Every Halloween for seven years my brother dropped his kids on my porch without once asking if I was free, and last year he grinned at me over their heads and said, “You’ve never told me no in your life, Dee. You don’t have it in you.” So this October I got myself a dress, a ticket, and one more thing he never saw coming.
Seven years of my one night off, handed over without a single question mark.
Rusty didn’t ask. He sent a schedule.
Kids at 5:45. Back for them around 1.
That was the whole text, every October, like a reminder from the dentist.
And every October I moved whatever I had, bought the giant bags of candy, and dug out costume pieces the kids had outgrown at my place.
He called it “Aunt Dee night.”
To me it was free childcare with a cute name stuck on it.
Year one, Kiana’s mom had the flu. Year two, they had concert seats they’d paid for back in March. By year four he’d quit giving reasons.
Last year he pulled up an hour and ten minutes late, dumped two backpacks on my hall floor, and just laughed at me for asking why he couldn’t at least call first.
“Why would I call? You’re always home, Dee.”
Then he said the other part.
The part I heard in my head for twelve months, every time I paid a bill or matched socks.
“You don’t have it in you.”
The kids were never what I minded.
Gavin is nine and has to inspect how every pumpkin on my street was carved.
His sister is five and has gone by Bug since she was three, and she still grabs two of my fingers when a big kid in a mask walks by.
I’d do anything for those two.
But loving his kids didn’t hand him the keys to my October.
So this year I booked mine first.
The hospital foundation was throwing a masked supper at the old train depot in Duluth. $85 a seat. I bought one.
Then a dark green dress with tiny black beads down both sleeves, off a consignment rack, $40.
Then I texted Yael, who I’d bailed on three Halloweens in a row, and told her to save me a chair.
On October 25 my phone lit up.
Same as always. 5:45. Don’t fill them up on candy before they eat.
Not one question mark anywhere in it.
I typed back: Not this year. I’ve got somewhere to be.
The dots showed up. Went away. Showed up again.
LOL ok. See you at 5:45.
So I dialed him.
“Rusty. I WON’T BE HOME.”
He laughed. “You say that every year. Wait till you see Bug in the antennae.”
“Then find somebody else.”
“Dee. Don’t turn one night into a whole thing.”
One night.
Seven Halloweens, and it only ever shrank down to one night when it was his to cover.
I said it once more, slower, that I would NOT be in this house, and I hung up.
He texted twice after that.
The first one said the kids would be crushed.
The second one said see you at 5:45.
That’s when I quit arguing with him.
I made one more phone call instead.
Halloween came in clear and cold, leaves skittering down the sidewalk, porch lights on up and down the block by four.
Across the street the Macias family’s inflatable cat had a slow leak and sagged a little lower every night.
At 4:50 I did my eyes, then tied the ribbon of a black and gold mask to my wrist so I wouldn’t walk out without it.
The beads on the sleeves caught the hall lamp every time I lifted my arms.
I didn’t look like somebody’s backup plan.
I looked like a woman with a table waiting for her.
At 5:36 he texted. Almost there. Told you you’d cave.
I turned my phone face down on the hall table.
At 5:45 on the dot his truck rolled up to the curb.
He left it running.
Through the glass beside my door I watched Gavin climb down in his foil knight armor and Bug fix her red antennae with both hands.
Rusty walked them up my steps and looked back at the truck like a guy dropping off a package.
He hit the doorbell.
Then again.
The third time he just leaned on it.
“DEE. THEY’RE HERE.”
I opened the door.
His grin went wide. The same grin that’s been telling me my no was just a delay since we were kids.
Then he saw the dress.
Then the mask on my wrist.
Then the woman standing in my hall behind me, a canvas tote on her arm with a stuffed bear and a stack of picture books poking out.
The kids lit up.
Rusty didn’t.
He pushed one hand out at her, palm up, like I owed him a receipt.
“Who the hell is this?”
