I swallowed the urge to ask,Your brother talked about me? When?Since I wasn’t, in fact, a crush-obsessed teenager giggling with my friends in the school lunchroom. “Guilty,” I said instead, and dunked another kettle into the soapy water. We were both swathed in aprons, my arms swaddled to the elbows in ugly blue rubber gloves.
“So, what are you doing here? Did you, like, quit?”
“Nope.” Not yet. Sarah’s words replayed in my head: “Let’s give it the summer…. The break will do you good. We can make a fresh start in August.”
I swished the inside of the pot. “I thought my mom could use the help.”
Hailey nodded. “That’s what Joe says.”
I thought of the way he’d walked into my parents’ house without knocking, like he lived there. The way he’d casually fixed my bike. “He does seem to be around a lot.”
“It was cool when I was little.” She sanitized and rinsed the kettle. “But I don’t need him to be my babysitter anymore.”
Heat rose to my face like steam. She was talking about Joe helpingtheirmother, not mine.
“And I don’t need your mom to keep an eye on me, either. No offense,” Hailey added. “She’s been really nice to me.”
I imagined my mother being nice—reallynice—and smothered a completely inappropriate yearning. “I’m glad.”
I chucked a batch of scrapers into the sink. Hailey hoisted the pot onto the rack over the sink to dry.
We fell into a rhythm, working side by side.Wash, rinse, sanitize, repeat.Mom could say all she liked about taking satisfaction in a job well done, but dishwashing was boring, repetitive work—labor without reward.
“She didn’t have to hire me,” the girl confided. “She only gave me a job because Joe asked her to.”
Teenagers, I thought with amusement. Like wild animals, they were more at ease communicating without eye contact. How many times had I invited a student to stay after class, arranging chairs or shelving books, so they would tell me what was bothering them? Or followed my dad around, watching him focus on some project while I talked to the back of his head?
“I was really looking forward to taking a break,” Hailey said.
“From school?” I prodded gently.
“Fromeverything. But Joe doesn’t want me to stay home by myself.”
“I get it. I need time to myself, too.” That’s why I’d come home, after all. To find my way forward. To discover if there was anything in my laptop files / career / relationship worth salvaging or if I needed to scrap it all and start over.
“He thinks I’m lazy.”
I’d heard that one, too.Lazy, disorganized, absent-minded…“Did hesaythat to you?”
“No,” she admitted. “He says I spend too much time on TikTok.”
I grinned. “Doesn’t everybody?” I ran water over the scrapers, shifting my weight from foot to foot. “Although he might just possibly have a point. You don’t want to spend the next three months alone in your room scrolling on your phone.” Or staring at a blinking cursor, waiting for inspiration to strike.
“He doesn’t trust me.”
I thought of what she’d said about not having any friends. “Or he’s worried you’ll be lonely.”
She flushed. “He thinks I’m going to burn the house down. Just because I didn’t turn off a burner on the stove that one time. Okay, twice. But the house didn’t catch fire, right? I’m not irresponsible. I’m not stupid. I was busy. I forgot.”
I could have been listening to an echo of my younger self. Or my current self, honestly. “Sure. It’s normal to get distracted sometimes.”
“Tell that to my brother. He still treats me like I’m six.”
Me, too.“He used to call me Pest.”
That earned a genuine smile.
“Maybe this is the summer to show him who you are now,” I suggested. “Make him see that you’ve grown up.”
