Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 91149 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91149 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Leo covers the microphone again. “Text me later and let me know about the interview.”
“Will do.”
“And we’re still on for tomorrow at six?” he asks, eyes filled with hope.
I laugh. “Yes. Dinner at my parents’ house, six p.m. sharp.”
“Sweet,” he says, and I know he’s already salivating for my mom’s fried chicken. My mother hails from Georgia and even though she’s been in Pittsburgh for almost thirty years, she still cooks from her southern heart.
“Later,” I say to Leo as he pulls on inspiration from his T-shirt and starts plucking the cords of “Silent Lucidity.” He and I actually do a beautiful, harmonized rendition of this song, but he freaking kills it on his own. I’m forgotten and no one watches as I walk out of the coffeehouse and across the street to where my car is parallel parked.
I drive an Audi Q3, my one big splurge from the generous salary the Hamberlys paid me. Because I was an almost full-time live-in with them, I had no rent or utilities. On my days off, I would stay with my parents over in Mt. Lebanon, so I’ve managed to save up an incredible amount of money in the 401(k) the Hamberlys started for me, as well as in individual investment accounts my dad helped me set up.
Opening the rear hatch, I place my guitar in gently, toss my backpack in behind it, and grab my keys and phone from the back pouch. The SUV is a push-button start engine, so I toss the keys in the cup holder. I take a moment to plug in the address from the text Sasha sent and am relieved to see that with lazy Saturday traffic, it will put me there five minutes early.
Disregard for punctuality is a pet peeve of mine, so I always try to be a little early. On the rare occasion that I might be a few minutes late, I chastise myself hard. Checking for traffic in my side mirror, I pull out and head over to Squirrel Hill where Pittsburgh Titans hockey player Foster McInnis lives.
♦
The hockey player’s house is imposing, as are all the houses in the affluent neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. Still, it’s not as large as the mega mansion the Hamberlys owned in Oakmont, so nothing about it is intimidating.
I had a middle-class upbringing with two very successful parents as role models. My mother, a chemical engineer with PPG, is highly educated and analytical. My father is an entrepreneur at heart and has owned his own commercial landscaping business for the last twenty-five years. He went into manual labor upon graduating high school while my mom went off for seven years of university, earning a bachelor’s, master’s and ultimately a PhD.
I’m part of a blended family but it’s the absolute best family. I never knew my biological father—he wanted nothing to do with my mom after she got pregnant with me twenty-eight years ago when she was just twenty-five and starting her career at PPG. She met Kyle Archer, a handsome man who had his own start-up cutting grass around her workplace, when I was two.
Divorced, he had two boys who were six and nine and they split time between parents. Kyle fell in love with and married my mom and I had a new dad, and he’s been my dad in all ways ever since. Never a stepfather, Kyle adopted me and I became an Archer through and through. My two older brothers, Brian and Tim, immediately became overprotective, overbearing and completely nonsensical when it came to me. They embraced their new little sister and deemed it their duty to watch over me alongside their dad.
But our family wasn’t done growing. Our families melded, Mom rose in the ranks of PPG, and Dad’s business boomed, and because my parents apparently thought that their lives weren’t chaotic enough, they had a baby eleven years into their marriage. I was thirteen, Tim was seventeen, and Brian was twenty and off to college at Penn State.
When people ask why I’m a nanny, I can honestly say I came by it naturally and to an extent, by default. With two career parents and a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old brother who was so into his girlfriend at the time he was hardly ever home, I was the go-to person to help raise my new baby brother, Mason, and my second one who came along two years later, Landon.
My parents never asked or demanded of me the extra time I put into helping with the two babies. They had, in fact, hired a nanny to watch the boys while they worked and when Tim and I were at school.
But when I wasn’t in school or playing music with Leo, I doted on Mason and Landon. I love them so much and it was a calling in my heart. I thought at first maybe it was just the novelty of having babies in the house—I loved everything from changing poopy diapers to rocking them to sleep after their baths. My parents often joked they had to beat me off the boys so they could have time with them after work.