week is called Floor Danger, and the rules change depending on which parts of the kitchen he currently wants to jump off.
The game used to be Margot’s. She invented the first version when she was six and refereed it with a whistle Nora regretted buying.
Teddy doesn’t remember that. I remember it for everybody.
I made too much batter again. The extra pancakes go into a container, and the container goes into the fridge with the other containers. On Sunday I’ll throw them out and wash everything and put the empties back in the cabinet.
The agency is sending a fourth candidate at ten.
Three have come and gone already — one quit by text, and the other two I turned down after a single afternoon each.
The last one crouched to Teddy’s level and used a voice I’m certain she practiced in the car.
Margot looked at me across the room with an expression I’ve been trying to forget ever since.
It said, this is what we get now. It said, don’t you dare.
I came down the stairs one at a time this morning.
Twenty-one seasons of hockey live in my right knee, and I feel every one of them around dawn.
Six weeks until the season starts, which is when my job wakes up.
I’m a part-owner of the Cascades now, which mostly means I shake hands where they point me and give the same eight answers at charity dinners.
It’s not hard work. It just requires me to be somewhere that isn’t here, smiling, more days than this house can currently afford.
I tried running it alone last spring, and the wheels stayed on longer than anyone expected, which is not the same as staying on.
There was a Thursday in May when a sponsor lunch ran long.
Teddy stood outside swim lessons for forty minutes with his towel around his shoulders, telling the front-desk girl his dad was extremely famous and extremely late.
He wasn’t upset. That was the worst part. He’d already built it into his day.
Nora’s mother takes the kids on Thursdays. She would take them every day if I asked. There’s a reason I don’t ask.
Eventually the kids are fed, the griddle is soaking, and I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with a towel in my hand, not using it.
The doorbell rings at ten exactly, and Teddy beats me to the hall by half a house. He’s already opened the door by the time I get there — we’ve talked about that — and he’s looking up at a woman in flat shoes with her hair pulled back.
“Are you the new one?” he asks.
“I’m the interview,” she says. “The job comes later, if I don’t blow it.”
“June Ashby,” she tells me over his head, and shakes my hand like it’s a normal hand.
The agency makes candidates sign nine pages before they learn my name.
I hate that. Mitch insists on it — Mitch runs the Cascades, has known me since we were rookies together, and guards my privacy harder than I do.
So she’s had my name for two days at most. Here is the strange thing, the thing I notice inside the first minute: the name isn’t doing anything to her.
There’s a case in the front hall. Nora set it up — the ring, one of the replica Cups, a framed photo from the parade — because she said pretending it didn’t exist would be worse.
Everyone who comes through this door stops at it.
The plumber stopped at it. The last candidate gave it a full minute and then told me where she’d been during Game 6.
June walks past it like it’s a coat closet.
I do interviews in the kitchen, because the living room makes people sit up too straight and start performing. She takes the chair I offer, and Teddy takes the one next to her, uninvited, holding the notebook he keeps for serious matters.
“I have questions,” he says.
“Teddy—”
“He should ask them,” June says. “He lives here.”
So my five-year-old conducts the first round.
Can she make macaroni the orange way and also the white way?
Can she swim, and how far? Is she afraid of spiders?
If not, will she remove them, and does she remove them alive?
She answers each one exactly as seriously as it was asked.
Nobody has ever taken the spider question that seriously. He fills half a page.
Margot comes down in the middle of it, because she will not be introduced — she arrives.
She shakes June’s hand, says it’s nice to meet her, takes an apple, and goes back upstairs.
Perfectly polite. Three years ago that girl narrated her entire day to anyone standing still.
There’s no way to explain to a stranger that the apple was Margot being warm, so I don’t try.
June watches her go and doesn’t say anything about it.
That’s the first thing she does that the others didn’t.
The second thing: she doesn’t tell me Margot will come around.
Everybody tells me Margot will come around.
People say it to end the subject, the way you’d put a lid on a pot.
June just moves to her next question and leaves the subject open on the table between us, which is where it actually lives.
Then it’s her turn. She asks questions for twenty minutes, and none of them are about me.
Allergies. Bedtimes, actual versus official.
When school starts, who does the run, what happens when I travel.
Who has keys, which grandmother, which doctor, what Teddy eats when he says he isn’t hungry, and which cabinet the cups live in.
She has a pen and she uses it. Somewhere in there Teddy, reaching across the table to show her the notebook, puts his elbow through his orange juice.
I’m up before it spreads, but she’s closer.
She moves the notebook first — his, not hers — then catches the juice at the table’s edge with the cloth that was hanging on the oven door.
She does it the way you’d brush crumbs, still asking me about swim lessons, and she doesn’t look at me to see how it landed.
The last candidate would have made it a moment.
June makes it not one. Teddy, who was braced to be embarrassed, decides instead to finish his question about spiders.
Then, because he is five and his mind runs on rails nobody else can see, he says, “Our mom died. Two kids at school thought it was a shark, but it was cancer.”
I go still. The towel is somewhere behind me, so I hold the edge of the table. This is the moment the second candidate reached for Teddy’s arm and made her face into a greeting card. Margot walked out of the room that day and didn’t come back down till dinner.
June doesn’t reach for anybody. “I know,” she says. “Deanna told me. I’m sorry it happened.”
“Me too,” Teddy says, and turns the page of his notebook. “Do you know how to make pancakes that aren’t burnt?”
“Hey,” I say.
“It’s a fair question,” June says. Teddy cackles, and for a moment the kitchen sounds the way it used to sound. I look at the window for a second before I trust my voice.
“Why nanny?” I ask her, when the juice is handled and the notebook is closed. “The agency said you did marketing.”
There’s a half-second where she answers me honestly with her face, before any words happen.
“The company folded Tuesday,” she says. “They walked us out with boxes at two in the afternoon. And houses have always made more sense to me than offices did. In a house, you can tell whether you’re doing a good job. ”
“You can,” I say. “Everybody in a house is a critic.”
She laughs once, quick, like she hadn’t planned to. It’s a good laugh. I notice it, and I leave it alone.
“You know what I do?” I ask. “What I did?”
“You played hockey.” She says it the way you’d say a man used to sell insurance. “Deanna says you’re in some hall of fame.”
Some hall of fame. Twenty-one years, two Cups, a plaque with my face on it, and this is the best sentence anyone has said to me all year.
I have spent three years in rooms where everybody knows exactly what I am and adjusts themselves around it, the voices going bright, the hands finding my shoulder.
This woman is in my kitchen asking which cabinet the cups live in, so she doesn’t have to open six of them in front of a hungry kid.
“You signed nine pages about me,” I say. “I’ve read about two paragraphs about you. That seems like a bad trade for you.”
“Deanna’s paragraphs are accurate.” She squares her pen against the edge of her notes. “Four families, five years, references who’ll answer on the first ring. The marketing detour didn’t take. That’s the whole story.”
It isn’t, and I know it isn’t, because nobody’s whole story is two paragraphs. But I’ve spent three years giving rooms the two-paragraph version of myself. I’m in no position to complain.
I run my thumb across the scar on my knuckle. Old habit. “It’s been a hard three years in this house,” I say. “Margot got the worst of it. Whoever takes this job gets the hard parts too, and some of them don’t announce themselves.”