5. June
June
Dinner is Teddy explaining the rules of wall-ball as they were explained to him, wrongly, by a first-grader named Wyatt.
“—and if it hits your head, that’s a headshot, and you’re out forever. Not just the game. The whole recess.”
“That’s not how wall-ball works,” Margot says to her plate.
“It is at my school.”
“I went to your school.”
“Wyatt says the rules changed.”
“Wyatt,” says Margot, “is not in charge of wall-ball.” Teddy looks so betrayed that Gus has to turn a laugh into a cough, and I get up for the water pitcher so nobody sees my face.
This is dinner now. A month ago I ate standing at a counter in Greenwood.
Now there’s a five-year-old pointing his fork at me because he wants my opinion on recess rules.
“June. Is Wyatt in charge of wall-ball?”
“Nobody’s in charge of wall-ball,” I say. “That’s the whole point of wall-ball.”
He accepts this. Margot doesn’t argue with it, which from her is a lot. She finishes, asks to be excused, and takes her book upstairs. Gus catches my eye over Teddy’s head and grins like we’ve gotten away with something.
That’s the moment I’d point to, if anyone ever asked when I should have seen the whole thing coming.
Gus waits until the kids have left the table to bring up the real question.
“The Foundation dinner’s in two weeks,” he says, stacking plates.
“It’s the big one — Nora’s foundation, the whole organization comes.
The kids make an appearance at the start.
They shake some hands, Teddy charms a table, and somebody takes them home before the speeches.
” He sets the stack down. “That somebody has been three different people in three years. I’d like it to be you, if you’re willing.
It’s a work night, you’d be paid for it, and I know Saturdays are already—”
“I can do it.”
“You can say no. It’s a lot of people and a lot of noise.”
“It’s a work night,” I say. “What do the kids wear?”
He smiles like I’ve solved something bigger than an outfit question. “Nora used to handle that. Last year Carol did, and Margot came home in something with a bow, and we don’t talk about it.”
“No bows. Got it.”
“Fair warning — Carol will have opinions about the dress.”
“Carol can have opinions. Margot gets the final say on her own dress.”
He looks at me for a second. “That conversation’s going to be something.”
“I’ve had harder ones with landlords.”
“Margot will want your opinion. Also — the week after the dinner, the season starts. I’ll be on the road more. A few days at a time, sometimes longer.”
“We’ll be fine here. I’ll leave you reports on the fridge.”
“all fine, margot ate seconds,” he says, quoting, and I have to straighten the salt and pepper. He noticed the note. Worse, he memorized it.
“That was a good report,” I say.
“It was the best thing I read all month,” he says, and then, easily, like it’s nothing, like it’s a thing you can just say to a person, “She does better when you’re there, you know. They both do. Honestly, the whole house does.”
Then he carries the plates to the sink, because to him it was nothing. A nice thing a decent man says to an employee.
I wipe the table, which I already wiped.
Before Teddy’s bath, I knock on Margot’s doorframe with the dinner news. She marks her page with one finger and listens: fancy party, two weeks, new dress.
“Grandma picks the dress,” she says, flatly, the way you report a known problem.
“Not this year. This year you pick. If Grandma doesn’t like it, she can talk to me about it.”
A long look. “Anything I pick?”
“Anything within reason.”
“I’ll make a list,” she says, and goes back to her book. It’s the first thing she’s asked me for since I got here. I go run Teddy’s bath and don’t make it a thing.
Upstairs, my room is the same as I left it.
Bed made, window cracked, suitcase open on the closet floor with half my clothes still living in it.
Three and a half weeks and I never finished unpacking.
The dresser Gus bought for this room has six drawers, and I’m using two of them, because two is easy to empty in a hurry.
She does better when you’re there. The whole house does.
That’s what he said, and an hour later it’s still with me, and this is the problem.
Not him. Not the job. The job is the best one I’ve ever had.
The problem is that tonight, at that table, listening to Teddy explain his day with his fork in the air, I was happy.
Off-guard happy. At-home happy. In a house where every person likes me because they don’t know who they hired.
Margot asks me for nothing and I know how to do that. Teddy asks me for everything and I know how to do that too. But their father thanked me tonight with his whole face, over a stack of dirty plates, and I had to leave the room. He has no idea who he’s thanking.
Because here is what I know at that table, every night, and have known for three weeks: their father was FOURTEEN.
The scar on the hand that pours my coffee is the scar from the photo.
For over a year, that kind, careful man paid a monthly subscription to talk to me — to JUNO — about sleep and dinner and nothing at all.
Now she passes him the salt, and he doesn’t know.
I carry that through every breakfast in this house. It is not getting lighter.
I skip the tea I usually make and go down late instead, when the kitchen is dark and everyone’s asleep. Rice, a fried egg on top, soy sauce. I eat it standing at the counter without turning on the big light. The ice maker grinds, drops nothing, and grinds again.
“Not now, Brenda,” I tell the ice maker, quietly.
Bex texts while I’m rinsing the pan: how’s the palace. did the widower do anything hot today. I look at it a while and don’t answer, which I’ve never once done to Bex. I put the phone in my pocket. Then I take it back out and open a message to Deanna instead.
Deanna, it’s June. I don’t think the placement works long-term. I can stay until you find someone — I won’t leave them short. Nothing happened. Everyone’s been great. It’s me.
