Cover Page

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Melanie Abrams

Dedication

For Vikram

Epigraph to come

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CHAPTER ONE

WHEN THE TWO O’CLOCK BELL RANG, KIDS SWARMED THE ELEMENTARY school pickup zone, their backpacks dragging on the warm asphalt or slung upside down on their tummies. Tyler was usually one of the last children to arrive, but today he ran to the car and waved an orange construction-paper leaf in Josie’s face. “We made leaves,” he said. “There are deciduous trees and evergreen trees.” He held it out to her. “This is from a deciduous tree.”

“That’s great, Ty,” she said, and took it. He had drawn brown spidery veins down the middle, and on each point of the leaf was carefully printed the letters of his name. “Did you write this by yourself?”

“Of course,” he said, and snatched the leaf back. “And I cut it with left-handed scissors.” He climbed in the backseat and buckled himself beside the baby. “Twelve more days of first grade,” he said. “Where’s Mommy?”

“Home getting ready for the party tonight.” Josie looked in the rearview mirror and watched Tyler scowl.

“It’s Friday,” he said.

“I know, but today we had to make an exception to the rule,” she said.

“But it’s Friday.”

She looked back again and tried to change the subject. “How big is Australia again?”

“Australia is two point nine six million square miles and is located on the Indo-Australian Plate,” he said.

“Wow, that’s a lot of space.”

“China is over three point four seven million square miles and has one point two eight four billion people as inhabitants,” he said, and kicked the back of her seat in time with the syllables.

“Tell me more,” she said. It wasn’t the best way to avoid a tantrum, but it was one way, and she was too tired from reading about the burial rituals of the Konkomba all night to try any of the recommended “positive coping skills.”

Josie hadn’t wanted to be a nanny. She had moved from Santa Barbara to North Carolina and into the graduate dorms—small, cramped spaces with a shared kitchen and antiseptic-smelling bathrooms—and holed up with her books. She liked her classmates, went running every weekend with a girl from Boston, ate breakfast once a week with the head graduate TA, and she had met guys—slept with a graduate student in library science who could compare every part of her body to food (her hair was like honey, her eyes like the inside of a kiwi)—but she felt temporary and untethered. Then in October of her second year, she had been assigned Tyler’s first-grade class for her Ethnographic Research Methods seminar and everything had changed.