“Can your wife help?”
“Less than I’d like,” said Jared. “Let me call you back.”
But Lauri didn’t wait. She had several good candidates. Would he like to set up some interviews?
“The first one I’m going to send you is foreign, but her English is very good.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Slovakia? Does that sound right?” Lauri chuckled. “It sounds made-up. Like Transylvania. But she says she’s from there.”
“I’ll tell the kids she’s from Transylvania,” said Jared. “They’ll be thrilled.”
“Transylvania, is that like a real place?” asked Lauri.
“Yeah, sure. Why not?”
Maria Toledo came at three in the afternoon on Saturday when all the kids were home. When he talked to her on the phone to set up the time, from her voice he imagined her to be benevolently heavy, but she turned out to be tiny and slender. She wore a maroon peacoat and brown lace-up Timberlands, and her brown hair was pulled back in a French twist. She had good teeth. She smiled a lot. Her English was pretty good. She said she had been working as live-out for a family in Mountainside, but the husband recently lost his job so they didn’t need her anymore.
“Do you need a live-in or live-out?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Because I can’t do live-in. I’m married.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m looking for full time. As many hours as possible.”
“That I’ve got.”
She lowered her voice. “The children have no mother?”
“Well, they didn’t spring from a rock,” said Jared. “So clearly they have a mother. She’s just not here.”
“Oh. Is she coming back soon?”
“Not sure,” Jared replied. “But in the meantime, the three children need supervision, the house needs upkeep, errands have to be run.”
“I understand.”
He told her what the job entailed, she listened. He liked her. He was a little worried about her request for vacation. Not just to be paid when he and the kids were away, but four weeks in addition to that, at the time of her choosing so she could go back to Slovakia to visit her family. He didn’t know what to say to that. Was that normal, that much vacation? He didn’t get that much vacation. For the lack of anything to say, he asked her where in Slovakia she was from.
“Oh, you know Slovakia?” She giggled. “Just a small little village outside Skycov. Do you know where that is? Is that helpful?”
“You’re funny,” said Jared.
She laughed. “So? What do you think?”
“What do I think?” He guessed she meant about her. “Very good.”
“Do you want to see my references?”
“Sure. But I have to interview some other girls, too.”
She became noticeably deflated. “I’ve never been out of work before,” she said. “I worked since I left school, twelve years ago. Never not worked. I’m worried.”
“Give me a couple of days. I’ll be in touch this week. Now, those references?”
The references were very good. But she was the first girl he met with. He had to see what else was out there.
Courtney smelled like smoke and had an artist air about her that Michelangelo loved, but which concerned Jared. She didn’t seem the type that would stay.
Erin was young and attractive, perhaps too attractive for his fourteen-year-old son to have in the house; plus she had zero experience; he’d have to hire her solely for her looks.
Jaime had lots of experience, didn’t want any extra vacation time off, was willing to start right away and do whatever he needed to, but she had bad teeth and her hair lay in an unbrushed clump at the back of her head.
Fern, at first glance, was ideal. She was fifty-one, energetic, good-looking, was a personal trainer for twenty years and had the body to show for it, and was funny when introduced to the kids. Then she opened her mouth. For the next fifty-five minutes, Jared couldn’t open his to even let her know what would be required of her. She told him about how unfairly the-soon-to-be-former boss was treating her, how she wasn’t being compensated enough, paid enough, rewarded enough, and she went into some length about her empty-nest syndrome and how after her twenty-one-year-old son moved out, she wanted to die, and even for good measure about her hysterectomy and its attendant complications of bleeding and infection.
It was after Fern that Jared called back Maria Toledo and offered her the job, and she said, oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Stark, I really liked you and your family, but I didn’t think you liked me, you said you would call me in a few days and I didn’t hear from you.
“Maria, you were the first girl I talked to. I wanted to interview other candidates before I concluded how perfect you were.”
