The Babysitter

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“I don’t know Cara, it’s like… I dunno.” Ava took a drag on her Nat, then blew a smoke ring at the belly-boy who stood ready on the red carpet, arms crossed, looking out at the street. It was the day they were leaving New York, she was all packed, dressed and ready to go, but they still had a few hours yet. Billie and the kids were eating in the restaurant. Ava wanted a cigarette and an excuse to call her best friend.

“Well, Kurt said you had it pretty bad for the guy. You fucked him yet?” Her friend’s voice was amused, but sarcastic. Ava rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, twice actually,” she ran her hand through her hair, “he’s pretty good”

“Well let’s hope so, sex god that he is.” Cara laughed again. Ava could hear a pill bottle rattling in the background.

“What’re you taking?” Ava loved Cara like a sister, truly she did, but sometimes she wondered if maybe the girl weren’t a more out-of-control version of Ava herself. Cara chuckled, Ava heard a glass clink against the phone receiver.

“Just my morning vitamins and mom-prescribed happy pills. So you really care about this one, huh?”

“Janice still making you take shit?”

Cara’s mother was a notorious suburban housewife who preferred her wild daughter less wild and more vegetative. The joke had been that she’d had Cara on Prozac before she was weaned. “Fuck yeah she is, but you should try mixing lithium and coke sometime…,” she sighed orgasmicly, “It’s so intense.”

“I’ll bet. It’s just weird though.” Ava stared at the foliage that creeped around the entrance to the park. Last night was… something. Amazing. Like… whoa. And then they’d fallen asleep. It was a good thing he woke up early or there would have been a pretty embarrassing situation to explain to the boys, it was sobering to think that it could have been ruined before it even really began. But there it was.

“What’s weird? Lithium?” Ava could hear her friend rummaging through a bag, she was probably getting ready for school. Cara went to an expensive private art school that Ava’s mother had died trying to get her into, but Ava preferred music so she went to a public magnet school instead.

“No, this thing with Billie, I mean-“

“You mean the wife.”

Ava was silent for a minute. Cara’s blunt nature was something that Ava loved about her, but sometimes it was disconcerting. “Yeah, that’s exactly it. I’m still not sure what the whole story is. I mean, I know somebody left somebody and I know he moved out, but that’s about it. Dad gave me the impression that she’s already seeing somebody else and that’s pretty soon-“

“So he found out she was boffing the mail man-“

“And I dunno. They’re at least trying to be friendly with each other. A couple of times I’ve shown up to baby-sit like right as she was dropping them off and their at least civil-“

“That just means they’re good at hiding it, chica.” Cara’s smoky voice held bitterness. Ava’s parents had split when she was ten. In a lot of ways she was lucky, at least her parents did what was best for them. Cara’s parents stayed together because they were staunch Catholics who didn’t believe in divorce. To the public everything was beautiful, they were June and Ward fucking Cleaver, but at home they used Cara as a go-between, bargaining chip, translator, or just a lawn jockey if they didn’t feel like dealing with her at all. If Kurt wanted to talk about Freud, well, Cara was probably the better example than Ava.

“You think?”

“Fuck yeah, I think so. But if you really want to know, ask him. Or hell, ask the kids. They probably know more than he knows they do.”

Ava knew she was probably right. Ava could still remember her mom’s hour long phone conversations with her music tutor, Mr. McTavish, and Ava’s dad threatening early one morning. Fights. “I can’t ask him. I mean, before maybe but now it’d just be-“

“Like you were collecting information for the file? Yeah. Try to get it out of Tom if you can. Speaking of, how’re you planning on hiding it?”

“Hiding what?” Ava was watching a taxi take a curve to sharply and some business woman jump out of the way, gesturing rudely.

“Duh, hiding what, you big slut.”

“Oh, I dunno, I guess I’ll be spending more time at the library?” Ava laughed, “Or maybe I’ll make up a friend.”

“Code name: Bob?”

“Works for me, I should go back inside and see what the deal is,” Ava stubbed out her cigarette in a large potted plant.

“Kay,” Cara sounded disappointed and Ava felt a twinge of guilt, this was the first time she’d spoken with her in days.

“Listen, I’ll call you when I get back to Cali, okay?” The bell-boy opened the door for her and Ava winked at him, walking into the hotel lobby and glancing around idly for one or both of the kids. Not seeing them she kept walking, heading for the elevators.

“Okay, hey, when’re you coming back to Chicago?” Cara’s voice held a taunting note in it, “I know a few people who’d like to see you…”

“I’ll try, maybe next break, okay?”