I read it four times. It’s a good text. Professional, clean, gives notice, protects the family. Deanna would call in the morning and be kind about it. In a month there’d be a new person driving Margot to school, learning where the cups are.
My thumb is over the send arrow when small feet cross the upstairs hall.
By the time I get up there, Teddy is standing outside my door with his hair stuck up on one side, holding the stuffed triceratops by a horn.
“I had a dream,” he says.
“Okay.” I put the phone in my pocket, screen down against my leg. “Bad one?”
He nods. He isn’t crying, which is worse — he’s got the wide-awake, careful look of a kid holding something too big to put down. I don’t ask what it was. I’ve learned that with Teddy you don’t ask — you just make it easy to tell.
“Come on. Back to your room. I’ll sit.”
His room is dinosaur-dark, night-light in the corner. He gets under the covers and arranges the triceratops and doesn’t lie down.
“In my dream Mom was calling me,” he says. “But there wasn’t any sound. Her mouth was going and no sound came out.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “That’s a scary one.”
“I tried to hear her.” He picks at the horn. “June. I don’t know what her voice sounds like anymore. I tried and I can’t.”
There it is. Too big to put down, so he handed it to me, in the middle of the night, in a room with a plastic triceratops. I hold very still so I don’t drop it.
“You were two,” I say. “Almost three. Nobody keeps sounds from being two. That’s not you forgetting her. That’s just how being two works.”
“Margot remembers her voice.”
“Margot was six when it happened. Six-year-olds get to remember more. That’s the only difference.
” I straighten the blanket over his legs, just to be doing something.
“You know what I bet? I bet there are videos. Your mom, talking, singing you something, telling your dad to stop filming. We can ask him tomorrow.”
He thinks about it. “What if I hear it and I still don’t remember?”
“Then you’ll know it anyway. Knowing works fine. Half of what I know about my mom comes from pictures and other people. I love her the same.”
“Is your mom dead too?”
“Yes.”
“Did you forget her voice?”
“No,” I say, because I don’t lie to kids about the big ones. “But I was grown up when she died. It’s different. You got the harder job, bud.”
He nods, like that’s fair. Like somebody finally admitted it. He lies down. I stay on the edge of the bed with my hand on his back. His breathing slows until I’m sure he’s asleep. Then he says, into the pillow:
“Are you still going to be here when I wake up?”
“Yes.”
“And the wake-up after that?”
“Yes.”
“For all the wake-ups?”
Send it, and Deanna calls in the morning. I’m gone in a month. And this exact kid learns one more time that the people in his kitchen are temporary. I came up here tonight ready to do that to him, professionally, cleanly, with two weeks’ notice.
“For a lot of them,” I say. “A really lot.”
“Okay.” He pulls the triceratops closer. Then, almost asleep, running the check he runs: “Is yours still Maiasaura?”
“Still Maiasaura.”
“That one’s good,” he mumbles, and he’s out — that fast, the way only little kids and old dogs go. I sit there in the night-light dark for a while longer, to be sure, and on my way out I leave his door open the regular amount.
When I step into the hall, the door across from the stairs is open. Gus is standing in it in a T-shirt and flannel pants, gray hair flattened on one side, obviously awake for a while.
“Everything okay?” His voice is night-low.
“Bad dream. He’s asleep again.”
“Which kind?” He clearly knows there are kinds.
“The mom kind,” I say. “He dreamed she was calling him and there wasn’t any sound.
He’s worried he’s forgotten her voice.” I could stop there.
It’s the middle of the night and his face has gone still, and stopping would be kind.
But the kid needs what he needs. “He was asking about videos. Whether there are any where she’s talking. ”
Gus is quiet long enough that I hear the refrigerator start downstairs. “There are,” he says finally. “There’s a lot of them. I haven’t—” He stops. Starts over, plainer. “I’ll find one for him.”
“He’d like that.”
“He used to come to my door with the dreams.” He says it carefully, a man picking up something to look at it. “Every time, since she died. Tonight he went to yours.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I do nothing, which around him is getting harder.
“That’s not a complaint,” he says. “That’s a thank-you. It came out wrong.”
“It came out fine. Goodnight, Gus.”
“Goodnight, June.”
I close my door and take out the phone. There it is where I left it: my professional, clean, kind resignation, still waiting on the send arrow, an hour older now and no truer.
Nothing about it is a lie, exactly. It doesn’t work long-term.
Not because of the family — because of me.
Because their father used to pay for my time, and he doesn’t know it, and I can never tell him.
Because someday it could come out anyway, and every good day here sits on top of it.
All of that is real. If I sent it right now, I could still be somebody who left early and clean.
But there’s a kid across the hall who asked me to be here for all the wake-ups. And I said a lot of them, and he took the deal, because kids take whatever deal you offer.
I delete the text. Not saved in drafts — deleted, all the way gone, the same way I deleted the account in April.
Then I answer Bex, because if I leave her on read all night she’ll be at the front door by breakfast: palace is fine. long day. full report sunday.
I’m awake anyway. So I open the closet and finish what I never started.
Sweaters into the third drawer. Jeans in the fourth.
The winter coat onto a hanger, the boots to the closet floor, the folder of my mother’s paperwork flat under the sweaters where it always lives, whichever house I’m in.
It doesn’t take long to finish moving in, once you decide to.
The suitcase goes up on the closet shelf, empty.
If anybody asks, I was just putting laundry away.