She giggled. “I know, and you were perfect too, but I already accepted another position.”
He couldn’t believe it.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“I called you within seven days of our interview.”
“I know, but I was very worried about being out of work. Listen, I will keep your number. I mean, I’ve never had a job not work out, but if this one doesn’t work out, I’ll call you, okay?”
“Okay, Maria,” said a very disappointed Jared.
Well, that was that. Once again he called his mother-in-law.
Barbara returned, ecstatically. There was no other way to describe the emotion on her face as she was still in the driveway with her suitcase. The children, even Asher, who never ran out to anybody, ran out to her. Larissa! Jared wanted to tell his wife, who would’ve thought that a life was possible in which your mother was coming to live with me and I would be grateful?
But the first thing Jared did, even before looking for help, or calling Barbara, or organizing any Labor Day get-togethers, was sell Larissa’s Jaguar. He had been doubling up on the monthly payments, and had paid it off four months earlier. He got half what he paid for it, which was no justice at all. What in the name of God was he going to do with that money?
On Saturday following Labor Day (no party, but Ezra and Maggie came, not in a party mood) when he came home from food shopping in the late afternoon, Emily ran out to the driveway and hissed, “Dad, where’ve you been? Somebody’s here waiting for you!”
“Who?” he motioned her to step away and slammed the car door.
“I don’t know. Somebody from your work. She brought her two kids!”
“She?” Twirling his keys, Jared walked into his house.
Jan Skeels from work was sitting at his kitchen table with a big pot of food in front of her in a casserole container. She was casually but neatly dressed, and she sprung from the bar stool so fast, she knocked it over, which made her even more on edge.
“I thought I’d come by,” she stammered. “I only just heard…I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just heard. I’m so out of the loop on stuff…”
“How are you, Jan?” said Jared, putting his keys on the ring, walking over to the island. “Emily said your kids are here?”
“Yes, they’re playing with two of yours somewhere. Maybe outside? I didn’t know you’d be out. I just stopped by in the afternoon. I wanted to bring a little pot of food, thought it might be hard for a man on the weekends.”
“Nah,” he said, smiling slightly, “on the weekends, it’s easy. We just go out. Or get take-out. Do you want a drink? We have Coke,” he quickly added, belatedly remembering her ardent alcoholic troubles. “Or iced tea.”
“No, I’m fine. Your daughter gave me a glass of water.” Jan nervously tittered. “So what do you do during the week for dinner?”
“We just go out. Or get take-out.”
And she laughed, less nervously. “I brought my little specialty dish I was making for me and the kids, and thought, why not? It’s baked ziti. Kids like it.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
“There you go. I wanted to be a good neighbor, that’s all.”
; “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Neighbor? “You live around here?”
“Yeah, not too far,” she demurred. “A couple of miles. Boys!” she yelled. “Come on, let’s go!”
“Um, do you want to stay for dinner?” asked Jared.
“No, no, we have plans. I really just brought it over to acknowledge my knowledge—” Jan broke off awkwardly again. “My sympathy, I mean.”
“Thank you.”
“When my husband left, it was very tough. Without my neighbors feeding me, I don’t know how I would’ve managed.”
“Would that my neighbors fed me,” said Jared. “They’ve all been too mortified.”
“Yeah, people don’t know what to say.”
“No kidding,” said Jared. “You sure you can’t stay? You made plenty of food. And I have some Italian bread, some salad fixings. We might as well make a full dinner out of it. My mother-in-law is going to join us. You don’t mind, do you?
“No, of course, not. Well, I’ll have to…let me…I’ll just make a phone call.”
“Sounds good. I’ll have the kids set the table. Kids! Come!” He turned to Jan. He forced a smile.
Jan Skeels wasn’t the only one. The bank ladies on Saturday morning all came out to greet him, nattily dressed, friendly, arrayed as if in a line-up, offering him coffee while he waited, a donut, making small talk, chit-chatting, commenting on the gray goatee he had grown, how much they liked it, how it made him look more distinguished.
