Who: Sam Caulfield and Toby Randall What: Hiring of a less-conventional babysitter Where: Hamartia building When: This afternoon Warnings: None? Possibly swearing.
“Not now, Teresa.” There was a please in the voice, one that wasn’t said so much as heard but the other end of the line, crackly as it was, pretended not to hear it -- and then couldn’t: the coughing fit was heavy and choking. The elevator made a churning, groaning sound of protest; the half-broken light above painted everything an odd sort of yellow that made the worst of the graffiti somehow less offensive, and it was at least working, but elevator service was still something the residents of Hamartia couldn’t count on. As if to make her point for her, with a weak splutter of breaking machinery, it juddered to a halt on the second floor with a rattle-clank-wheeze, and the doors opened half-way as the light strobed above.
Toby wedged the phone beneath her shoulder and her ear, and stuck a foot in between the doors to wiggle them open a little further (skill born of long, unfortunate practice) and leaned her back against the opening to push it further.
“Do you know of anyone else who has an opening? I can come get her before work, but I have to go in...” It was weak, a question to which there was no likely answer: the local ones, the ones with credentials and certificates and the crafts and the soft quiet that was a home -- not Lily’s home, but a home (and that mattered) were snapped up. What was left were the places with blowsy looking women with dull expressions, where the television buzzed from the corner and there were too many children crammed into one apartment. Teresa coughed, and the thick, wet sound came through the shitty phone just fine.
“Find babysitter?” she said, her voice scratchy and thin and with a sound that wasn’t quite protest and wasn’t acquiescence, Toby muttered a thanks, and shut the phone, before beginning the task of unloading the elevator and piling it up in the hallway to figure out a way to get it in. It was the second trip that she saw it, that notice; brown bag under each arm. It was the kind of note that advertised books at college, kittens for free on the board at work, a houseplant for sale -- the kind of note that said nothing of references and infant CPR and was just a name and a number and a line about dubious ‘experience’. It was the kind of note that advertised someone local (within the building) and the kind of note that meant that local person wouldn’t be inundated with demand.
It was the fourth trip that did it. Fourth trip trudging back and forth and the door swinging open, and seeing the bills cascading over the table, until throwing down her keys settled them in a tidal wave of hospital fees. Toby opened the crappy phone and Toby dialled and she waited with the slow, descending feeling in the pit of her stomach that was nothing to do with elevators.