Archive of Our Own ^beta

Rust knew this was a real whopper of a mistake even before he said yes.

Truth be told, he never did say yes. Or alright, or even sure thing. He might would’ve told Marty to go fuck himself, if Maggie hadn’t taken the phone away from her husband and interrupted Marty’s rant about his father-in-law being so stingy he tried to clean the moss off his roof himself and took a fall, shocking no one but himself.

Maggie had said I really hate to impose on you like this, and all my family are at least two hours away and most are at the hospital with Dad, and we’ll be back before dinnertime, and so Rust let himself get railroaded against his better judgment.

When they rolled up to Rust’s apartment, Marty predictably tested Rust’s patience by trying to make it into a joke: “Hey, man, what’s the worst that can happen? They’re smaller than you, you can take them both.”

Only after the words were out of his mouth did Marty seem to remember Rust’s history with girl children, and then Marty’s face twitched in that way that showed Marty knew he’d fucked up, and was supposed to stand in lieu of an apology but was really just chicken shit.

But Maggie smiled, and Maggie hugged Rust, and Maggie said thank you so much for doing this.

Then they were driving away, and Rust was alone with the Hart girls.

It being just after seven, he let them play outside, on the sad patch of lawn wedged in between his apartment building and the road, while he sat on the stoop, and smoked, and watched the rare passing cars, gauging the distance between both girls and the curb and calculating how fast he’d need to move if he needed to sprint to the rescue. But on a Sunday morning, folks slept in or were in church, and so the worst they had to contend with was the rising heat of a June day.

Once the lawns, sodden by sprinklers overnight, had stopped smoking, the cicadas drowned out the traffic hum from the highway, and Rust started to see nothing but pulsing orange and yellow, he stubbed out his cigarette and stood up: “Come on inside,” he told Audrey and Maisie.

“But why?” the littler one, Maisie, whined back, while Audrey just looked at him.

“‘Cause the sun’ll burn you redder than a lobster, and then your momma will skin me alive for letting it happen.” He opened his apartment door, gestured. “Come on, get.”

“Don’t you have any sunscreen?” Audrey asked him as she followed her still-whining sister inside, her face as solemn and disapproving as a churchgoing madam’s.

“No, I do not,” Rust replied.

“I’m thirsty!” Maisie called from the shady interior.

Rust switched on the A/C unit, filled two tall glasses with ice cubes, and opened his fridge, hoping for little help from its contents. He hadn’t had time to go to the store before Marty and Maggie showed up, and perhaps he would have resisted the notion of needing to do any special preparation, even if he had had the time.

He wouldn’t change his opinion on the topic of luck or fate based on such flimsy and ambiguous evidence, but relief did wash over him when he spotted, tucked into the fridge door and accompanied by no memory of how it had got there, an unopened bottle of seltzer water.

The girls took the glasses from him eagerly enough. Maisie made a face once she’d taken a sip: “This isn’t Sprite!”

“Sprite’s bad for you,” Rust said. Maisie kept wrinkling her nose, but her thirst got the better of her, and Audrey made no complaint at all.

Once their glasses were empty, they explored the meager contents of his apartment. The two tiny mirrors on the bedroom wall escaped their notice, being well above their eye level, and Rust sat in the kitchen so that his presence would deter them from getting into the knife drawer or the booze cabinet.

They honed in on Rust’s father’s army locker. “What’s in here?” Maisie asked, fiddling with the lock.

Rust thought about the darkness locked up inside. “That’s private.” He knew better than to tell them it wasn’t suitable for children.

Audrey said: “Why do you sleep on the floor?”

“Why not?”

Again she stared at him in that silent, unwavering way of hers, as she’d done that day she’d witnessed Rust and her mother talking of private things, adult things, over tall, sweating glasses of sweet tea in the Harts’ kitchen.

The locker yielding none of its secrets, the girls soon abandoned it and set about building a Jenga tower out of Rust’s books on the living-room floor. Maisie didn’t even glance at the titles, but Audrey did and even cracked open a few volumes.

