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“Did you find out what’s wrong with Liam, Dad?” I asked.
    Still smiling, not looking at me. “Nothing wrong with Leemster.”
    â€œDad, he does really weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff. Just ask Rita.”
    Staring at the screen. “Rita’s not your babysitter anymore. I’m finding you a new one.”
    I was devastated. “Dad, she’s good. She’s the best . She helps me with my homework. She does the dishes.” Actually, I did the dishes and said it was Rita. I wanted to add: Her hair smells like peaches. Her teeth are perfect. Her fingernail polish blinds me. I finished hopelessly, inaccurately, “She’s very fair.”
    Not that Dad was listening. Apparently one of his new girlfriends had a daughter who needed money, and so Rita was out of the picture. (I saw her a few more times before she and her mother moved away. She told me on the rusted steps of the apartment complex that she didn’t like babysitting because she hated little kids. This only increased my love for her.)
    The next babysitter was Trudy. Daughter of Melissa, briefly known as Delicious Melicious. Trudy didn’t last very long, though, because Delicious didn’t last long. Apparently, the last few times Trudy babysat for us, Dad didn’t bother to pay her. Her mother left a message on our answering machine, saying it was bad enough that he had cheated on her without also cheating her daughter out of her money. He owed Trudy fifteen dollars.
    I was in the kitchen when Dad played this message back. He looked at me, shook his head, and muttered “women.” The next day I took fifteen dollars from the food money jar, and I took it to school and made a show of presenting it to Trudy in the hallway outside of her classroom. I told her it was from my dad and that he was sorry. “He’s also really sorry about what he did to your mom.”
    She made a disbelieving face but took the money.
    I had become aware of a terrible pattern in Dad’s behavior: he changed his mind about women way too fast, sometimes after only one date—a date that he would have gone to all kinds of trouble to arrange. I was also noticing that he spent a lot of our limited budget on impressive first dates at expensive restaurants and dance clubs. It kept us constantly broke, and nobody made him the least bit happy for more than a few weeks.
    After the Trudy incident, my dad accepted my role as the babysitter finder. I made sure never to hire anyone with any ties to him. At school, I studied the sixth graders, always on the lookout for a cute girl to make mac and cheese the way I liked it (extra soupy), to stay up late with me on the couch (and not push me away if I wanted to get right up next to her), to let me smell her hair. I hired half a dozen babysitters this way, approaching the girls, asking them if they were interested in a job, even tracking down their phone numbers so that my dad could call the parents if a girl seemed willing.
    But they did not last. We were routinely left alone with these girls, sometimes for four or five nights a week. Either my dad found a way to alienate them, mostly by forgetting to pay them or being rude to them when he came home drunk, or maybe the girls themselves found the hours spent with two anemic boys too much to deal with for more than a few months at a stretch. I always turned on the charm with these girls, but no one ever measured up to my memories of Rita, the first girl in the bachelor pad, the first girl who let me be physically close to her. Did I love her more than I love Clara?
    I’m not sure. I swear, I’m not sure. What a miserable excuse for an adult male I am.
    Mrs. M.’s voice comes into my ear. “ Choose a girl who is nice. Will you promise me that, Charlie?”
    And I did promise. Although, at the time, I didn’t understand why this was suddenly so important to her. I found somebody who’s nice,