Maybe This Time (10 page)

“The whole house is filthy,” Andie said. “Go nuts everyplace but the kitchen. Mrs. Crumb is in there with knives.”

“That's a good one,” the woman said. “We'll start at the top and work down.”

They all piled in, one of them stopping to say, “That driveway of yours is awful.”

“I know, I know, I'm getting it fixed,” Andie said.

“It's all right,” the woman said. “We'd have
climbed
down that bank to get to see into this house.”

“Oh. Uh, good,” Andie said, and went back to the kitchen where Mrs. Crumb was hyperventilating. “Look,” she said when she was facing the old woman, “you can't keep this place clean. No one person could keep this place clean.”

“This is
my house,
” Mrs. Crumb snapped, shaking with rage, even her teased red updo quivering now.

“No,” Andie said, when she heard the doorknocker again and went to let the cable guy in.

“That driveway,” he said, and she said, “I know, let me know if you need anything,” and then she went back to the kitchen to deal with the red-faced housekeeper again, only to be pulled back to the front door by a FedEx guy, who handed over a big box.

“I had to walk that down your driveway,” he said as she signed for the package. “You need to get that fixed.”

“Yeah,” Andie said, and then met Carter at the bottom of the stairs as he headed for the library. “Here,” she said, handing him the package. “This is addressed to you, and I have to deal with Mrs. Crumb before she knifes one of the cleaning people.”

She turned back to the kitchen but the knocker went again, this time a guy named Bruce who said he'd been sent to look over the house for repairs. “I walked around it,” he said slowly. “You gotta lotta work here.”

“Driveway first,” Andie said, “and then—”

Upstairs, Alice began to scream, “NO NO NO
NO NO NO,
” and Andie said, “Just make a list,” and ran for the stairs.

Once she'd gotten Alice's comforter away from the poor woman who was trying to put it in the laundry—“It's new,” she said, “it's okay”—and Alice and the comforter and Jessica-the-dead-blue-doll back down to the kitchen with some cocoa as an apology, she confronted Mrs. Crumb again.

Mrs. Crumb turned on her and spat,
“I'm not going to put up with this!”

“You're quitting?” Andie said, hope rising, but Mrs. Crumb saw the abyss and stepped back.

“You brought those women into
my house,
” she said, and pressed her lips together until her small mouth almost disappeared. “You had
no right
—”

“It's not your house,” Andie said calmly. “It's Carter and Alice's house. And they deserve to live someplace clean.”

Alice looked up at that, a cocoa mustache making a pinky-brown slash on her colorless face. Her topknot was now over her ear, and Jessica had a new brown splotch on her blue-white face.

“You are the house
keeper,
” Andie went on as she pulled out Alice's scrunchie and moved her topknot to the center of her head again, “which means you're supposed to keep the house in good condition, which you have not done because it's impossible for one person to do so.”
And because you haven't tried
. “Therefore I have
brought in people who will. You can assist them, you can ignore them, or you can leave. It's your choice.” She picked up the doll and wiped the cocoa off and part of the discolored paint came with it. “Sorry,” she said to Alice and handed the doll back to her.

Alice put the doll under her arm and drank more cocoa, watching as Mrs. Crumb turned an interesting shade of puce.

“I've been here for
sixty years,
” Mrs. Crumb said, and Andie started to slap her down and realized that it wasn't just rage, it was fear.

The woman had been at Archer House since her teens and she was in her seventies now. She wasn't going to get another job and the chances that she had much retirement were slim.
Oh, hell,
Andie thought. Torturing old ladies was not in her job description even if the old ladies were hags from hell. “I suggest that we have the Happy Housekeepers come in every week, and you supervise. After all, no one knows the house like you do.”

“Well,” Mrs. Crumb said, her breath slowing slightly.

“Somebody named Bruce is going to be doing some repairs, too,” Andie said, not adding,
And Mr. Archer would like to know where the money he gave you for that went.
Let North fight that battle.

“I don't know,” Mrs. Crumb said, but it was all bluster now.