She stepped up next to me, slid a folder out of the tote, and held the top page where he could read it.
“Mr. Prinsen? I’m Priya Malhotra,” she said. “Your sister booked me as the—”
The top page
“—evening sitter,” Priya said. “Six to ten tonight. Four-hour minimum, thirty-six an hour. A parent has to sign before I start, and before your sister can leave.”
She tipped the page so the porch light hit it.
Across the top it said SERVICE AGREEMENT in letters a person could read from the curb.
Halfway down, on the line that said Billed To, somebody had typed Russell Prinsen.
Nobody calls him Russell. The DMV does, and Kiana does when he’s in trouble.
He read it the way he reads a menu with no prices on it, from the bottom up.
Bug had already worked one hand into the tote and found the bear’s ear.
Gavin was reading the spines of the picture books out loud, which is what Gavin does with anything that has letters on it.
I took the pen off the clip on Priya’s folder and held it out to my brother.
He didn’t take it.
“You hired a babysitter,” he said. “For my kids. At your house.”
“I hired one for your kids. You’re paying her.”
He laughed, one short one, and looked at me like I’d told a joke at a funeral.
Then he patted the front of his jacket twice, high on the left, the way he does when he’s thinking about money.
“I’m not signing anything, Dee.”
Priya didn’t move the page.
“Then I can’t stay, Mr. Prinsen,” she said. “That’s the agency’s rule, not mine. No parent signature, I go home, and the children stay with whoever is responsible for them.”
She didn’t look at me when she said whoever.
Down at the curb the truck kept idling, a little cloud of exhaust going pink in the Macias porch light.
Rusty looked at the pen. He looked at my dress.
He looked at his watch, which he never does on my porch, because on my porch he’s never been in a hurry before.
“So who’s responsible for them,” he said, “if I just get back in my truck?”
The hall table drawer
The table my phone was lying on came out of our grandmother’s front room in Proctor.
It has one drawer, and the drawer sticks unless you lift it while you pull.
In that drawer, under the spare house key and a roll of stamps from before the price went up, there was a stack of seven cards with a rubber band around them.
Kiana sent one every year, the first or second of November.
A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a turkey wearing a pilgrim hat. Kiana buys her cards in packs at the drugstore and she sends them to everybody, the mailman included.
Every one said nearly the same thing in her round handwriting.
Thank you for Aunt Dee night!! Treat yourself. xo K
Year three’s said Treat yourself to something nice, you earned it!! with a little heart over the i.
I thought it was cute. I also thought it was a strange thing to write to somebody about a night that cost her two bags of candy and her Saturday.
Treat myself with what?
I never asked. You don’t text your brother’s wife to say your thank-you card confused you. You put it in the drawer.
That year I treated myself to a rotisserie chicken and ate half of it standing at the counter.
So that’s the drawer.
The other thing you need to know is older than the drawer.
The summer I was seven and Rusty was ten, our mom sent us to the city pool with one five-dollar bill and said share it.
He was the oldest, so he held it.
He zipped it into the inside pocket of his windbreaker, the one with the broken zipper pull he’d replaced with a paper clip, and every few minutes he patted it to make sure it was still there.
At the snack window he bought himself a Choco Taco and a basket of fries.
He handed me thirty-five cents.
“Mom said share,” I said.
“I did,” he said. “That’s your share.”
I got a pack of Bazooka with it and he laughed at me the whole walk home because I couldn’t blow a bubble.
He’s forty-four now. He sells insurance to trucking companies.
He still keeps his money in an inside pocket, and he still pats it.
People like Rusty. He’s loud at barbecues.
He carries your couch. He remembers your kid’s name.
At our mom’s funeral he gave a eulogy that made the priest laugh, and four people told me afterward what a good man my brother was.
He is good, to everybody who isn’t standing between him and something he wants.
Gavin has a thing too, which matters here.
Gavin repeats things. Word for word, the way he reports on the pumpkins.
