Nanny Returns Read Online Free PDF Page B

to dismiss his mother, his eyes at half-mast as he scrolls the phone.
    “So, what I’m trying to say is that, well . . .” I trail off, feeling suddenly like I’m trying to get him to walk me to cafeteria brunch after a keg-fueled hookup.
    “I should go.” He lifts the arm holding his coat and the air passes over it, simultaneously reaching both of us with the aroma of his vomit.
    “Let me get you a bag! To put that in. You don’t want to carry it like that out on the street.” I lilt past him, transforming into a Febreze commercial.
    “Sure.” He walks behind me, through the tool-laden workstation that will one day be my dining room, to the gutted kitchen, where I fumble in the remaining cabinet until I find the plastic bags.
    “We’ve been moving everything around for the contractor to start. I guess technically they’ve started, but, man, are they taking forever to really get going. So …here we go!” I shake one out with a loud snap and he drops the coat in and takes a step back from me. “Do you want some coffee? Crap, the fuse is out. I could do it in the upstairs bathroom. Maybe some water?” I swipe Grace’s bowl off the floor and pour in her breakfast.
    “I’m good.”
    I put the bowl down and Grace descends upon it like this is any other day. “Okay, well …I feel like I should make you something or …something.”
    “I gotta go. Thanks.” He turns, and I have to rush to catch up as he navigates to the front door. I study his broad back, searching for courage, struck that I don’t know if what I want to say is, at this point, really for him or for me. He stops in the foyer and looks down at his loafers. “I was kinda …drunk last night, so whatever I said—”
    “Don’t give it another thought.” I slice the air emphatically.
    “Thanks for, uh, getting me onto the couch.”
    “Of course. You’re a lot heavier than you used to be.” I smile, but his face tightens.
    “So, okay then . . .”
    “Grayer, look, I’ve got to say this, so please, just—”
    “I can’t.” He clenches his hand around the plastic straps of the bag and lifts his gaze right past me to the cracked ceiling. “My family’s going through some shit right now and I lost it, that’s all. I’ll be fine. It’s all …fine. Sorry I bothered you.”
    “But you didn’t! You didn’t bother me at all—”
    “’Cause you’re preparing your Fight Club recruits?”
    Surprised, I laugh and he grins for a moment. That boy, I know. “You’re really funny. You were always really funny.”
    “Can you—” He gestures his bag at the locks.
    “Yes.” I undo them and pull open the door. “You’re free.”
    Grace traipses in from the kitchen, licking off her blond chops.
    “Bye.” He nestles his palm, the size of her whole head, between her ears. “Bye.” He turns and offers his hand for me to shake as they have taught him to do. I shake it. This is wrong. I am doing this wrong, again.
    “Don’t be a stranger,” I hear myself say.
    “Okay.” He steps out into the bright sun and tromps down the steps.
    “Wait!”
    He turns back, squinting up at me. “You said you lost your wallet; let me give you money for a cab.”
    “I’ll walk.” His shoulders lift as the sharp spring breeze whips across his oxford, pressing it against his frame.
    “Please, Grayer, let me at least give you one of my husband’s coats—”
    But he continues down the street, bag twisted on a wrist, hands plunged into pockets, shoulders hunched in the cold, as I race for something—anything—to say that will get him to stay, buy me a few more minutes to fix this, knowing with sickening certainty that there’s nothing that would make him turn around.

    Staring at the quarter-sized patch of Pepto-Bismol–hued paint on day two of no Steve, I tilt my head and wait for the paint to bubble from the bathroom wall. As the heat gun box has promised it would. F’ing power-tool boxes with their confident primary colors and photos of