The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month

Ellie told me on a Tuesday in the middle of September, sitting on the tall stool at my kitchen counter with a sleeve of saltines and a cup of apple juice she had poured herself, spilling only a little.

“Derrick eats breakfast with us on Saturdays,” she said.

I was typing up a hail claim on a machine shed out by Durand. I stopped with my fingers on the keys. “Who’s Derrick, bug?”

“Mommy’s friend.” She bit a cracker in half and looked at the half like it had done something interesting. “He gets the pancakes with the smiley face. The whipped cream is the mouth.”

“At the café downtown?”

“Uh huh. Just us girls, and Derrick.” She swung her feet against the stool rungs. “He’s nice. He cut my pancake in squares, not triangles. Mommy cuts triangles.”

I had known about the Saturday breakfasts for about a year. Whitney called them just us girls, and I thought it was the sweetest thing in the world, a mother and daughter with a booth and a pot of syrup.

I hadn’t known about Derrick. That was fine. My sister was thirty-four years old, and she didn’t owe me a report on who sat in her booth. I went back to the shed.

Then Ellie said the other thing.

“He asked who picks me up from school. Mommy said Uncle Adam.” She said it proudly, like it was a test she had passed. “She said you’re just the babysitter.”

She said it the way kids say the sky is up. There was no meanness in it at all. She was reporting the facts of her world, and in her world I had just been given a job title.

I said, “Is that right,” and my voice came out normal, which surprised me.

“Uh huh. Can I have a cheese stick?”

I got her a cheese stick. I peeled the wrapper halfway down the way she liked it, so her fingers didn’t get greasy, and I handed it to her, and I went and stood at the sink and looked out at the backyard for a while.

Five Years

I should tell you how we got there, because it matters.

Five years ago this past spring, my sister called me from the maternity floor at the hospital in Eau Claire. It was ten at night. Ellie was two days old.

“Kyle’s not coming back,” she said. She was trying very hard not to cry, and losing. “He says he can’t do this. He put my stuff out on his porch, Adam. The nurse says they discharge us tomorrow at noon.”

Kyle was Ellie’s father. He and Whitney had been living together in a rented duplex on the edge of Menomonie for about two years. I had met him four times. He was not a monster. He was twenty-nine and scared, and he picked the coward’s door.

I drove over that night. It was a little over an hour from my place. I sat with her until the nurse kicked me out at midnight, and I came back the next morning with the car seat I had bought at Walmart on the way.

I didn’t have a plan. I had a three-bedroom ranch house on a half acre at the edge of town, a house I had bought when I was thirty, and two of those bedrooms had nothing in them but a treadmill and a box of Christmas lights.