Last Halloween he stood in my kitchen and told me, “Dad says your candy is the cheap kind but it’s still candy.”
Then he ate four.
The phone call I made after Rusty hung up on me, the one more thing, was to a sitting agency on the hill above downtown.
A woman named Shirley answered on the second ring and had a cough she kept apologizing for.
“Who’s the parent?” she said.
“My brother.”
“Then your brother signs. We bill whoever signs, and the parent signs. Aunts and grandmas book us all the time, honey. The parent signs at the door.”
“What if he won’t?”
“Then our sitter leaves,” Shirley said. “We don’t take children from somebody who didn’t hire us. You’d be surprised how fast a parent finds a pen.”
There was a fifty-dollar booking fee on my card. Nonrefundable.
I paid it before I could change my mind, and then I sat on my kitchen floor for a while.
Priya got to my house at 5:15. She looked at my dress and said it was a good green.
She’d been in my hall for half an hour when Rusty leaned on the bell.
Now he stood on my top step with his palm still half out, and I knew what he was going to do before he did it, because I had seen him do it at the pool.
He patted his jacket twice and turned around.
The running truck
He didn’t walk fast. Rusty never walks fast when he wants you to come after him.
He got as far as the bottom step and set Bug’s pumpkin bucket down on it, like that made the decision for everybody.
“They’re at your house, Dee,” he said over his shoulder. “That makes you responsible. That’s not a rule, that’s just what it is.”
Priya closed the folder and slid it back into the tote, behind the bear.
“Then I’ll call it in,” she said, to nobody in particular.
She took out her phone.
Bug looked up at her with her antennae bobbing. “Are you leaving? You just came.”
“I might have to, sweetheart,” Priya said.
Bug’s hand found my two fingers. She held on.
I went down two steps in heels that were never meant for porch steps.
“Rusty. If you drive off, I’m still going. They’ll either be here with her or in your truck with you. Those are the two places.”
He turned around at the bottom of my walk.
“You’d leave a five-year-old alone in a house? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“No. I’d stand on this porch and call you. And then I’d call Kiana.”
He laughed, a real one this time.
“Call her. She’s already at Clyde’s. Clyde’s got a fog machine and a DJ in his garage. She can’t hear her own phone in there, she’s dancing with his wife.”
So that was where Halloween went.
Seven years, and I’d never once known where they were. I’d pictured something that couldn’t be moved.
A concert. A wedding.
A sick mother.
A guy from his work named Clyde, a fog machine and a garage.
“Every year?” I said.
“Every year that you’ve had my kids, Dee, sure. What did you think we did?”
Priya was holding her phone to her ear and not saying anything into it.
She looked at me once, a quick one. Then she said, mostly to Rusty, “Mr.
Prinsen, I’ve been doing this eleven years. Nobody’s ever actually driven away.
Please don’t be my first.”
“Lady, I don’t know you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “That’s why there’s a form.”
Gavin had wandered out to the curb, studying the Macias pumpkins across the street with his hands behind his back, like a man at a museum.
The inflatable cat was down to about knee height.
Rusty went around to the driver’s side of his truck.
He opened the door and stood inside it, one boot up on the running board.
Kiana’s voicemail
I picked my phone up off the hall table and turned it over.
There was a text from Yael at 5:41: Your chair has a little pumpkin on it with your name. Do NOT make it year four.
I didn’t answer it.
I called Kiana.
It rang four times, and then her voice came on, the recorded one, cheerful the way only Kiana can be on a voicemail. Hiii, it’s Kiana, you know what to do.
I didn’t know what to do.
“Kiana, it’s Dee. I need you to call me. It’s about tonight. The kids are fine, they’re right here, it’s just Rusty won’t…”
I stopped, because Rusty was already coming back up the walk.
He’d left the truck door open. The dome light was on.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “You’re calling my wife. To tell on me. Forty-one years old.”
