The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month

The Boxes

There were six cardboard boxes in my basement that had been there five years.

They were the boxes from Kyle’s porch. I had picked them up myself the day after Ellie came home, while Whitney slept. Kyle didn’t come to the door. He’d left them by the steps with her name on them in black marker.

She never unpacked them. She took out what she needed that first week, a few sweaters and her hair dryer, and then she taped them back up and they went downstairs behind the furnace and stayed there.

On Wednesday night after she went to bed, I carried them up the basement stairs one at a time and loaded them in my truck. Thursday morning, after she left for work, I drove them over to Oak Street and set them in the living room by the wall.

I didn’t open them. They weren’t mine to open. I just wanted her to walk in and see that her own things had gotten there before her.

Then I went home and changed into a clean shirt, the forest green quarter-zip my mother gave me two Christmases ago, and a pair of khakis, like I was going to a showing. I don’t know why. It felt like it mattered.

At 3:35 the bus came around the corner. Ellie came down the steps with her pink jacket unzipped and her pink backpack bouncing, and both light brown pigtails half out, the way they always were by the end of the day.

“Uncle Adam! We had popcorn for science!”

“Popcorn is science,” I said. “Hop in. We’re going somewhere.”

“Where?”

“It’s a surprise for your mom. You have to help me keep it.”

She took that very seriously. She made a zipper motion across her mouth and didn’t say another word the whole four minutes to Oak Street, which was a record.

I texted Whitney from the curb. Come to 418 Oak St after work instead of home. Ellie’s with me. Trust me.

She wrote back right away. What? Why? Is she ok???

She’s great. Just come.

The Doorway

Ellie walked into that apartment like it was Disneyland.

She dropped her pink backpack in the middle of the beige carpet, right next to the boxes, and ran to the big window. It was a quarter after four and the sun was coming low through that west glass, and the whole empty room was gold with it.

“Is this a hotel?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Whose is it?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s what we’re going to find out.”

Then she came back and stood next to me, and took my hand, the way she does when she’s had a lot of excitement and needs to hold on to something for a minute.

I had the keys in my other hand. I kept turning the ring over with my thumb.

At 4:20 I heard a car door outside. I heard her steps on the porch, quick, the way you walk when your phone has three question marks on it. The front door opened, and she came through the living room and stopped in the doorway to the back bedroom, where the hall met the room.

My sister has long dark brown hair she has worn the same way since high school. She had on the black puffer vest she wears every fall.

She looked at the empty room. She looked at the cardboard boxes against the wall, and I watched her know them. You could see it happen. Her face went white and then it went soft.