Page 1 of Worst Nanny Ever (Babes of Brewing #2)

CHAPTER ONE

TRAVIS

A scream rips through the house, loud enough that the noise-cancelling headphones I’m wearing don’t do jack.

I hurl myself out of bed, forgetting the rumpled blankets wrapped around my legs and plunge headfirst onto the floor, face-planting hard enough that my forehead bounces off the wood flooring.

Yup. That really hurts. But I can’t focus on the pain because my son is still screaming. It feels like the sound is inside of my head. It’s the wind powering my anxiety tornado.

Is there an intruder?

Or…is Ollie dying? Maybe he has some awful medical diagnosis his mother didn’t disclose to me when she dropped him off on my doorstep a month ago with nothing but a single suitcase.

Is he homesick?

Does he miss his mother?

Then there’s the other, more persistent, thought—I’ve known I’m a father for all of a month, and I’m already failing.

I stagger to my feet, my head aching, my headphones askew. The sound of my band’s music is still blasting out of them. I throw them onto the bed and charge out the door with renewed determination and the beginnings of a really awful bruise just beneath the birthmark on my forehead.

A few seconds later, I burst into Ollie’s bedroom.

It’s not pitch dark, because there’s a night-light in here, purchased after he woke up weeping on his first night in my house.

I’d felt like a jackass for not realizing most kids his age are afraid of the dark.

Though I work with children in my after-school music program, The Missing Beat, they’re all older than Ollie.

Teenagers. I’ve discovered there’s a world of difference between seven and thirteen.

Thanks to that night-light, I can see my son’s wide eyes. His serious little face. For a second there’s no recognition in his gaze, but at least he stops screaming.

“Oh, it’s you, Travis,” he says after a moment. He sounds disappointed, like he’d really hoped an intruder would have come in instead.

My head is throbbing, my breath coming in pants.

“Are you okay?” I ask in a gush, leaning over to catch my breath.

“No,” he says, his little cheeks pink, his eyes shining. “I just had a nightmare that my mother left me at a stranger’s house, and I woke up here .”

Well, shit. I don’t know what to say to that. There’s no denying it’s true. Up until just over a month ago, I didn’t know I had a son, and Ollie thought he had a different father.

“This is your home,” I say, because it sounds comforting.

It’s also true. Right now, my house is the only home he has.

Years ago, his mother Lilah left me for a very rich, very old record producer before she realized she was pregnant.

Her solution was to marry him and pretend Ollie was his child.

He and Ollie had both believed it up until last month.

The truth had come out thanks to one of those home DNA tests and a justifiably suspicious family who hadn’t wanted his millions going to Lilah.

The geezer had thrown them both out, as if all of the years he’d spent with Ollie had meant nothing.

Asshole.

I did one of those DNA tests too, after Ollie came to live with me, and it confirmed that he’s my son. I didn’t really need the test, though. He could have stepped out of my childhood photos. Looking at him stirs up memories I’d thought I’d made peace with years ago.

“This definitely isn’t my home,” he says, folding his knees up and wrapping his skinny arms around them. He looks so painfully small like that, wrapped up like a pretzel. It hurts to look at him, to want to protect him but not know how .

I sit at the end of his bed. The spare bedroom still looks the same as it did when he first arrived—a double bed with a white comforter, a nondescript bureau, a desk with a chair, and a framed photo of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Why don’t we go to the store and get some stuff for your room?” I suggest, not for the first time. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“No,” he says, tightening his arms around his legs. “My mom’s going to come back.”

Not anytime soon, she’s not. She made it very clear it was my turn with Ollie— indefinitely —and then boarded a plane to Australia to follow her new boyfriend’s band.

She has called all of twice to check on him.

A lawyer helped me secure emergency temporary custody, and I plan to seek sole custody as soon as Ollie has been with me for sixty days, which would legally qualify as child abandonment in North Carolina. While I might not know what to do with him, at least I would never abandon him .

“Sure,” I say. “But while we’re waiting, we might as well have a little fun, huh?”

“You’re not fun,” he says flatly. “You don’t have any toys, or anything interesting in this house besides your drums, and you won’t even let me play them. This place is a prison.”

Ouch.

I bought him a train set the week he got here in mid- September, nearly a month into the school year, but he insisted it was a boring baby toy.

I asked if he wanted anything else, and he told me he wanted nothing from me.

The only toy he’s accepted is a stuffed sloth my best friend Rob gave him.

He also calls Rob “Uncle Rob,” while I’m still just Travis.

“What about Winnie?” I ask, referring to the new nanny. “She’s always got that cool fun pack with her.”

We’ve had three nannies. Three, in five weeks. That has to be some kind of record.

The first nanny quit because Ollie asked her not to sing to him anymore, and when she pressed him for a reason, he said her voice sounded like a dying parrot’s.

I told him not to be rude and found a new nanny.

She quit because he didn’t say a word to her. Not one word in two weeks.

He admitted he’d only given her the silent treatment because I’d told him not to be rude.

Now we’re on Nanny Number Three, Winnie, and she seems perfect.

She’s young, pretty, and has a degree in early childhood education.

Better yet, she’s got that fun pack of activity books, markers, bubbles, and other kid-centric crap like stretchy hands that probably leave stains on the walls.

(I would have worried about that last month; I couldn’t care less now.) Ollie smiled the first time he saw her stash of goodies, which I figured was a good sign.

“I don’t think she’s coming back,” he says flatly.

The ache in my head instantly gets worse.

“What happened?” I ask, massaging my forehead. My band has a show at a brewery tomorrow night, and Winnie was supposed to watch him.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says.

“I didn’t say you did.” Although, let’s be honest, he totally did. Ollie is smart—his teacher, Mrs. Applebaum, told me he’s several grade levels above his peers—and he’s devoted his considerable intelligence to his new goal in life: making me miserable.