“You said call her.”
“I said she wouldn’t pick up. Which she didn’t.”
He stood at the bottom of the steps again, closer this time. “You want to know what she’s gonna say when she does?
You want me to save you the call?”
Priya had put her own phone down. She’d taken a picture book out of the tote and handed it to Bug, which kept Bug’s hand off my fingers for the first time since the doorbell.
It was a book about a bear who loses his hat.
“Kiana thinks you love this,” Rusty said.
“She says, every single year, ‘It’s so sweet your sister gets the kids, Rus, it’s good for her, she doesn’t have a lot going on.’ That’s your sister-in-law. That’s what she thinks of you.”
I didn’t say anything.
I had a tablecloth in my head. White, with a little pumpkin on it and my name.
“So you call her back,” he said. “You tell her you paid some stranger to sit in your living room instead of your own niece and nephew. You tell her you’d rather go to a party. And watch how she sounds.”
“It’s a supper,” I said. “For the hospital.”
“It’s a party, Dee. With a mask.” He pointed at my wrist. “You’re wearing a mask.”
Gavin wandered back up the walk, stood beside his dad, and looked up at me with his whole face.
My first idea, the smart one, had been to make the call before Rusty could make it.
It wasn’t smart. It just gave him the phone.
“She doesn’t think you’re doing her a favor,” Rusty said. “She thinks we’re doing you one. I tell her you ask, Dee. Every year, I tell her you ask.”
Gavin’s report
The furnace kicked on behind me in the hall and blew warm air out the open door and past my ankles.
Bug turned a page in the bear book and said, “He’s going to find it.”
Nobody answered her.
Gavin has a way of standing when he’s about to report. Feet together. Chin up. Like the kid at the spelling bee who knows the word.
“The Macias pumpkin has teeth,” he said. “Real teeth. They glued in corn.”
“That’s great, bud,” Rusty said.
“And the cat’s getting smaller.”
“Yep.”
Then Gavin looked at Bug, who had shut the book and gone very quiet, because she’d figured out from all of our faces that something was wrong with tonight.
Her chin was doing the thing.
“Is Aunt Dee not staying?” she said.
She put the book down and found my two fingers again and held them hard.
I crouched down on the step, which in that dress was a project. The beads on my sleeves clicked against each other.
“I’m going to a supper, Buggy. With Yael. You remember Yael? She gave you the gum that tasted like a pencil.”
Bug didn’t laugh. She held on.
And then Gavin, nine years old, put a hand on his sister’s shoulder in his foil armor, and said the thing the way he says everything, the way he heard it.
“It’s okay, Bug. Aunt Dee gets paid for us. Dad said Mom pays her, so we have to be extra good.”
Nobody said anything.
Priya closed the bear book very slowly, like a noise would be rude.
I looked up at my brother from the step.
“Paid,” I said.
“He’s nine,” Rusty said. “He hears stuff. He hears stuff on TV.”
“Gav. When did Dad say that?”
“In the car,” Gavin said, reporting. “Every time. He said Mom pays Aunt Dee so don’t make her mad and don’t break anything.”
“Okay, that’s enough, Gav, get your bucket.”
Gavin didn’t get his bucket. Gavin looked at his father, confused, because he’d said it word for word and that’s always been the right way to say it.
I stood up.
I didn’t look at Rusty’s face.
I looked at his hand. It went to his jacket, high on the left, and patted twice.
Speakerphone
There’s a thing my brother does when he’s losing.
He calls in somebody who likes him.
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, not the inside one, and scrolled with his thumb, and put it on speaker and held it out between us at the height of my chin.
“Watch,” he said. “She’ll pick up for me.”
She did. Second ring.
You could hear the garage behind her. Bass coming through a wall, somebody howling like a werewolf, somebody else laughing at the werewolf.
“Rus? Hold on, hold on.” The noise went down, like she’d walked outside or into a bathroom. “Hi. Did they get there okay?”
