Page 5 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Teddy—”

“He should ask them,” June says. “He lives here.”

So my five-year-old conducts the first round. Can she make macaroni the orange way and also the white way? Can she swim, and how far? Is she afraid of spiders? If not, will she remove them, and does she remove them alive? She answers each one exactly as seriously as it was asked. Nobody has ever taken the spider question that seriously. He fills half a page.

Margot comes down in the middle of it, because she will not be introduced — she arrives. She shakes June’s hand, says it’s nice to meet her, takes an apple, and goes back upstairs. Perfectly polite. Three years ago that girl narrated her entire day to anyone standing still. There’s no way to explain to a stranger that the apple was Margot being warm, so I don’t try.

June watches her go and doesn’t say anything about it. That’s the first thing she does that the others didn’t. The second thing: she doesn’t tell me Margot will come around. Everybody tells me Margot will come around. People say it to end the subject, the way you’d put a lid on a pot. June just moves to her next question and leaves the subject open on the table between us, which is where it actually lives.

Then it’s her turn. She asks questions for twenty minutes, and none of them are about me. Allergies. Bedtimes, actual versus official. When school starts, who does the run, what happens when I travel. Who has keys, which grandmother, which doctor, what Teddy eats when he says he isn’t hungry, and which cabinet the cups live in. She has a pen and she uses it. Somewhere in there Teddy, reaching across the table to show her the notebook, puts his elbow through his orange juice.

I’m up before it spreads, but she’s closer. She moves the notebook first — his, not hers — then catches the juice at the table’s edge with the cloth that was hanging on the oven door. She does it the way you’d brush crumbs, still asking me about swim lessons, and she doesn’t look at me to see how it landed. The last candidate would have made it a moment. June makes it not one. Teddy, who was braced to be embarrassed, decides instead to finish his question about spiders.

Then, because he is five and his mind runs on rails nobody else can see, he says, “Our mom died. Two kids at school thought it was a shark, but it was cancer.”

I go still. The towel is somewhere behind me, so I hold the edge of the table. This is the moment the second candidate reached for Teddy’s arm and made her face into a greeting card. Margot walked out of the room that day and didn’t come back down till dinner.

June doesn’t reach for anybody. “I know,” she says. “Deanna told me. I’m sorry it happened.”

“Me too,” Teddy says, and turns the page of his notebook. “Do you know how to make pancakes that aren’t burnt?”

“Hey,” I say.

“It’s a fair question,” June says. Teddy cackles, and for a moment the kitchen sounds the way it used to sound. I look at the window for a second before I trust my voice.

“Why nanny?” I ask her, when the juice is handled and the notebook is closed. “The agency said you did marketing.”

There’s a half-second where she answers me honestly with her face, before any words happen. “The company folded Tuesday,” she says. “They walked us out with boxes at two in the afternoon. And houses have always made more sense to me than offices did. In a house, you can tell whether you’re doing a good job.”

“You can,” I say. “Everybody in a house is a critic.”

She laughs once, quick, like she hadn’t planned to. It’s a good laugh. I notice it, and I leave it alone.

“You know what I do?” I ask. “What I did?”

“You played hockey.” She says it the way you’d say a man used to sell insurance. “Deanna says you’re in some hall of fame.”

Some hall of fame. Twenty-one years, two Cups, a plaque with my face on it, and this is the best sentence anyone has said to me all year. I have spent three years in rooms where everybody knows exactly what I am and adjusts themselves around it, the voices going bright, the hands finding my shoulder. This woman is in my kitchen asking which cabinet the cups live in, so she doesn’t have to open six of them in front of a hungry kid.

“You signed nine pages about me,” I say. “I’ve read about two paragraphs about you. That seems like a bad trade for you.”

“Deanna’s paragraphs are accurate.” She squares her pen against the edge of her notes. “Four families, five years, references who’ll answer on the first ring. The marketing detour didn’t take. That’s the whole story.”

It isn’t, and I know it isn’t, because nobody’s whole story is two paragraphs. But I’ve spent three years giving rooms the two-paragraph version of myself. I’m in no position to complain.

I run my thumb across the scar on my knuckle. Old habit. “It’s been a hard three years in this house,” I say. “Margot got the worst of it. Whoever takes this job gets the hard parts too, and some of them don’t announce themselves.”

She doesn’t do anything with her face, which is how I know she heard it. “Then tell me what a bad day looks like,” she says. “So the first time I see one, I’m not meeting it in front of the kids.”

I tell her. Not all of it — there are rooms in the last three years I don’t open for anyone — but the shape of it. The school pickups that end in silence. The nights Teddy shows up in the hallway at two a.m. and won’t say why. The way Margot’s politeness keeps everybody at a distance, and how aiming warmth straight at her only backs her off further. June takes notes on some of it. The parts she doesn’t write down, I can tell she’s keeping anyway.

“What about your life?” I ask. “Six days a week, living in. That doesn’t leave much room for one.”

“I’m between lives at the moment.” She says it the way you’d report a bus running late. Then, one beat behind, the joke arrives: “I’ll spend Sundays somewhere very glamorous, I promise.”

There’s a person under there who has carried something heavy a long way. I recognize the walk. I don’t ask what the something is, and I hope to God she never asks about mine.

She clicks her pen shut. “What do you actually need?” she asks. “Not the posting. Deanna read me the posting. The real list.”