The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month

Derrick

The hard part, for Whitney, came that Saturday.

She had to tell Derrick. There was no way around it. You cannot move out of your own place and into a new one when the man you’re seeing thinks you already live on your own. Sooner or later he offers to carry a box.

I wasn’t there. She told me about it later, sitting at my kitchen table with her coat still on.

“I told him about Kyle and the porch,” she said. “I told him I’ve lived in your house for five years and never paid a dime of rent. I told him you meet the bus every day and you were up with her every night she had the croup. I told him what I said about you.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, for a while. He just drank his coffee.” She turned her mug around on the table. “Then he said, So why’d you tell me different? And I told him the truth. That I was ashamed. That I wanted him to like me.”

She shrugged, but her chin was shaking. “I figured that was it. I figured he’d decide I was a liar and that would be the end of it, and I’d deserve it.”

“And?”

“And he said, Whitney, I grew up in a trailer on my grandma’s land after my dad left. Nobody’s ashamed of that at my table.” She laughed a little. “Then he asked if your truck had a hitch, because he’s got a utility trailer for moving.”

That afternoon Derrick drove out to my place in his pickup with his own trailer behind it.

I’ll be honest, I was ready not to like him. I had built him up in my head for three weeks as the man I’d been written out of the story for. I stood on my porch with my arms crossed like my dad used to.

He got out, a big, quiet man in a canvas work coat, and came straight up the steps with his hand out.

“Adam,” he said. “Derrick. I’d have liked to meet you a lot sooner.” He held my handshake a second longer than he had to. “She told me. All of it. I just want to say, what you did for those two, that’s about as good as a man gets.”

I didn’t know what to say. I mumbled something about it being nothing, which was not true, and we both knew it.

“It’s not nothing,” he said. “My uncle did it for my mom and me when I was seven. I never thanked him right. He’s been gone ten years.” He looked out at my yard. “Anyway. Where do you want to start?”

We started with Ellie’s bed. It was a white toddler bed I had put together in my spare room the summer she turned two, and the two of us took it apart in about four minutes without saying much. Some men talk while they work. Neither of us did.

When we carried the headboard out through the hallway, Derrick stopped at the doorframe of Ellie’s room. There were pencil lines on it, going up, each one with a date written next to it in my handwriting.

“You did these?”

“Every birthday,” I said. “Her mom did the first one. I did the rest.”

He looked at them for a while. Then he took out his phone and took a picture of the doorframe. “So she has it,” he said. “In case you ever paint.”

I liked him a lot after that.