The back seemed to me no less fancy than the front, fewer stairs to reach the door but the same carved columns and stone balustrade around a wide veranda. The man from the road was waiting for me, along with a woman in a striped dress and white shoes. They led me up and into the house, through a dark hallway to a pantry with a square table covered in checked oilcloth and three mismatched chairs.

The woman asked me if I was hungry, and though I said I wasn’t, she brought out saltines and slices of orange cheese. She pressed a small wheel with spokes into an apple and produced eight even wedges and threw away the core. The two of them sat down with me. I wondered why, if they had this whole house, we were in such a small, dreary room.

“Where are your children?” I asked the woman. I figured she was more my direct boss than the father.

I’d never seen a grown-up blush before. Hers was instant, the way mine was, and the worst shade imaginable, as if the blood itself were just about to spill out. “I don’t have any,” she said. Sweat glinted above her lip and she stood quickly to bring my plate to the sink.

The man laughed. “The children you’re to be taking care of don’t belong to either of us! Show her upstairs and straighten the poor girl out.”

I followed the woman up three flights of back stairs, uncarpeted wooden steps with a greasy banister and a potato chip smell. We turned out onto a wide corridor full of light from long high windows that framed the blue sky above us. We passed at least five bedrooms until she pointed to one on the left, as if she were just now choosing it for me. But when I peeked in I saw a set of towels at the foot of the bed and my mother’s green suitcase on a wooden rack. It felt for a moment as if I would find my mother, too, in the room when I stepped in, but when I did it was empty. I’d forgotten she’d driven the suitcase over on Sunday. The woman told me her name was Margaret and that she would be downstairs in the kitchen whenever I needed her.

“The littles have gone to the beach with their mum but should be back for naptime. They’ll come find you then, I’m sure.” Her accent wasn’t like the man’s. Foreign, but different. I realized they might not be married at all.