exactly, did we arrive at this moment, where we’ve elected to have a shapeshifter watch over my six-year-old?
The day before yesterday, the pub was uncharacteristically dead, so Cauley let me head home early. Normally, I always opt to stay for my full shift because I need the paycheck. I’m a single mom with two kids: money is always tight. Because it’s almost Labor Day though—directly after which school begins—it means that Maggie is stuck with a babysitter during the day hours, and she’s miserable.
We’ve had some terrible babysitters.
Being the child of divorced parents myself, I remember all too well how some babysitters acted once my mom had to leave for work. Some were great, but most sitters were hell. And if even half of what Maggie was reporting could be believed, I knew she’d appreciate the rescue.
I pulled up in front of our townhouse, parked at my spot at the curb, grabbed my purse, locked up the car, and groaned as I made my feet take my weight for the two dozen or so steps of sidewalk it takes to make it to the house.
I wasn’t quiet when I unlocked the door. But apparently, the girl I was paying my hard-earned dollars to watch Maggie couldn’t hear me over the blaring TV. I walked in to find the kitchen a mess (typical—sitters don’t clean up nowadays, even though I distinctly remember doing dishes and wiping down counters every day when I was a babysitter myself), there were kale chips spilled out on the floor—what looked like darn near the full bag of them (just what the heck had happened in here? Wasting food? Not in my house, heck no!), and the sitter, Bella, was parked comfy as you please watching television and eating a pan of macaroni and cheese. Seriously, straight out of the pan. Which wouldn’t bother me (one less dish to wash later)—but it begged the question: what was Maggie eating?
Maggie was nowhere to be seen.
Maggie had been claiming that Bella would lock her in her room without lunch. Knowing that Maggie can exaggerate details from time to time, I gave Bella the benefit of the doubt and asked for her version of events, which never ended with Maggie going hungry.
I wasn’t sure what to believe.
But when I marched to Maggie’s room, found a chair wedged under the handle so she couldn’t leave her room, and found her inside, asleep with tears dried on her face, without so much as a bottle of water as Bella sputtered behind me that she’d locked Maggie in for just two minutes—
I. Was. Livid.
Let me mention another point: Bella isn’t a kid. Well, she isn’t a young kid, at any rate. She’s twenty-freaking-one. There’s no excuse for this. I’m paying her to walk Maggie to the park once or twice a week, make sure she isn’t kidnapped, feed her when she’s hungry, and prevent her from burning the house down. That’s all I want. A pet sitter is expected to do better. And Maggie is a good kid, I swear—this is not a difficult job.
Unable to trust that Bella would do a better job in the future—and also very concerned that she might act out some form of misdirected retaliation on Maggie—I fired her on the spot. It left me in a lurch, but I didn’t see how Bella was an option anymore anyway. It seemed we were already in a lurch.
I was fuming about how I’d essentially been paying a girl to treat Maggie the way she did when I went into work the next day. Cauley had taken one look at me, pulled me aside, and asked, “Sue, what’s wrong?”
I’d told him. I’d shared too that in order for me to come into work, Charlotte skipped a full day of heavy-homework-loaded classes to watch Maggie herself since there’s no babysitters available on short notice. As it was, we’d had a heck of a time getting Bella. And since that turned out so well, I didn’t know what in the world we were going to do to make it another week until school started.
(But even then, although the school would be watching Maggie ‘til 3pm, the junior high didn’t release their kids until 3:35. This meant that Maggie would be stepping off the bus at our house before Charlotte’s bus ever arrived. Sure, Maggie was six and she could become a latchkey kid. But lost keys, bus delays, and she was so outgoing and extroverted that talking to strangers was a