I’m up early, making lunches, when Milly finds me in the kitchen working on her sandwich.
“That’s too much,” she says, looking at the Vegemite. “You always put too much.” If you ask me, any Vegemite is too much Vegemite.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m not allowed to complain.”
Oh, this girl and the list of things she can’t do or say. I hate my nanny. I cry at night. I’m not okay. How much make-believe can a seven-year-old take?
I spread as thin a layer of Vegemite as has ever been applied to a piece of bread, barely a stain, and hold up my work for inspection.
“Not enough. I can do it myself. I’m almost eight.”
I hand over the butter knife and reposition the cutting board in front of her. She drags the knife forcefully across the dry bread, which rolls up and breaks, as I knew it would. In the most pitiful way, her failure pleases me.
“This knife is bad,” she says.
“Tell me about it.”
“Tell you what?”
“Nothing. It’s an expression.”
“A what?”
“An expre— Nothing.”
While she works on her second piece, I check my desire to meddle, to fix, and maybe, glory of all glories, to save. Intervention will backfire. Milly is a sovereign state.
“So, what do you want for dinner?” I ask.
“Um, soup,” she says.
“Soup?” I didn’t eat soup until I was in college.
“Soup.”
“What kind?”
“The kind you make in a pot. From in a cookbook.” She points to the shelves behind me.
I’ve never made soup or been in a kitchen where soup was being made. Restaurants make soup. People open cans, or they go to restaurants where soup is made.
I pull out the most likely resource, a thick book covered in faded blue linen called New South Wales Favourites, and flip around in the “Soups & Sauces” section. Crumbs fall from the pages. Then, in the margin of page 26, next to the ingredients for “Fall’s Best Minestrone,” I see handwriting—delicate, easy, feminine—perfectly matching the composite I’ve created of Ellen Tanner in my imagination. This is as real as she has felt to me, as if she stood in this exact spot only a moment ago, so present that if I knew how to parse the smells of this house, I’m sure I could pick up her scent.
Her note—to whom, I wonder—next to pasta shells says, Use barley here.
“So, okay, here’s one,” I say with hesitation. “Minestrone. Do you like minestrone?”
“Yes, with barley.”
“Ah.”
To me. The note was to me, I guess.