And the women at work were undeniably more friendly—and better attired. As if his daily life had become a fashion show parade. Mr. Stark! Please. Your eyes on the runway. And the next one is only twenty-seven! But after several bad relationships and issues with her mother that are being worked out in twice-weekly therapy sessions, she is ready to present herself to the world. Here she is, wearing an elegant Diane Von Furstenberg cotton tank dress with a sweetheart neckline and a lace-up front, size 6, color bloom. On her feet, she is wearing delightful multi-colored Dolce and Gabbana buckled slingbacks, and she is carrying a Bottega Veneta hobo bag with a suede inner lining. Makeup by Nars, hair by Frederic Fekkai. What do you think, Mr. Stark? This is the director of human resources at your firm. Not for you, you say? Next! Mr. Stark, please pay attention. Because they’re coming to your office door two at a time now, and you only have a few seconds to assess. Time to focus.
It’s like they all knew. The wildfire spread through the bank, the office, even Michelangelo’s school. Once everyone knew, no one talked to him about Larissa anymore, blessedly, but the ladies smiled wider and dressed better.
There were things he had to make himself do, to begin to function again, to cease to end to function. He asked Ezra for help in finding a house painter. Ezra was only too happy to locate one, a father of one of his students. The man came one evening to assess the job, give Jared an estimate. Before he and his crew painted, Jared had the Salvation Army remove every single item from the bedroom. They took Larissa’s clothes and her books; they took their old T V, and their two dressers. They removed their bed and the nightstands, and her makeup table with the cosmetics still in it. They took it all. And then the painters came and in two days his bedroom went from taupe or whatever to Sherwin-Williams Rainwashed, with Honied White trim and Nuthatch chocolate bedding and curtains. Maggie helped him pick those out. She and Ezra took Jared to Pottery Barn at the mall and selected a new bed with him, a dark stain four-poster king with a short headboard. White pillows, a Nuthatch cocoa quilt, a new dresser (just one), a leather chair, and a 50-inch LCD TV so he could watch his Yankees in High-Def style. He placed the bed against a different wall than before, made a seating area with new black bookshelves for his baseball and finance books. He even went on art.com and bought a Joan Miro painting, black framed and triple-matted to go over the bed, because the old things that hung there, the two pictures of Jared and Larissa in their simple eloping wedding clothes standing in front of the justice of the peace, had been taken down, as all pictures of her had been taken down and placed in a large plastic container that held her photos, their wedding albums, her plays from Pingry, and all the trinkets he hadn’t donated to St. Paul’s Mission. This was a big project; it took all of September. But he could sleep in his bedroom again; that was something.
Also in September Jared got busy with school supplies, backpacks, pens, folders, three-ring binders, lunch tickets. Things he never had to do. He thought he had had it tough, dealing with a multi-billion-dollar business, stress, politics, personalities at work, office shit, rushing home. He didn’t know how easy it all had been.
It was warm for part of September, and then got cold fast. The fall jackets came out of the attic. The Halloween decorations went up. Jared hung the goblin lights, put the ghosts out, the coffin, the skeleton that talked. At the store they bought orange flowers. One Saturday in October he took the kids and Barbara to a farm in the country. They went on a hayride and through a corn maze and picked out five pumpkins, but Michelangelo picked one more and said, “This is for Mommy.” No one else said anything. It was a cool beautiful afternoon. Afterward they went out to a steak place for dinner, and Jared sat with his kids, and cut up Michelangelo’s steak, and they talked about. Thanksgiving and Christmas presents in the most oblique way; sort of, we can’t wait for Christmas, and should we buy some more tree decorations, and when can we start our wishlist? The gaping hole in the middle of Christmas they all left unsaid.
Thanksgiving came. And went.