“Is it lunch yet?” Alice said from behind them. “Because I would like a cheese sandwich. But no tomato soup.”

“How about chicken noodle?” Andie asked her.

“No. NO NO NO
NO NO
—”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Alice, it's soup, not poison.”

Alice looked at her darkly. “Maybe.”

“I'll make it, you try it.”

“No.”

“I made cookies last night. Try the soup, you can have a cookie.”

“No.”

“I said
try
it. One spoonful.”

“NO.”

“Fine.” Andie turned back to Mrs. Crumb, who seemed distracted now, her eyes darting like a cornered rat's, falling finally on Alice, slopping her cocoa onto the table.

“You be careful,” she snapped at Alice, her eyes cold on the little girl. “You're making a mess on my nice clean table.”

“It's not your table,” Alice said calmly. “It's mine. Andie said so.”

“We'll clean it up later,” Andie said, taken aback by Alice's use of her name.

“This ain't right,” Mrs. Crumb said, and Andie realized she was near tears. “I been here for sixty years. None of you was born yet but I was here. You don't know this house. You're
stirring things up
. You—”

“Which brings us to my next point,” Andie said. “You will stop talking about ghosts. I have no idea why you thought that was a good idea, but from now on the official position in this house is that there are no ghosts.”

Alice drained her cocoa cup. “I want my sandwich
now
.”

Andie got out the whole wheat bread as Mrs. Crumb said, “I never said there were no ghosts.”

“Yes you did,” Alice said, and Mrs. Crumb glared at her with absolutely no effect.

“Even if there were,” Andie said, “I don't see why a good housecleaning would upset them. They don't live in the dust.”

“Oh, they care,” Mrs. Crumb said to Andie, folding her arms over her orange-flowered apron. “You'll see they care.”

“For the last time, I do not believe in ghosts—” Andie began, and then Carter came into the kitchen with the box opened.

“It's computers,” he said, more confused than defiant, and Andie looked inside and saw two sleek Apple boxes holding Mac PowerBook 145s. She took the boxes out and put them on the table and found a note from Kristin that said, “Mr. Archer wanted to make sure the children had computers.”

“Those are from your Uncle North,” Andie said, showing him the note, thinking,
Thank you
. North never missed on the details.

“Who?” Alice said.

“Bad Uncle,” Andie told her. “They come with a graphics program,” she told Carter.

“What is it?” Alice said poking at her box. “Is it candy?”

“Better,” Carter said, and left with his Mac, undoubtedly heading for the library.

“You think you're so smart, but you're not,” Mrs. Crumb said. “All this change, all this stuff. It's bad.”

Andie gave up on the pity. “Mrs. Crumb, I do not want to have to fire you, but I will if you cause any more problems. You will keep the kitchen clean and you can supervise the Happy Whosis, but you will not tell any more stories about ghosts, and you will not make any more veiled threats, and you will either assist me with the cooking or get out of my way, and you will answer any questions I have without muttering. Is that clear?”

Mrs. Crumb's nostrils flared, but she said, “Yes.”

“Good,” Andie said, and finished making Alice's lunch.

When she was done, she put the sandwich in front of Alice.

“I think I'll have cookies,” Alice said.

“I think you won't,” Andie said.

Alice glared at her, and Andie glared back, and Alice put her headphones on and ate her sandwich, swathed in her pearls and her shells and her locket and her bat, pretending Andie didn't exist.

It's only a month,
Andie thought,
and no matter what North thinks, I can make it a month easy.

“It's mean not to give me a cookie,” Alice said.

Not that it mattered what North thought. He'd forgotten her already. He—

The doorknocker thudded again.

I'm going to get a scooter,
she thought, as she race-walked across the Great Hall and opened the door.

A deliveryman with a clipboard stood there. “We got a stove for a Mrs. Andromeda Archer.”

“A stove,” Andie said.

North had sent her a new stove.

“This the place?” the guy said.

