Over an hour later a navy blue station wagon came down the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. My windows were closed but I could see the little boy was crying when he got out of the car and the little girl was asleep as her mother pulled her out of the back and draped her on her shoulder. I supposed I should go down and help them unload the car of towels and beach toys or scoop up the sleeping girl and put her down on a bed somewhere, but I didn’t. I wasn’t in a hurry to become an employee. I stayed in my turret sprawled on my window seat until, a half hour later, there was a knock on my door and the job began for real.

It wasn’t difficult, at least not before Hugh arrived. Margaret made all the meals and Thomas, the man with the ice-cream cone head, did all the serving and the washing up. A lady named Mrs. Bay came for the laundry, including the disgusting cloth diapers that Kay, the children’s mother, insisted on using. When I met Kay the first day, she attached Elsie to one of my hands and Stevie to the other and said, “I’ve got to pee like a racehorse, Carol,” and dashed off. She came right back and gave me a hug and thanked me for coming, as if we were old friends and I’d stopped by to visit. I was aware of the age difference between us—I was fourteen and she was twenty-nine—but to her, because she spent her days with a two- and a four-year-old, I must have seemed older than I was. Kay was different around her mother, stiff and nearly silent. Mrs. Pike told us each morning in the breakfast room how the day would unfold. Kay nodded at her mother’s ideas—Mrs. Pike wanted her to see old friends, play tennis at the club, visit her old German tutor who had said she had so much promise—but as soon as her mother left the room to go to her desk after breakfast, Kay turned to me and hatched another plan.