Page 87 of Babies for the Boss
“Hello there. Nice of you to join me.”
She blinks her pale eyes at me, ancient and unfocused and entirely present, and I look back at her, and this is the mostawake I have been in my entire life. It took her four days to do it. What else is she capable of?
Four days versus the decades before her, and she has fundamentally changed everything in my life, including me. For her, I will do anything, be anything. Whatever she needs me to be.
EPILOGUE
MOLLY
Six Months Later
Hot coffee is a luxury item.I never knew that before becoming a mom.
I get to enjoy it this morning because Carrie Ann is here to backstop our parenting, but Pavel is somewhere in the house with both of the girls strapped to his chest in the double baby Bjorn. He ordered it after approximately two days of online research, and has worn it with the unselfconscious confidence of a man who has decided this is simply what he does now and requires no commentary from anyone.
The Bjorn is black. He specified black when he ordered it, because it matches his holster.
The house sounds alive these days. From somewhere down the hall, Pavel’s voice is doing the thing it does when he’s talking to the girls. At first, I thought that tone was him talking to his men, but then I heard him describing a butterfly in his work tone, and I was caught off guard. What I realized is that he talks to our girlswith the full engagement of a man who considers his audience capable of receiving the information he is delivering.
Today, it’s politics. “The geopolitical situation in the early twentieth century was considerably more complex than the standard narrative suggests. You will want to develop an independent framework for evaluating primary sources.”
I put my coffee down and press my hand over my mouth.
Carrie Ann, who has appeared with the expression she gets when Pavel is explaining things to the babies, looks at me. I look at her and say, “He’s been lecturing for about an hour.”
“He does it every morning.”
“Yesterday, he explained the structural weaknesses of the Bretton Woods system. I have no idea what that is, and tuned him out completely when he was going on about it, but they seemed very engaged.”
“They were asleep.”
“He knows that. He doesn’t consider it relevant. I think he thinks he can educate them subconsciously.”
Carrie Ann comes the rest of the way into the kitchen and pours herself coffee with the ease of a woman who has finally made herself at home. I am glad for it. Hiring her remains one of the better decisions I have made in a year of consequential decisions.
She came initially for a few weeks, and she’s still here in August, which is not how a few weeks works, but is how things work when you are Carrie Ann Kohler. I suspected she’d linger. Planned on it, in fact.
She has discovered that the Hamptons in summer are beautiful, and our professional kitchen is everything she imagined. And of course, the theater scene in New York has more opportunities than Manhattan, Kansas, ever offered.
She has been on nine auditions in the past two months. She hasn’t booked anything yet, but that’s a part of the business, according to her. Each rejection is met with cooking elaborate meals, reading in the library, and occasionally going very still in the hallway when Igor passes through.
I have not said anything about that in several weeks. I’m letting it develop at whatever pace it develops at, which is grating. They are two extremely self-contained people who are both very aware of the other person, and neither of whom is going to do anything about it until they have decided to do something about it.
It has been difficult to remain silent and neutral and let it play out, but I’m determined to give them their space. No matter how much I want to lock them in a room together until they’re a couple.
“He’s not going to let us take them today,” Carrie Ann says, sitting across from me at the table with her coffee.
“He will. I’ve already told him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he would consider it.”
“That means no.”
“That means he’s going to agree after we have a conversation about the security protocols for the afternoon, and then he’s going to spend forty-five minutes verifying that you know all ofthem, and then he’s going to call Igor three times in the first hour we’re gone.” I look at her over my coffee cup. “It’s fine. He comes around.”
Carrie Ann tilts her head. “You’re very good at managing him.”
