I could only think about the cop I’d fucked because he’d fed me. I nodded. “When the mood strikes.”

“I know I’m sort of your boss,” she said. “But we can be friends. We’re probably not very different.”

“Did you have a nanny?” I asked after a beat, something I’d wondered often, while trying to figure out why Lonnie was so nice to me all the time. “What was your nanny like?”

“My first nanny? I loved her,” she said, shaking her head.

“How long did she work with you?” I asked.

“I was probably five or six when she left. After her there was a very strict woman. She taught me to behave properly, I guess. I have her to thank for teaching me manners, but I didn’t love her. My last nanny was a young girl, younger than we are now, and she let me do whatever I wanted, in secret.”

Lonnie explained how she hadn’t been allowed to watch television, but the nanny would warn her when she heard the elevator door slam in the hallway signaling her father’s return. I imagined a complicated walkie-talkie system, little Lonnie getting the radio signal and scrambling on skinny legs and oversized adolescent feet out of her father’s bedroom. I pictured her flopping onto her bed, throwing open a book, and glaring at the man over the top of the cover, daring him to interrupt her from her reading.

She also told me there had been a boyfriend who would come over when her father was out late. They probably waited for Lonnie to go to bed so they could fool around. They gave her junk food for dinner—whatever she wanted—and handed her cassette tapes—of Nirvana and Bikini Kill. I tried to imagine little Lonnie struggling to make sense of grunge and punk from the Northwest—the same music that had seemed a natural extension of my teenage existence—but within the context of her privileged childhood it somehow made less sense.

“Hair like this,” she said about the boyfriend, making a chopping motion on either side of her chin with her hands. “You know, and parted in the middle. Always greasy.”

“My So-Called Life,” I said.

She laughed. “Yes, exactly.”

“Are you in contact with any of them now?” I asked. “Do they know you had a baby?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know how to contact anyone.”

Lonnie stopped pushing the stroller. She turned to me and said, “I know you’re young, and maybe you don’t know what you want to do with your life, but I hope you’ll be with Billy for a while, Elle. I hope you’ll stay with us for a long time.”