“Fine, look, just don’t do anything stupid okay? It’s a weird situation, Ava.”

“Like you have to tell me?” Ava sighed, “Thanks Cara, I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Kay, bye,” Cara hung up before Ava could say anything else. Ava shoved her phone into her back pocket and got on the elevator feeling like something that she couldn’t pinpoint was off, but she wasn’t exactly sure what.

When she got back to the boys’ room the door was wide open and Billie was helping them pack. Ava grinned, Joe was busying himself trying to coax Fats into the puppy carrier by his hind legs and Jake was laying dead-weight in the large suitcase. Billie looked ready to throw up his hands in disgust.

“Need some help?” She blushed when the grin spread across his face and couldn’t help how her stomach flipped. He looked at her for a long moment and it said more than it probably should have that all of a sudden she wanted to call Cara back and gush like a lovesick thirteen year old.

“We need to hurry, flight leaves in a few hours.”

@%@%@%@%@%@%@%@%

On the plane, flying somewhere over Middle America, Ava turned her head on the head rest and found that he’d been staring at her. For God only knew how long. “Hi,” she murmured softly. This plane was bigger, she was at the window, then Billie, then the boys and then the isle. It was strange to be sitting next to him, almost like she could pretend it was something other than it was. “They asleep?”

“Yeah, right after takeoff. They really had fun with you on this trip,” he inclined his head more toward her and she leaned closer to him. They were speaking in quiet, library voices.

“I had fun with them too,” she glanced out the window and a touched her lip with two fingers, “And with you,” she finished quietly. When she looked back up at him, his face was more intense.

“Me too, kid,” he paused and Ava felt almost sure he wanted to say something else, but he seemed to remember that there were people all around him because that’s where it stopped. She looked down, disappointed. Cara was right, this was going to be harder than she’d anticipated.

“What happened with you and Adrienne?” She blurted finally. Whatever she’d meant to say, it hadn’t been that.

He winced.

“You don’t have to answer that, I’m sorry.” She looked out the window again.

“Ava,” his finger trailed down the exposed skin of her forearm, Ava turned her head, staring up at him. He arched an eyebrow, “You do have a right to know you know.”

She shrugged, remembering Cara’s advice not to push to far or to hard. Kurt’s advice to just let it roll. Harder than it sounded, really. She sighed finally, “Do you mind?”

“Telling you? Or that you asked?”

She rolled her eyes and flipped her hair off her shoulders. “Both. But don’t tell me if you don’t want to.” She curled her legs under her on the seat and shifted so that she was facing him. When he didn’t answer right away she traced the line of one of the tattoos on his forearm. “She really hurt you, huh?”

“You could say that.”

Ava cocked her head, “Is that a ‘no’?”

“No, that’s a ‘I would have said ripped my heart out and did a tango on it’, but ‘really hurt’ covers it too, I guess.” He sighed, wiping a hand over his face. “We were both of working all the time, she was taking care of the kids, I was with the guys promoting the album, and then one day I come home and she’s sitting on the couch in the dark and she looks at me and says ‘I don’t love you anymore’. Just like that. Like it’s a switch or something. And then I asked her why and she gave me some bullshit about forgetting how and now it was habit and that she wanted to learn how again and whatever but I was like ‘are you fucking serious?’ I mean, you don’t out of nowhere drop a bomb like that on a person and then just expect them to get the fuck over it and jump into family therapy or whatever.”

“So…”

“I left. I mean, screw her and her Faith-Hill-have-we-forgotten-what-love-is bullshit.” He shook his head, his fist was clenched on the seat rest and Ava put her hand over it, running her thumb over his knuckles. The line in his face softened a fraction. “I wasn’t going to stick around until she decided we were okay again.”

“And now?”

“Now she’s seeing some therapist. She’s pretty good about letting me see the kids. She knows she’s the one that screwed up, so what can she say, right?”

Yeah, what could she say if it came down to a custody battle and yeah she screwed up, but Billie Joe was screwing the seventeen year old babysitter. So there, right? Ava withdrew her hand from his fisted one and placed it in her lap. She stared at them for a long, long moment, lost in thoughts where her insecurities went into overdrive. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, sliding it downward and then holding his fingers there in a touch that lasted.

Finally Ava looked up through her lowered lashes. He read the uncertainty in her eyes and wanted to kick himself for telling her about it in the first place. She really didn’t need to know all that shit, but he wasn’t really that surprised that she asked in the first place. Their eyes locked and held for a long moment and just as Ava finally shivered, finally giving into the touch of his fingers, he stuck his tongue out at her.