I was startled when some lady appeared right behind me, holding a pot of steaming coffee. She was Asian, very small, age indeterminate.
“This is Mary,” Madison said.
“I can make anything you want,” the woman said, her accent possibly British. Or maybe just so elegant that it felt European. It wasn’t Southern, that’s all I knew. She wasn’t smiling, but maybe she wasn’t supposed to smile. I kind of wished she were smiling. It would make it easier to ask her for a giant bacon sandwich.
“Just coffee is fine,” I said, and Mary poured me a cup and then returned to the kitchen. I wondered how many people were employed by Jasper Roberts. Was it ten? Or maybe fifty? Or was it a hundred or more? Any of these seemed believable. Just then, as if conjured by my curiosity, a man wearing suspenders and a big floppy hat walked across the backyard; he was holding a rake like a soldier marching with a rifle.
“How many servants do you have?” I asked Madison, who stiffened. I couldn’t tell if I was doing this on purpose, trying to make her feel bad about being so filthy rich.
“More than we probably need,” she finally said. “But they’re not servants. They’re employees. It’s like running a cruise ship or something like that. It’s just that a place this big has a lot of things that have to get done and a lot of people who have specific abilities. But I know all their names. I can keep track of them.”
“And now you have me,” I said.
“You’re not an employee,” she said cheerfully. “You’re my friend who is helping me out.”
I drank the coffee and it was really good, the taste so complex that it made me realize that I was going to have to get rid of my expectations of how things worked. I was used to break-room coffee so thin that I had to dump a pound of sugar into it just to make it taste like something. The pizza we’d eaten the night before had been so fresh that I could taste the tomatoes in the sauce. The crust had been just slightly charred. I was finally, after twenty-eight years, going to experience things the way they had been intended. No more knockoffs.
“What do you have to do today?” I asked Madison, and then I added, “What do I have to do today?” which was more important to me.
“You can just relax. You can take a walk and get familiar with the grounds. This afternoon we’ll go into Nashville and buy some clothes and necessities. Oh, and Jasper is going to be home this evening; he’s flying back from D.C. I wanted him to meet you.”
“How often is he around here?” I asked.
“Less than you’d think,” she said. “He has a lot of work in Washington; he has an apartment there. But I see him enough; he’s big on family, you know.”
I didn’t know that at all. After all, the whole reason that I was here was to take care of his primitive, as-good-as-orphaned kids. Then I realized that this was just Madison going over talking points. She had a faraway look in her eyes. I knew that, over time, she’d forget herself and I’d learn what was wrong with Senator Roberts. I could wait.
“I’m going to take Timothy to day care and then when I come back, we’ll go explore. Sound good?” she offered.
“That’s cool,” I said. I wanted another cup of coffee but didn’t know if it was impolite to go get it myself. Or was it worse to call for Mary just to refill my cup? I knew that whatever I chose would be the wrong thing. I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.
“Say goodbye to Lillian,” Madison instructed Timothy.
The boy dabbed at his little mouth with a napkin, the most dainty and infuriating thing I’d seen in my life. Only then did he look at me and say, “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Tim,” I said, hoping that the boy would be annoyed by this abbreviating of his name. And already I was fucking up. I needed to get Timothy to like me. Or I needed to learn how to like him. He was practice. Until the twins arrived, he was my one shot to figure out how to talk to, how to behave around, how to tolerate a child.
I tried to think of the times when I had willingly interacted with children. One time, some little kid had gotten lost in the aisles of the Save-A-Lot. I was changing the price on some cereal boxes, and I suddenly noticed her, like a ghost had materialized just for me. She was doing that thing where her eyes were real wide while she put every bit of effort into trying not to cry. I cautiously held out my hand. She took it easily, without question, and we walked in silence through the store until we reached the last aisle and her dumbass fucking mother was standing in the freezer section, looking at Lean Cuisines, no clue her daughter had almost been abducted. Before I could mutter some real passive-aggressive stuff to the mom, the girl simply squeezed my hand so I’d look down at her. Then she kissed the top of my hand, slipped out of my grasp, and ran to her mother, leaving me there. For a few seconds, I wanted to scoop up the girl and keep her. I opened the freezer door to some Popsicles and held my head in the cold until I felt normal again, until the girl and her mom had moved out of sight. I was so out of it that I ended up stealing an entire country ham at the end of my shift just to take my mind off of that girl. For the next few weeks, I kept hoping she’d return, but I never saw her again. Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.
I stayed at the table, even after Madison and her son had left the room. I noticed that Madison hadn’t eaten much of the cottage cheese, so I reached over and pulled the bowl to me. Just as I took my first bite, Mary reappeared, teleported probably, and was refilling my coffee cup. “I could have made you some food,” she said. “You only have to ask.”
“Oh, well, I just thought I’d eat this. You know, like, I didn’t want it to go to waste.”
“Scraps,” Mary said. I couldn’t tell if Mary was sympathizing with me or making fun of me. If I wasn’t sure, I generally just assumed that someone was making fun of me. But I couldn’t punch her. Not yet, not until I learned how essential she was to the whole operation. And then I took a sip of that amazing coffee, and I relaxed. This is luxury, I told myself. Don’t fuck it up by punching the help and getting your ass kicked out of paradise.
“Could I have a bacon sandwich?” I asked Mary. She nodded and effortlessly reached around me and removed the bowl of cottage cheese and blueberries.
I took my coffee and walked behind Mary to the kitchen. “I’ll bring it to you,” she said, looking over her shoulder.
“I’ll come with you,” I told her. “I feel weird at the table by myself.”
She opened a refrigerator that was as big as a car and removed a huge package of bacon. She slapped so many strips in a pan; it must have been a pound. Without ever looking at me, she sliced a loaf of fresh bread and put two pieces in a toaster that looked like both the fifties and the future.
“How long have you been working for Madison?” I asked Mary.
She didn’t respond until the toast popped up. “I have worked for Jasper Roberts for eleven years.”
“Do you like it?” I asked.
“Do I like work?” she asked, frowning. There was an edge to her, but I understood why. Every time the supermarket hired some new doofus, all I wanted to know was how much extra work I was going to have to do to make up for what they didn’t know, how many of their fuckups might blow back on me. But I’d win Mary over. My fuckups affected only me. She’d be safe.