“What?!” Dr. Cone yelled from the bottom of the stairs.
“Mommy!” Izzy yelled.
“Richard! Izzy! Come up!”
It was more hollering than I’d ever heard in my own house. Once, just before bedtime, my mother had loudly said “Damn it!” when she’d stepped on a shard of glass from a plate I’d dropped in the kitchen earlier in the day. I had thought the world was about to cave in like a tar-paper shack being consumed by fire. It wasn’t only the words; I’d never seen my mother barefoot before. My eyes must have been bugging out of my head as I watched her pull the shard from her heel.
“Mary Jane,” my mom had said, “go upstairs and fetch my slippers so I can mop this floor the right way.” She had stood over my shoulder and supervised when I had mopped up after breaking the plate. Obviously, I hadn’t done a good job.
“Why are you barefoot?” I asked.
My mother only said, “This is why we should never be barefoot. Now go get the slippers.”
“You come down!” Dr. Cone yelled up the stairs. “Izzy made something!”
“I made something!” Izzy yelled.
“Mary Jane is here!” Mrs. Cone yelled back.
“Who?” Dr. Cone shouted.
“MARY JANE! The summer nanny!”
I smiled nervously. Did Dr. Cone know I had been hired to work in his house? And how much hollering could go on before someone moved closer to the other person?
“Mary Jane!” Izzy’s feet made a muted thunk thunk thunk as she ran up the stairs and into the bedroom. She had a face from a Victorian Valentine’s card and the energy of a ball of lightning. I liked her already.
I bounced back and received the hug.
“She’s been so excited for you to get here,” Mrs. Cone said.
“Hey. So good to meet you!” I ran my fingers through Izzy’s coppery-red curls, which were half knotted.
“I made something!” Izzy turned from me and hugged her mother. “It’s downstairs.”
Dr. Cone appeared in the doorway. “Mary Jane! I’m Richard.” He stuck out his hand and shook mine, like I was a grown-up.
My mother thought it was nice that I’d be working for a doctor and his wife for the summer. She said that a house with a doctor was a respectable house. The outside of the Cones’ house certainly looked respectable; it was a rambling shingled home with blue shutters on every window. The landscaping was a little shabby （there were dirt patches on the lawn and half the hedges were dead and looked like the scraggly arms of starving children）， but still, my mother never would have guessed at the piles of things lining the steps or strewn down the hall or exploded around the room where we stood just then.
And my mother also never would have imagined the long sideburns Dr. Cone had. Tufty, goaty things that crawled down his face. The hair on his head looked like it had never been combed—just a messy swirl of brown this way and that. My own father had a smooth helmet of hair that he carefully combed to the side. I’d never seen a whisker or even a five o’clock shadow on his face. No human under forty would have ever called my father anything but Mr. Dillard.
If my father knew I was working for a doctor’s family, he would have approved. But he didn’t pay much attention to matters concerning me. Or concerning anyone, really. Each night, he came home from work, settled into his chair by the living room window, and read the Evening Sun until my mother announced that dinner was ready, at which point he moved into the dining room, where he sat at the head of the table. Unless we had a guest, which was rare, he continued to read the paper while Mom and I talked. Every now and then my mother would try to include him in the conversation by saying something like “Gerald, did you hear that? Mary Jane’s English teacher, Miss Hazen, had a poem published in a magazine! Can you imagine?”
Sometimes my dad responded with a nod. Sometimes he said things like That’s nice or Well, I’ll be. Most often he just kept on reading as if no one had said a word.
When Dr. Cone stepped deeper into the room and kissed Mrs. Cone on the lips, I almost fainted. Their bodies were pressed together, their heads only an inch apart after the kiss as they whispered to each other. I would have listened in, but I couldn’t because Izzy was talking to me, pulling my hand, picking up things from the floor and explaining them to me as if I’d grown up in Siberia and had never seen American toys. Of Legos she said, “You click the blocks together and voilà!” Then she threw the blocks she had just coupled straight into the air. They landed, nearly invisible, in a heap of Fisher-Price circle-headed kids that lay beside their upside-down yellow school bus.