“Babe. Tell my sister she’s lost it. She hired a babysitter. Like an agency. And she wants me to pay for it.”
There was a pause.
“A sitter?” Kiana said. “Dee? Are you there? Honey, are you okay? Did something happen?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I’ve got plans tonight. That’s all that happened.”
“Oh.” And then, I swear, she sounded happy. “Oh, good for you, Dee. That’s great. Where?”
“The depot. The hospital thing.”
“With the masks? Oh my God, I wanted to go to that.” Then her voice changed, slower. “Wait. So why is Rusty paying a sitter? Rus, just give the girl the envelope.”
My brother didn’t say anything.
That was the loudest thing on the porch.
“The envelope,” Kiana said. “On the counter. I put it right by your keys, Russell. The one-fifty for Dee.”
I went back into my hall.
I lifted the drawer of my grandmother’s table and pulled it, and it came out the way it only does if you lift it.
I took out the cards with the rubber band still on them and came back to the door.
Priya moved out of my way without a word. Bug was holding the bear by the ear.
I slid the first card out from under the band and read it into my brother’s phone.
“Thank you for Aunt Dee night. Treat yourself. xo K.”
Kiana didn’t say anything.
I slid out the next one.
“Treat yourself to something nice, you earned it. There’s a heart over the i, Kiana. It has a turkey on it.”
“That was year three,” Kiana said. Her voice was very small and very clear. “That was the year it went up to a hundred and fifty. I put a sticky note in with it.”
“I’ve got seven cards,” I said. “I never got one envelope.”
Rusty reached for his phone. I didn’t stop him, and I didn’t need to, because Kiana got there first.
“Russell,” she said. “Is it in your pocket right now?”
The inside pocket
He took her off speaker.
He walked all the way down my walk to the open truck door and talked into the phone with his back to us, one hand on the roof of the cab.
I couldn’t hear most of it. I heard “Kiana” four times. I heard “not here.” I heard “Babe, listen to me.”
Priya took her pen back off me and clipped it to the folder. She opened the folder on her forearm like a waitress.
Gavin got his bucket.
When Rusty came back up the walk, he’d hung up, or she had.
He stopped at the bottom of my steps and he started talking, and he didn’t stop for a long time.
“It’s gas, Dee. You know what it costs to drive across town in that thing?
I’m the one who drives them. I’m the one who loads the car seat, I’m the one who sits in traffic on Superior Street.
And you know what else? Who did your gutters in May?
Who drove all of Mom’s stuff over here in the rain? You want to talk about what’s owed?”
“I didn’t say owed.”
“You didn’t have to.” He was louder now.
Across the street a porch door opened and shut. “You’d have done it for free.
That’s the thing. You always did.
You were always gonna. You said yes before I even got to the end of the sentence.”
“You never got to the end of a sentence,” I said. “You never asked.”
“That’s my point.” He threw both hands up.
“Why would I ask? I knew the answer.
Everybody knows the answer with you. That’s not me being a jerk, that’s just you.”
Priya was looking at the page in her folder like it had gotten very interesting.
Bug had moved behind my dress. I could feel her through it.
“And you want to know something?” Rusty said.
“Year one, she wanted to give you two hundred. Two hundred bucks, for one night.
I said, Kiana, don’t, she’ll be insulted. I said my sister doesn’t want money, my sister wants to be needed.
And you know what? I was right.
Look at you. Look at you right now.
You hired a whole lady so you’d still be the one who handled it.”
He pointed past me at Priya.
“You couldn’t even leave without fixing it first.”
It’s a strange thing, hearing the worst thing your brother thinks about you said out loud on your own porch, in front of a stranger, and having it be about a quarter true.
I didn’t argue with the quarter.
I put my hand out, palm up, the way he’d put his out at Priya when I opened the door.
“Inside pocket,” I said.
He looked at my hand.
“Dee.”
