Free Nanny Returns by Emma McLaughlin

Originally I majored in Child Development. But the first few programs I worked at out of school were epically dysfunctional. I mean, staff meetings like a page from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It didn’t matter the country or the level of funding, the grown-ups consistently needed more help playing well with others. I became really interested in how to get organizations to run effectively—so the people they’re trying to aid actually receive it.”
    “Wow, that’s amazing—I never worked in an office. Some days I crave group dynamics so badly I want to pay people to hang out by my sink and talk to me about Lost while I make tea. So, Stockholm?”
    “Ryan put in to transfer someplace I could also get my master’s.”
    “Uppsala?”
    “Yes,” I say, surprised. “I can’t believe you’ve heard of it. It’s only forty minutes outside the coldest place on earth.”
    “I had an exhibition there in ’02.” She tips forward onto her knees, legs still folded. “This is so great! I feel like it was total fate I ran into you. To be with someone who understands the whole Chapin thing, but gets that it doesn’t define you. Or means you don’t have to work.” She empties her glass in one gulp as some guys on the street outside are shouting for Tanya in a way that would make me, were I Tanya, turn out my lamp and lie still on the floor. “And yet I get so sick of people in the art community who have no manners. I love my friends, but I’m thirty-three. I have nothing in common with the people who go to parties looking to steal something.” She abruptly unfurls and lifts to standing on those boots in one motion, like Madonna doing yoga. After all these years she is still mesmerizing in a way very few people are, and if I were a man I would buy her art and send her cases of imported wine. “I’m starving. How do you feel about cheeseburgers?”
    That night she brings me to DuMont Burger, site of the best onion rings I have ever had. They are the size of Krispy Kremes and we polish off two orders over a surprising amount of shared laughs. Then back to her apartment to load me up with a box of dog-eared paperbacks, and a call to Clark’s limo to take us both home.
    As the car pulls up to drop her in front of the Xes’ building, I remember, with sudden nausea, that I have a date there not forty-eight hours from now. The driver pops out to open her door before the caped attendant can get there. “You okay?” she asks. “You went white.”
    “I used to work here. Ninth floor.”
    “The Xes?” she asks, a strawberry blond eyebrow arching. “The doorman says she’s ‘strict.’”
    “Oh, good. I was afraid the intervening decade might have softened her. Still strict. Excellent.”
    “I’ll give her your regards if we pass in the elevator.” She kisses my cheek in a last whiff of honeysuckle and swings her feet to the sidewalk.
    “Only if you want a fish put through your mail slot.”
    She cracks up. “Please let’s do this again soon. You have to come over and help me figure out what we’re doing with this place. Please .”
    “I would love that,” I say, meaning it.
    “It’s a date! And let me know how you like The Sixteen Pleasures. Okay, wish me luck on my first night.” With that, she hops out and he shuts her door. I watch as she disappears behind the brass-framed glass and a minute later the car cleaves from the curb to drive me north. I flip open my phone to check the latest text from Ryan: MTNG RUNNING N2 WEE HRS. NO WORRIES, CRAPPY. TALK TMRW. XO R
    Slouching into the leather, I dial one of the few people I know are still thinking full throttle at this hour.
    “Hello, bug.” Mom answers the phone. “I love having you in my time zone.”
    “And yet we’re still talking in the middle of the night.”
    “Eleven thirty is not the middle of the night and when did you get old? Hold on. It’s Nan,” she says to Dad. “Who else do I call bug?” She comes back to me. “When he has