Small-Town Nanny Read Free Page A

doesn’t like me. When we talked last night, I could tell.”
    One of the food pantry workers came over. “Everything okay here, ladies?”
    â€œOh, sure, of course! We just got to talking! Sorry!”
    For a few minutes, they focused on their produce, efficiently filling bags with kale and then more leaf lettuce, pushing a cartload of bundles over to the distribution tables, coming back to bag up sugar snap peas and radishes someone had dumped in a heap on their table.
    Working with the produce felt soothing to Susan. She’d grown up urban and gotten most of her vegetables at the store, but she remembered occasional Saturday trips to the farmers market with her mother, Donny in tow.
    Her mother had tried so hard to please her dad, who, with his Japanese ancestry, liked eggplant and cucumbers and napa cabbage. She and her mom had watched cooking videos together, and her mom had studied cookbooks and learned to be a fabulous Japanese chef. Susan’s mouth watered just thinking about daikon salad and salt-pickled cabbage and broccoli stir-fry.
    But had it worked? Had her dad been happy? Not really. He’d always had some kind of criticism, and her mother would sneak off and cry and try to do better, and it was never good enough. And as she and Donny had grown up, they hadn’t been enough either, and Susan knew her mother had blamed herself. Having given birth to a rebellious daughter and a son with autism, she felt she’d failed as a woman.
    Her mom’s perpetual guilt had ended up making Susan feel guilty, too, and as a hormonal teenager, she’d taken those bad feelings out on her mother. And then Dad had left them, and the sense of failure had been complete.
    Susan shook off the uncomfortable reminder of her own inadequacy and looked around. Where was Daisy?
    Just then, her friend stood up from rummaging in her purse, cell phone in hand. “I’m calling Sam and telling him to give you an interview.”
    â€œNo!” Panic overwhelmed Susan. “Don’t do it!” She dropped the bundle of broccoli she was holding and headed toward Daisy. There was no way she could interview with a man who reminded her so much of her father.
    â€œYou can’t stop me!” Daisy teased, and then, probably seeing the alarm on Susan’s face, put her phone behind her and held out a hand. “Honey, God works in mysterious ways, but I am totally sensing this is a God thing. Just let me do it. Just do an interview and see what he says, see how you guys get along.”
    Susan felt her life escaping from her control. “I don’t—”
    â€œYou don’t have to take the job. Just do the interview.”
    â€œBut what if—”
    â€œPlease? I’m your friend. I have no vested interest in how this turns out. Well, except for keeping you in town.”
    â€œI...” Susan felt her will to resist fading. There was a lot that was good about the whole idea, right? And so what if it was uncomfortable for her? If her mom and Donny could be happy, she’d be doing her duty, just as her dad had asked her to do before he’d left. You have to take care of them, Suzie, her dad had said in his heavily accented English.
    â€œI’m setting something up for this afternoon. If not sooner.” Daisy turned back to the phone and Susan felt a sense of doom settling over her.
    * * *
    That afternoon, Susan climbed out of her car in front of Sam’s modern-day mansion on the edge of Rescue River, grabbed her portfolio, and headed up the sidewalk, all the while arguing with God. “Daisy says You’ll make a way where there is no way, but what if I don’t like Your way? And I can say for sure that Sam Hinton isn’t going to like my way, so this is a waste of time I could be—”
    The double front doors swung open. She caught a glimpse of a high-ceilinged entryway, a mahogany table full of framed photos and a spectacular, sparkling