At the beginning of December Jared got a call at work from a Maria Toledo. He had to work to place her in his memory. It was the first girl he had interviewed, the girl with the Transylvanian accent.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. She sounded cracked, breaking up, struggling for words. “But back in September you said I could call you if my job didn’t work out.”
Now he remembered.
“I don’t know if you hired someone already…”
“Well, my mother-in-law is helping us,” said Jared.
“Oh. I see.”
“Why? Did the other job not work out?”
“Well, this is the thing…I don’t know if you would be interested in maybe having a live-in, but you know, I have been in child care my whole adult life, and in Slovakia, I lived with a family of eight children…that’s a lot, right? And I did everything for the mother, I helped her, and I cooked, and cleaned, and took care of the kids, and then I lived in London for three years as an au pair for a woman with three children. You could call her for a reference, and then here in America, I worked for four years for two different families, and they’ll tell you, I did everything for them, so I’m saying, I could help you, and you wouldn’t have to worry about anything, your kids would be taken care of, and I’d do homework with them, and I love sports and playing outside. I’d take them to their after-school programs, and I know you said your youngest boy liked arts and crafts, well, I love arts and crafts, and I could do lots of stuff with them, and also I could walk your dog, because I bet she is lonely being by herself during the day; your mother-in-law, she probably doesn’t walk her, does she?”
“No,” Jared said slowly, “no, she doesn’t. She’s got arthritis. Makes it hard to hold the leash.”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying. Do you still have the reference letters I gave you last time? Because I can stop by tonight to drop another copy off if you don’t have them.”
“No, I probably still have them somewhere.”
“I could start anytime for you. I don’t have to wait till next Monday. I know it’s Tuesday right now, but if you want, I can start tomorrow. And because I’d be a live-in, I won’t need as much money. Oh, and I know you were worried before about me taking time off…”
“I wasn’t worried.”
“No, I could tell. You were. You thought it was too much time. And you were absolutely right. I won’t take any time except when you go away. I’ll just work around your vacation time. Because it must be hard for you…You
r wife, she’s not back yet?”
“She’s not back yet.”
“That’s what I’m saying. It’s not a bad deal. It would cost you less than a live-out.”
Jared was quiet.
“Are you okay, Maria?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she assured him. “I just wanted you to know I was still available if you needed someone.”
“To live in? But what about your husband? I don’t think husbands like that very much, their wives living somewhere else.”
She started to cry.
Jared turned his face away from the door in case someone came in, and pressed the phone tighter to his ear, as if Maria were crying right in his office and he didn’t want his staff to hear.
“Well, this is the thing,” she said. “The husband went on a fishing trip to Florida before Thanksgiving, and said he’d be back in two weeks, but two weeks passed and he wasn’t back, and wasn’t picking up his phone, and then finally over the weekend he called me and said he wasn’t coming back at all, and he was going to send a friend of his to get all his stuff from our apartment. So I locked his friend out, and he called the police, and told them it was his apartment, which it technically is—his name is on the lease, but we’re married—but the police are like, lady you have to move, so I don’t know what to do, and the landlord, I found out, hasn’t been paid since September! So now they’re telling me I owe four months rent on an apartment they’re kicking me out of! I mean, is that crazy, or what?”
“That’s crazy.”
“So I have a double problem. I need a place to live, and I have to earn enough to pay the landlord so he doesn’t sue me.”
“Plus the husband is in Florida.”
She cried.
Jared hired Maria and paid her back rent. They bought her a bed and she slept in Michelangelo’s room like Mary Poppins in the nursery.
After the tree went up, and the season to be jolly sped by, Jared and Emily were wrapping Michelangelo’s presents on Christmas Eve. The radio was playing Christmas carols, Jared poured his daughter a little punchless eggnog, while he punched his up with a dose of brandy—and rum and whiskey besides. They were casually chatting, about how happy the little boy was going to be with his Hot Wheels set and his Batcave and his Star Wars Lego ship, and Emily said, “Dad, what do you think happened to Mom?”