The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month

She looked at the little pink backpack on the carpet. She looked at Ellie holding my hand in the window light. Then she looked at the keys in my other hand.

She put her hand over her mouth.

“Adam,” she said through her fingers. “Are you putting us out?”

I had practiced what I was going to say for two weeks, in the truck, in the shower, out at a hog barn in Pepin County. None of it came out. What came out was the truth, quiet.

I held up the ring of keys.

“No,” I said. “I’m giving you what you told Derrick you already had.”

She didn’t move from the doorway. Her eyes filled up. I watched her understand, all at once, what I knew and how I must have found out.

Ellie looked up at her mother, not understanding any of it, and grinned. “Mommy, Uncle Adam says I get to pick my room.”

Whitney lowered her hand. Her eyes went to me, then to the keys, then to her daughter, and then back to me.

She crossed the carpet and took the ring from my hand. The paper tag on it had one word in my black marker, and she read it out loud: “Ellie.” Her voice cracked. “Go and pick your room, baby.”

Ellie ran. Whitney kept her eyes on me.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

In five years, she had said thank you to me probably a thousand times. Thank you for the diapers, thank you for supper, thank you for the bus. She had never once said she was sorry. I don’t think she knew she owed it until that minute in the doorway.

“Ellie,” I said, “go pick out your room. Take your time. Look in the closets.”

Ellie let go of my hand and ran.

What She Said

Whitney came in and sat down on the floor with her back against the boxes, right there on the carpet in her vest. After a minute I sat down too, across from her, with my knees up like we were kids in the basement.

“Who told you?” she said. “Mom?”

I didn’t want to answer that. But I don’t lie to my sister. “Ellie,” I said. “Not to tattle. She thought it was nice news. Pancakes in squares.”

Whitney laughed, a wet, awful laugh, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Oh, the squares.” She shut her eyes. “Adam, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know.” She opened her eyes. “Can I tell you? Will you let me tell you?”

So I let her.

She had met Derrick in August at the street dance during the town’s summer festival. He worked for the electric co-op, a lineman, thirty-six, divorced, no kids. He’d asked her to dance to an old George Strait song and hadn’t stepped on her feet once.

“He’s the first man in five years who looked at me like I was a person,” she said. “Not a single mom. Not poor Whitney whose boyfriend left her at the hospital. Just a woman at a dance.”

On their third date he asked about her life. She told him about the clinic. She told him about Ellie. And when he asked who watched Ellie after school, she heard herself say, My brother helps out. Then, a week later at the café, it got worse: Oh, Uncle Adam, he’s just the babysitter.