Let this be said for my son: he is very goal driven.

In addition to driving away two—possibly three—perfectly good nannies, he has written his math homework on the walls (to check if the markers are actually washable; they’re not), destroyed ten of my vinyl records because he “thought they were frisbees,” nearly burned down the house by microwaving metal, and stuck spiky dried sweet gum balls beneath the sheets of my bed (he denies it, but how else would they have gotten there?).

Don’t even get me started on how he keeps calling his teacher Mrs. Applebottom.

Rob says Ollie’s just acting out to get attention. I get it. His world has imploded, but my world has imploded too.

For years, I’ve been keeping my anxiety at bay by closely controlling every aspect of my environment at home, and now I’m in control of nothing.

I’ve barely slept. I stay up for hours, waiting for Ollie to scream or to start roaming the house in the middle of the night.

My mind is a constantly whirling tornado of intrusive thoughts.

“I know you hate me,” Ollie says, glaring at me with burning eyes.

“I don’t hate you,” I say softly .

What I do feel for him would be harder to put into words.

I didn’t have any time to wrap my brain around the idea of him before I was dealing with the reality.

He’s my son, and I love him, but it’s not like any kind of love I’ve ever experienced.

My feelings for him ache, and they’re awful—protectiveness wrapped in worry, encased in a shell of inadequacy.

“If you cared about me, you’d ask Hannah to be my nanny.”

Oh, Christ, not this again.

Hannah is Rob’s girlfriend’s friend. They brought her over here once, on the day Ollie was first dropped off.

Honestly, I barely remember that evening.

I was struggling to process the fact that I was a father, not of a baby, but of a fully formed seven-year-old boy who is probably smarter than I am.

Rob and his girl Sophie took off, but Hannah volunteered to stay behind and hang out with Ollie for a while.

She watched some cartoons with him and made him mac and cheese.

Everything seemed to be going well—she has a knack for talking to kids—and she said she was cool with me leaving them alone for a while.

I needed to play the drums in the (mostly) soundproof music room.

It’s one of the only things that helps me work through my emotions so I can feel like a functional human being.

When I came back, Hannah was playing Cards Against Humanity with Ollie, both of them laughing hysterically.

“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified.

“We’re having fun,” my son said, giving me a dark look. The first of many.

“Oh, relax,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “I took out all of the bad cards.”

“But they’re all bad,” I stammered. “That’s the whole point.”

I mean…who plays Cards Against Humanity with a seven-year-old kid ?

Ollie might be a genius, but he’s still a child.

I announced it was time for her to go home, Ollie told me he hated me for the first time, and now he asks about her every few days, like clockwork.

“Hannah’s not a nanny,” I remind him for the hundredth time.

“She doesn’t have another job right now. She told me.”

“That doesn’t make her a solid employment prospect. And, again, she has no relevant childcare experience.”

“She helped raise her little brother,” he counters. “Now he’s a chef in Boston, so he must have turned out okay.”

“Every chef I’ve ever met is mentally unbalanced.”

He gives me a hard look. “That’s not very nice, Travis. You told me not to make assumptions about people.”

After he’d told another boy he mustn’t be very smart because he thought the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were real.

I massage my temples again, which doesn’t help at all.

“Why don’t I have one of those?” Ollie asks, pointing at my forehead.

I rearrange my hair over the port-wine birthmark, which is small enough to be hidden. “Genetics works in funny ways. Consider yourself lucky you inherited my fingers instead.”

“You can’t inherit fingers, Travis,” he objects.

But he did. His hands are tiny versions of mine. It filled me with awe the first time I noticed, a more profound kind of wonder than when I first heard a song I’d recorded broadcast on the radio.

“Well, you’d know. You’re the brains in this operation, Ollie.”

“I didn’t get those from you either.”

I sigh.

“Or from my mother. She doesn’t care about facts. ”

That’s for damn sure. Lilah is wild. The time we’d spent together was fun, but it had felt like riding a roller coaster with no exit or ending.

This is a guess—an assumption, if you will—but Hannah is a bit like that too. She’s the life of every party she goes to, but bright lights can be blinding.

I’m a man who believes in learning from the past, so I’ve tried to stay away from her.

It’s hard, and not just because Ollie is so fixated on her.

She’s Rob’s girlfriend’s best friend, and Sophie goes to a lot of our shows.

So Hannah does too. And whenever she’s there, I find myself watching her.

Soaking in the details of her, even the slight look of contempt she seems to reserve just for me.

But I don’t want to think about Hannah right now. I don’t want to think about anything but my pillow….and whether it’ll hurt to lie down now that I’ve bruised my forehead.

“Will you be able to get back to sleep?” I ask.

“I’m going to read my science facts book for a while,” Ollie says, flicking on the small lamp next to his bed. “And then I’ll try. Are you going to call Hannah?”

“I don’t know,” I mutter, feeling defeated.

“You didn’t say no!”

He sounds so excited that I’m positive he won’t be going back to sleep. He’ll probably wander around the house again, knocking things over. Watching TV. Waking up the neighbors.

“Good night, Ollie,” I say, leaning forward to hug him.

He’s wooden in my arms, but he doesn’t pull away.

“I want you here, kid. I’m glad you’re here.”

Not true. Also not a lie.

“Okay,” he says. Which is better than if he’d told me I was full of BS, I guess.

I go back to my room, feeling beyond exhausted.

Which is when it occurs to me …

I can’t bring him to the show tomorrow. So, if Winnie is planning on ghosting me?—

Oh, what am I talking about? Ollie made it clear he drove her off, so yeah, I have to assume she’s gone for good. Which means I might really have to get in touch with Hannah. I’ve burned every nanny bridge I’ve come to.