“Yeah, this is the place,” she said, and silently apologized to North as they wheeled in her new stove, the latest model of the stove he'd bought her ten years ago. She hadn't asked then, but he knew. She hadn't asked now, but—

So he's good with stoves,
she thought, trying to dismiss the whole thing.

But he hadn't forgotten her.

“It means nothing,” she said to nobody, and went back to the kitchen to feed Carter.

That afternoon, while the cleaning crew worked around them, Andie sat the kids down in the library and explained their educational goals to them: They had to be up to their grade levels by January, and the only way she'd know that was if they took the achievement tests. Carter looked at his PowerBook with longing, and Andie handed him the curriculum. “Here's what you need to know. The notes from your last nanny said you had all your textbooks. I can go over this with you, or you can look it up and ask me for help when you hit a snag.”
Unless it's math; then we're both screwed.
She went over everything with him and then said, “Can you do this on your own?” He nodded. “Yell if you need me,” she told him, and turned to Alice.

“I'm not gonna do it,” Alice said, folding her arms.

“Too hard, huh?” Andie said. “Poor baby. Here, you can start with the kindergarten workbook.”

“I'm not in kindergarten!” Alice said, outraged.

“Oh, sorry.” Andie handed her the first-grade workbook.

“I'm not in first grade, either!”

“Prove it. Do the final test at the back of the book. I bet you can't.”

Alice grabbed the book and started working, bitching the entire time. Andie went to see how the cleaners were doing on the second floor—“You're going to need new linens everywhere,” one of the women told her, “this stuff is rotted through”—and checked to make sure the cable guy hadn't fallen in the moat—“You're ready to go,” he told her, “but it wasn't easy, all this stone, and some of it's loose”—and gave a glowering Mrs. Crumb instructions for dinner, and then went back to Alice and Carter.

“You've got cable TV,” she told Carter, who said, “Cool,” the first positive word she'd had from him, and then she turned to Alice.

Alice was working on the fourth-grade final test. Andie went back and checked the first-, second-, and third-grade tests. Perfect scores on first and second and near perfect on the third.

“How is this possible?” she asked Carter, showing him.

“The nannies weren't dumb and neither is Alice.” He held up the curriculum. “You got a test for this?”

“I can make one up,” she said, just as Alice pushed the fourth-grade final across to her.

“Can I have candy now?” she said.

“Candy?” Andie said, and Carter said, “They bribed her to work.” Andie shook her head at Alice. “No, no candy. Here's what you missed on the third-grade test.” She shoved the workbook back to Alice who looked outraged again. Alice was looking outraged a lot today.
Suck it up, Alice.
“We'll go over the questions you missed in a minute.” She looked back at Carter. “I'll make up the test for you to see if you've got the curriculum down, and then we'll figure out independent studies for you. I'm telling you now, I'm terrible at math, so we'll have to get you outside help there, but I'm a whiz at language skills, so there I've got you covered.” He gave her his usual blank stare, so she said, “I'll give you something to read, and we can talk about it—or not—and then you'll write a short paper on it. I'll show you.
It's easy. You just think about what you read, organize your thoughts, and write it down. As long as your arguments are clear and make sense, you're good. Math, of course, will still be math.”

He went back to the computer.

“These questions were wrong,” Alice announced, looking at the ones she'd missed.

Andie sighed and sat down with her and went through everything, including the fourth-grade test, which Alice had done pretty well on, considering she was a third-grader. “This is what we're going to be studying,” she told Alice. “Candy,” Alice said, and Andie worked out a series of rewards for her, including the right to pick out bedding for each of the ten bedrooms in the house and a dinner at Dairy Queen for every completed unit.

“The stove is exactly right,” she told North when she called him to thank him after the kids were in bed. “I'm making banana bread tonight in celebration. And the computer for Carter was a genius move.”

“Banana bread,” North said. “Send some of that up here, would you?”

“Sure,” Andie said, surprised he was asking for something. He never asked for anything. “I'm going to teach Alice to make cookies tomorrow. You want some of those, too?”