He looked over at me and smiled. “That’s right.”
“Are you religious?”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I do believe in a Higher Power. My mother would always give us scriptures to read whenever our emotions would get the best of us. She also told us that faith without works is dead. If we don’t believe in what we pray for, it’d never come to us.”
I nodded to agree with him. Maybe I wasn’t being intentional with my prayers to release this pain from my heart.
“How many siblings do you have?” I asked, pulling myself from going down the hurt road.
“Just my older brother, Bilal, and his wife, who acts like my blood sister. We don’t have a big family. It’s just always been me and my brother, so he vowed that once he got married, he was going to have eight kids. He got through half the battle already.” We both chuckled. “I also have a best friend who’s like anotherbrother to me, but he’s doing five up in the bricks. He has a couple of months left before he’s released.”
“Oh. I know this is a silly question, but do you want children of your own?”
“Of course. I only want two though. A boy and a girl. If not, I’ll take whatever the Big Homie sends my way.”
“Can I ask how old you are?”
“You can ask me anything you’d like, Ms. Alicia. Although all of my info is on the background check I gave you.” He smiled at me. “But I’ll be thirty-five in October.”
“I didn’t get a chance to read over it, but thank you for telling me.” He was a year younger than me, but somehow, he seemed older than he was.
“No problem at all.”
He pulled into the parking lot of Meijer and found a parking space. “A’ight, gang. We made it. Y’all ready to go crazy?”
The kids yelled in excitement again, and all I could do was smile at them. They had never beenthisexcited to go grocery shopping, but I saw Basil brought a different energy that even I felt good about.
“A’ight. Let’s get it. But let’s remember to be on our best behavior when we get inside so we can get everything we want. Cool?”
“Okay!” Chloe exclaimed.
“Gotcha, Mr. B!” Carsyn followed up.
“And I know you’re going to be good, right, little mama?” he said, reaching back and shaking Carlee’s foot. She giggled and smiled shyly. Right then, I knew my children had already taken a liking to this fine stranger with the killer smile.
And so had I.
After I tooka few calls and meetings that afternoon, I decided to go down to my gym to burn off this sexual energy that had built inside of me. I was partially conflicted because I wasn’t expecting Basil to be the one who took the job. Now that he was here, my hormones had taken over me, and I didn’t know if I could continue to allow him to be here.
He was so good with the kids, which made things much harder for me to decide whether I should let him go or let him stay. This was the most they had ever beenthiswell-behaved. When I’d take them anywhere, they were curious and touching everything, but with Basil, they were like little angels. They listened to him when he told them not to touch things, and if it was something they wanted, they would ask for it instead of grabbing it off the shelf and throwing it in the basket.
Where each day felt like a McDonald’s play place in my home, it was now much calmer since Basil had them doing activities to keep them occupied. Ms. Shelly and I would usually seclude them to one place and allow them to play freely, but Basil had them focusing on one activity at a time. In just a matter of five hours, this man had come into my home and given me peace where there was usually chaos.
While running my five miles on the treadmill and watching the video footage of them on the TV in the corner, my phone rang, interrupting the music that played on the Bluetooth. I slowed it down to a slow walk as I looked at the caller ID and saw it was my mother FaceTiming me.
I answered the call with a smile. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hey. You never called me to tell me how the new nanny is working out. Are you getting good vibes from her?”
I stopped the treadmill, took my phone out of the cupholder, and walked over to the bench to take a seat. “Him.”
“Pardon?”
“She is a he. I have a male nanny instead.”
She frowned and looked at me curiously. “They got those?”
I chuckled lightly. “He’s the owner of the business. There was a glitch in their system, so he had to be the one to come out.”
