Hairy’s bowling ball-sized brown eyes blink at me.
What now?I silently plead with the canine. I expected a list of instructions. Maybe a schedule. But the dog just looks at me like,How am I supposed to know? I’m a dog.
Looks like I’ll be improvising—my favorite.
“How about some breakfast?” I ask Imogen. I’m done talking to the unhelpful dog.
“Okay. What do you want? There’s cereal.” Imogen hops off the couch and grabs my hand with her sweaty little fingers, pulling me toward the suite’s kitchen. “You should eat fast. We need to fix your smell.” I can tell she’s trying to breathe through her mouth. Poor thing.
“No, not for me. For you. Have you had breakfast?”
The little girl wanders ahead of me. “Not yet. I can make something, too. Want some eggie toast? That’s what Nan likes, ‘specially when her head hurts in the morning.”
I have so many questions, but my stomach makes me start with food, since I skipped breakfast while I washed and re-washed my hair. “What’s eggie toast?” I slide onto a metal barstool at the white marble counter.
“You’ll see. I learned how to make it from YouTube. First, I need a pan.” She opens and closes a few of the cupboards until she finds the pristine, unused frying pan that every suite is equipped with. Her small, nightgown-covered behind pokes out from the fridge and she emerges with eggs and a bag of shredded cheese.
I move to help her—not keen on mopping eighteen eggs off of this tile—and watch with wide eyes as the tiny girl drags a chair over to the stove. She stands on it and sprays cooking spray into the pan, lighting the gas burner before I realize what she's doing. “Uh, wait. Are you allowed to do this?”
“Yep. My dad says I make the best eggie toast ever.” She uses a drinking glass to carve a circle out of the center of two pieces of whole wheat bread. She butters them on both sides and they sizzle when she drops them into the pan. It’s clear that she’s done this more than once. She tosses the bread circles to Hairy, who swallows them in one gulp without chewing. These two have a system. This must be how she keeps Hairy from biting off her face—bribery.
“This is the funnest part.” She messily cracks an egg into the hole of each slice of bread and sprinkles cheese over the whole thing. “I made up the putting cheese on it. The eggie toast on YouTube doesn't have cheese. At home I put some onion powder on it, too. That’s real yummy, but I don’t have any. When you do the next food order, can you get some?”
Food orders are the kind of thing that would be explained on a list of instructions.That’s why instructions are so important, I grumble to myself. I’ll be figuring that out, I guess. “Sure.”
When she flips the toast to cook the other side, the cheese sizzles and the aroma of cheese, toast, and eggs fills the room. My mouth is watering and I realize I’m hungrier than I thought. And once again, I think I love this child.
You’re doing a job, I remind myself.Short term.
A white plate appears in front of me on the counter and a spatula slides the egg creation onto it. Imogen drops her toast onto another plate and drags her chair right next to mine. I lift the toast to my mouth, taking a huge, cheesy, delicious bite. Heaven. I am nannying a chef.
“Wait,” she grabs my hand, “We need to say the blessing. Open your mouth.”
“Open my mouth?”
“To bless the food in your tummy.”
She watches me. A beat passes. Her blue eyes are a mirror image of her father’s. She’s serious, waiting for me to open my mouth so she can bless the food. Our eggie toast is getting cold.
My eyebrows furrow and I open my mouth.
She nods, pinches her eyes closed, and blesses the food. But she doesn’t stop there. “And please help Dad to not get hurt at work. Please help Hairy be a good girl. Thank you for Hairy. Thank you for this eggie toast I made. Thank you for my new nanny, Sunny. Please help us get the smell off of her because it is really stinky. The end.”
The end? I wait for more. She drops my hand and I realize that’s it. “Uh, amen.”
“The smell is in here, too,” Imogen informs me from her booster seat in the back of my car. She helped me find it in the suite and showed me how to put it in the backseat. She really is sharp for a little kid.
She’s buckled in and we’re making our way back to the resort from the grocery store. We picked up hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, along with some powerful shampoo. I’m crossing my fingers that it works. We’ll see. The home remedy video Imogen found was convincing, but it might singe the hair off my scalp. It will be worth it as long as it gets rid of the skunk funk.
How mortifying. To think I actually felt confident knocking on Anders Beck’s door this morning. I had my post-run endorphins pumping me up and my cutest jeans giving me false hope. But I will never forget the look on his face when I squeezed past him into the suite. That’s not a look a girl wants to see on anyone, least of all an unearthly handsome man. I feel my face getting hot as the moment replays in my mind on a loop. I’m going to find and destroy that A-hole skunk.
“I like it here.” Imogen says dreamily, gazing out the windows at the tiny desert town I’ve always called home. “It’s easy.”
“Easy?”
“Yep. It's not so crazy. There’s not so many people everywhere.”
Huh. “Is it crazy at your house?”
