The Babysitter Who Paid the First Month

Mom’s Program

The practical part, it turned out, was where Mom shined.

There was one problem nobody had solved. Whitney worked until five at the clinic. The bus would now drop Ellie at the corner by Oak Street at 3:40, and there would be no one home to meet it. She couldn’t leave a five-year-old alone in an apartment for an hour and twenty minutes, and she would never have tried.

“I’ll keep picking her up,” I said, at Mom’s kitchen table that Sunday.

“No,” said Mom and Whitney, at the same time. Then they looked at each other, surprised.

“Adam,” Whitney said, “that’s the whole point. I have to stand on this one.”

Mom already had her reading glasses on and a church directory open. Arlene Halvorsen has never once in her life gone into a problem without a church directory.

“Kathy Schultz runs the after-school program at the elementary,” she said. “It’s through Community Ed. They keep the kids in the school library and the gym until six. I know it’s about twelve dollars a day, because Kathy complained to me at Bible study that they had to raise it.”

Whitney did the math on a napkin. Four days a week came to about forty-eight dollars a week, close to two hundred a month. It was a real number on an eighteen-dollar-an-hour paycheck with eight-fifty in rent. But it fit, if she was careful.

“Four days?” I said.

Mom looked at me over her glasses. “I’ll take Wednesdays,” she said. “I’m retired. I can walk four blocks and eat graham crackers with my granddaughter.”

That left one day. Ellie had been listening the whole time from the living room floor with a coloring book, pretending not to.

She came and stood by the table and put her chin on the edge of it.

“Mommy,” she said. “Can Uncle Adam still pick me up on Fridays?”

Nobody said anything for a second. I looked at the napkin with the math on it. Friday wasn’t on it.

Whitney looked at me. Her eyes were wet again, but she was smiling. “If he wants to,” she said. “That’s up to Uncle Adam.”

Ellie turned to me with her whole face. “Do you want to?”

I said I did. I said it maybe a little too fast, and my voice did something funny in the middle, and my mother pretended very hard to be reading the church directory.

“Fridays,” Ellie said, like she was signing her name to it. “Every Friday.”

“Every Friday,” I said.

The Quiet House

They moved the last of it the second weekend of October.

The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator. I hadn’t heard my own refrigerator in five years.

On Monday at 3:30, I caught myself putting on my boots to walk to the corner. I sat back down on the bench by the door with one boot on and just stayed there for a while.

Mom called that night. She does that, calls when she knows. “How’s the quiet?” she said.

“Loud,” I said.

“Mm-hm.” She didn’t try to fix it. She just stayed on the phone with me while I did the dishes, talking about the funeral lunch for old Harold Meyer and whether ham loaf counts as a main dish. After a while I felt better.

Whitney called every night that first week. Mostly it was questions. How do you bleed a radiator. Is the pilot light supposed to look like that. Which breaker is the kitchen. I told her and she wrote it down, and by Thursday she didn’t call with questions anymore. She just called.