“Left side. High up. Where you keep it.”
For a second he was ten years old at the snack window with the paper clip on his zipper, and I was seven with thirty-five cents, and we both knew it.
He unzipped his jacket.
He reached in, high on the left, and took out a white envelope that said Dee across it in Kiana’s round handwriting, with a smiley face in the D.
He held it out over my hand and let go of it from about an inch up, so it would be me catching it and not him giving it.
I didn’t open it.
I turned around and handed it to Priya.
“Four hours is a hundred and forty-four,” I said. “Keep the six. For the bear.”
Priya took it. She didn’t count it, not in front of him. She tucked it into the back of the folder and turned the folder around so the signature line faced my brother.
“I still need a parent’s signature, Mr. Prinsen,” she said. “Pickup is ten o’clock. After ten it’s fifty an hour, in fifteen-minute blocks. It’s on the second page.”
Rusty looked at the truck. He looked at his phone, which had gone dark.
Then he took the pen, and signed, and pushed hard enough that I heard it go through to the folder.
“Happy?” he said. “Go have your little supper.”
He crouched down and kissed Gavin on the top of the head and kissed Bug on the cheek, around my dress, and he was gentle with them. He’s always gentle with them.
That’s the part people see.
“Be good for the lady,” he said.
Then he stood up and looked right at me.
“Don’t bother with Thanksgiving. I mean it. I’m not doing a whole dinner with you looking at me like that.”
He went down the walk. He shut the truck door. The dome light went out.
He drove off without looking back at the house, and for the first block his blinker was on for no reason.
Priya held her hand out to Bug.
“Do you want to see what else is in the bag? There’s a book about a moose who goes to school.”
Bug didn’t let go of me.
I crouched one more time, beads clicking, and I took her hand off my two fingers one finger at a time. She cried.
Not loud. The kind where the face does it before any sound comes.
“I’ll be home before you’re asleep,” I said. “Or right after.”
“You promise?”
“I’ll check on you. I’ll put my mask on your pillow.”
That got the smallest nod I’ve ever seen.
Gavin took her other hand, because he’s nine and somebody had told him he had to be extra good.
I got my coat off the hook. I untied the ribbon from my wrist and tied the mask on properly, over my eyes, in the hall mirror.
Yael had texted again: Soup’s out. Where are you.
I wrote back: Coming. Save my soup.
Then I walked out of my own house and pulled my front door shut behind me.
November 2
I got to the depot at 6:40.
They had already cleared the soup. Yael had saved mine on a saucer over the top of the bowl, and it was cold, and I ate all of it.
I got home at 12:20. Priya had texted at 10:52: Dad here. Paid the extra hour. Bug asleep on the bear. G told me about every pumpkin on your block.
There was a black and gold mask on my couch pillow where Bug had slept on it.
Rusty hasn’t called.
Kiana didn’t send a card this year. On the second of November there was nothing in my mailbox but a gas bill and a coupon for a carpet place.
Around noon I went out on the porch with my coffee.
The Macias cat had finally given up. It was lying flat on their lawn, folded over the edge of their hedge like a towel somebody forgot.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.
It was Kiana.
Hi Dee. Gavin wants to show you his pumpkin notes. He has a notebook now. Are you free Saturday the 16th? Totally fine if you’re not.
There it was, at the end. A question mark, after seven Halloweens.
I read it twice on the top step, in the same spot where Bug’s bucket had sat.
Then I took it inside and turned it face down on my grandmother’s table, and went to find my calendar.
If somebody in your family sends you a schedule instead of a question, maybe pass this along to the person who always ends up holding the candy bowl.
Family entitlement has a way of turning every favor into a battle – read about a truck taken without permission in “Grandpa Spent $46,000 Cash on My Truck. Mom Gave My Uncle the Keys”, and a mother’s three letters that never arrived. For another tense family moment, there’s the pralines his mother sent back to the truck.
