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feeling depressed and inadequate. I was afraid even now to hear about what new job she had or what cool friends she was hanging out with. Also I looked like shit. I’d just had a baby and was twenty pounds overweight, with nipples the size of rice cakes.
    I told Hollice that I would love to see her! That I couldn’t wait! But that, sadly, Jason was experiencing postpartum depression. I suggested we touch base again in a few weeks, hoping her super-glamorous lifestyle would sweep her out of town and prevent our meet-up from ever actually happening. It wasn’t that I disliked her. I just wanted to prevent myself from getting hurt or possibly deciding to change Sid’s name to something flashy and attention-grabbing like “Afrika” to ensure he’d be more famous than her kids.

    “Hollice might stop by in a few weeks to say hi,” I casually mentioned one morning as I loaded Sid into his car seat. We were going for a routine doctor’s visit in West L.A. and Jason had asked Debora if she wanted to join us. We didn’t know how not to. Leaving her in the house alone all day just seemed rude.
    Debora had been at our house just under a month at that point, and she was already way too comfortable with us. It wasn’t all her fault. Jason and I didn’t know how to say no. Neither of us had grown up with “staff,” and bossing an older black woman around the house just felt a little too
Gone with the Wind.
So instead of treating Debora like an employee, we treated her like a houseguest. I stocked the house with everything she liked to eat: berries, tortilla chips, coconut water. I bought her a bathrobe and a down comforter. I even let her borrow my car when she needed to run errands. Some people know how to handle obvious codependents like Jason and me, and they would have likely compensated for our lack of boundaries by enforcing boundaries of their own. But others tend to take advantage of our hospitality and end up controlling us completely.
    I can’t deny that part of why I let it happen was to ensure that Debora enjoyed her stay with me more than she did her stay with Hollice.
    “Can we eat at Mr Chow?” Debora chimed in from the backseat as we made our way to the doctor. “Uzo always gets to go to Mr Chow.”
    Mr Chow was a high-end Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills that I hadn’t eaten at since the early nineties. Once a notorious hotspot to see and be seen in, Mr Chow had in recent years become little more than a tourist trap (with great lettuce cups) and a standard stop for every TMZ tour bus.
    “Maybe…” I said, annoyed, looking at Jason from the passenger seat. I’d spent enough time around her to realize that whenever Debora really wanted to get her way, she’d throw a little Jesus talk into her negotiating.
    “The Lord Jesus is telling me I gotta get me some Mr Chow! Because the Lord was not liking what you fed me last night.” She paused, reading a text on her phone, then continued, half-focused. “The only kind of sushi I can do is a Californian roll.”
    Not only was Debora strangely manipulative, she was always on her phone. And aside from the handful of times I’d heard her wiring money to a relative in Atlanta, she was usually gossiping with Uzo.
    Uzo was the Queen Bee of the baby-nurse world. She was the Heather with the red scrunchie. She had an army of lower-level baby nurses she’d farm jobs out to when she deemed them unworthy of her time. Uzo seemed like a self-obsessed fame whore. And though she’d unequivocally signed a nondisclosure agreement with her current employer, she didn’t mind bending the rules to divulge secrets, especially if it allowed her to brag about a fancy new trip or a restaurant she’d tried. Debora worshipped Uzo and wanted everything she had. This included “the three
b’
s.”
    “My goals are simple,” she said, sucking down garlic prawns at Mr Chow after our appointment. “I want a Bentley, a black card, and a Birkin. Then I’ll know I’ve made