Rust came in from the kitchen and picked up the empty glasses. “Those’ll give you nightmares,” he told Audrey.

“Don’t you have any books for children?” she demanded, again in that little madam tone.

Rust had built a bonfire out of Sophia’s things, used scotch as an accelerant. That night, Claire had yelled at him that she was done with him, and meant it. “Nope.”

At noon, he put a saucepan on the stove and opened a box of Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese. There was a cosmic joke somewhere in there – prepubescent children and men living alone being partial to the same kinds of food.

The girls abandoned the mess of murder books on the floor and drifted into the kitchen, drawn by the sounds of food preparation.

“Go wash your hands,” Rust told them and opened the fridge again while they skedaddled to the bathroom.

He didn’t have any milk. Of course he didn’t. He was an adult, white, American male, the demographic least likely to take decent care of its health. He took his coffee black, and he’d never seen the point of cereal – it filled you up but left you hungry after an hour. At least he had a half-empty packet of butter.

They sat on stools around the bare kitchen island like a parody of the three bears with their porridge. Rust shook a bottle of hot sauce over his bowl, painting the poisonous-yellow mass red, felt the girls’ eyes on him, like he was a magician performing a conjuring trick.

“You put hot sauce on mac ‘n’ cheese?” Maisie asked him, eyes wide as saucers.

He capped and set down the bottle. “Just did.”

“Our mom says hot sauce disguises the taste of anything you put it on, and there’s no point in putting effort into cooking if people will just smother their food in the stuff.” Audrey, doing a dead-on impression of Maggie in a didactic moment.

Rust shrugged. “Your mom is probably right.”

He picked up his spoon, but the girls didn’t touch theirs.

“I want some!” Maisie burst out.

“Maisie!” Audrey scolded her. “Mind your manners. And no, you don’t, it’ll burn your tongue.”

“I do too,” Maisie insisted, tears looming on the horizon.

Rust figured he’d had a pretty good run so far. He was hungry too and in no mood to have to soothe a tantrum. “Hold out your finger,” he told Maisie.

She was already sniffling, but stopped and stared at him a moment before she slowly put out her hand, her tiny index finger pointing at Rust in accusation.

Rust made a rolling gesture with his free hand, uncapped the hot-sauce bottle with the other. “Over.”

Maisie turned her hand, so her index finger was held out as if to have blood drawn from it.

Carefully Rust dripped a single, bright red drop of hot sauce on the tip of her finger, under both girls’ watchful eyes. Maisie moved at once to put her finger in her mouth, but Rust anticipated it and caught her wrist between his thumb and forefinger – tiny pulse and bones like drinking straws in the circle of his calloused fingers.

“Nuh uh, honey,” he told her. “Dip your finger in your bowl.”

She did.

“Now stir it around. No, with your spoon.”

Maisie stirred her mac ‘n’ cheese energetically, putting her whole back into it. Off her inquiring look, Rust nodded, and she put a spoonful into her mouth. Her eyes grew wide again, her cheeks flushed a little, but no tears loomed anymore.

“It’s good,” she said, her mouth full. “Like crawfish boil.”

“Swallow or talk, not both at once,” Rust said and picked up his own spoon.

“May I have some too, please?” Audrey piped up.

Rust looked at her. “You sure?”

She scowled. “Yes!”

“A’right. Finger, please.”

Another drop of hot sauce on a little index finger. Audrey stirred her mac ‘n’ cheese slowly. Rust could almost hear Maggie’s voice in his head: like a lady, Audrey.

Audrey kept her eyes on her bowl while she ate the first mouthful, and the second. Rust didn’t expect her to cave openly, although it was obvious she liked it – she took after her father in that regard.

Audrey did look over at her sister and said: “We won’t mention the hot sauce to mom and dad.”

Maisie swallowed her food before she blew a raspberry. “You won’t. I like hot sauce!”

Rust ate a big spoonful to hide his smile. He was in for it now, but to be fair, Maggie and Marty might thank their lucky stars if this was the worst that happened when they asked Rust to babysit.