What a colossal dickhead.
I look down at my forearm. The Sharpie digits are a blurred, blue mess, casualties of sweat and struggle. I scrub at them with my thumb, but they only smear further into a Rorschach blot of a failed encounter. I squint at it, trying to make out the name written there.Jon.
Jon!Thatwas his name! Jon with no H. What’s the point of spelling it like that? Maybe he’s a Jonathan. Either way, I’m going to think of him forever as Jon with no H, the guy whose name no longer matters.
I glance back down the street. The man is now a receding shadow under the uneven pools of light. As if feeling the weight of my glare, he half-turns. Our eyes meet across the distance. Without thinking, my arm comes up, my middle finger extended in a classic, unambiguous salute.
He shakes his head once, a gesture of utter dismissal, and disappears around the corner.
God. What a waste of good genetics.
I finally manage to hail another cab—it takes fifteen more minutes—and when I get home, the climb up the four flights to the apartment is a purgatorial journey. Each step sends a fresh ache through my feet, and my head pounds in time with my heartbeat. I fumble the key, stumble inside, and shed my boots like shedding a second skin.
I don’t bother with the lights. I walk straight into my room and collapse face-first onto the bed, still in my dress and scuffed jacket. The room tilts gently on the axis of my spinning head. The gritty texture of the sidewalk is still on my palms.
Then, it starts. A single, choked snort of laughter escapes me. Then another. It builds from my diaphragm, uncontrollable, wheezing, until I’m shaking with it, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, dampening my pillowcase.
I fought a man. For a fuckingtaxi. Not a metaphorical fight. A physical, grappling, ankle-grabbing, seat-clawing, shouting-in-the-street brawl.
The Annemarie Collier I was raised to be would have perished on the spot. Just keeled over, the victim of a sudden acute propriety embolism. That Annemarie knew how to properly pair a soup spoon with a bisque. That Annemarie could make polite, penetrating eye contact with a Guggenheim donor while discussing the socio-political undertones of Post-Impressionism. That Annemarie would have stepped aside. She would have offered the cab to the man with a serene smile, insisted he take it, and then waited in the rain with the quiet martyrdom of a nineteenth-century heroine, probably contracting a picturesque fever.
Annie, however? Annie had just tried to knee a stranger in the ribs over a Chevy Caprice with a broken AC.
The laughter finally subsides, leaving me breathless and hollowed out, but happy. A strange, bright peace settles in its wake. I didn’t win the cab, but I didn’t back down either. I met sheer, pigheaded will with my own, and for a few glorious, ridiculous minutes, I was not a Collier, not a runaway, not a charity case. I was a force of nature on a sticky sidewalk. It’s the most undignified, majestic thing that’s happened to me in years.
I close my eyes, the city’s perpetual noise as my lullaby and I think I fall asleep still smiling.
Chapter 5
LEO
My parents’ front door groans its familiar, rusty protest as I ease it open—a high-pitched, metallic whine that has been the herald of my arrivals and departures for thirty years. My father’s steadfast refusal to oil the hinges is a point of stubborn pride; he claims it’s a security system, as if the sound could deter anyone more determined than a mildly apologetic burglar.
The house is a living museum of quiet at this hour, a stark contrast to the kinetic energy that will fill it come morning with Emma’s presence. She’s here, sleeping upstairs, having spent the weekend with my parents. I’d used the time to wage war on the administrative hydra that is my academic life: grading a mountain of Intro to Neuroscience exams and reviewing half-baked research proposals from overeager grad students.
The real work, the heart of the crisis, had been the nanny search. TheVillage Voicead yielded a harvest of the improbable and the impossible. One respondent inquired about on-site housing, as if I were hiring a live-in governess for a country estate, not a babysitter for a walk-up. Another declared children under six “insufficiently intellectually stimulating.” Then there was the woman whose interest in my marital status was decidedly unprofessional.
I had one actual interview tonight. Teresa. Mid-forties, fifteen years of childcare experience, available immediately. We met at a café on Avenue B, next to a tattoo parlor and Lucky’s, which was blasting music loud enough that I could hear it through the café windows. The interview was at ten thirty because it was the only time that worked. I’d been at the lab until nine thirty monitoring a sleep study subject, and Teresa works as a home health aide during the day, which means her schedule is just as inflexible as mine.
I could have done a phone interview. It would have been easier, more convenient, taken less time. But I need to see the person who’s going to be around my four-year-old daughter all day. I need to look them in the eye and get a sense of who they are beyond a voice on the phone, which I’m glad I did.
Teresa seemed nice enough—warm and chatty as she told me about the three families she’d worked for previously. But she also kept touching my arm when she talked. Leaning in a little too close. At one point she asked if I was single, and when I said it was complicated, she said, “Complicated can be good. I can work with that.”
Then she told me she doesn’t believe in “too much structure” for kids. That children should be allowed to “explore their impulses” without restriction. Which sounds great in theory until you remember that my daughter’s impulses recently included locking a babysitter in the bathroom and cutting her other nanny’s hair off with kitchen scissors.
So. No Teresa.
Which means I’m back to square one, except now it’s past midnight and I’m bone-tired. I was closer to my parents’ house anyway, so I figured I’d just crash here for the night and take Emma home in the morning.
I walk through the living room as quietly as possible, even though the lights are still on. My parents’ house is bigger thanmost New York apartments—four bedrooms, an office, an actual dining room, a large kitchen. My father bought it in 1971, back when this neighborhood was affordable and before anyone called it “up and coming.”
The walls are covered in photos. Me and Maria as kids, gap-toothed and sun-browned, standing on a beach in Greece. My parents on their wedding day, their faces unlined by the struggle to come. A framed picture of the village in Crete where they grew up—white buildings, blue shutters, the Aegean stretching out behind them. They left in 1967, when I was five and Maria was two, because my father wanted something more than what their village could offer. More opportunity, more stability, a chance to build something of his own. So they moved to New York with two suitcases, two kids and a plan to open a restaurant.
It wasn’t easy. My father worked construction during the day and washed dishes at night to save money. My mother cleaned houses. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens with another Greek family for four years, all of us sharing space and meals and the dream that things would eventually get better.
They opened Roussos in 1976, and it almost bankrupted them twice in the first five years. But they kept going, kept working, kept building. Now it’s been open for almost eighteen years and people wait an hour for a table on the weekends.
Immigrants don’t get to fail. That’s what my father always said.You come here, you work hard, you make it work, Leonidas. There’s no plan B.
