Page 1 of The Nanny and the Nerd
One
Penny
“No,no, no! Not the blue one!” Penny Fennimore pleaded under her breath, striking random keys as the dreaded blue screen of death flashed on her ancient laptop. “You cannot stop working! Not today! I can barely make rent! I cannot afford a new laptop. And what’s a writer without a laptop? Come on, baby! Come back to me!” she coaxed, begging the machine to give her something, anything. A cursor! A toolbar! Hell, she’d take an emoji of the damn thing flipping her off. Anything but the blue screen!
And what did all that begging get her?
Nothing but a whole bunch of blue!
Stupid technology!
She glanced up and found every person in the auto shop’s waiting room staring at her. She mustered up a weak grin. “I’ll take a felt-tipped pen and a composition notebook over this any day of the week,” she announced, holding up her sad, little laptop. She looked around, hoping to find a sympathetic nod, but no one spoke.
Complete Crickets-ville!
“Yep, good old paper and pen will never let you down,” she murmured, her cheeks growing hot as she closed her laptop and placed it into her tote, then chanced another look around the room. The crowd must have decided she wasn’t completely insane. They’d reverted their attention back to their smartphones and continued to ignore the world.
She exhaled a weary breath when a grating buzz paired with a distorted, creepy chime, like something out of a horror movie, emanated from her bag. Cheeks now burning from embarrassment, she frantically fished through her tote, then plucked her ancient flip phone from the bag as all eyes flicked back to her. “Sorry, sorry!” she apologized as she scrambled from her chair to take the call outside. She pried open the phone and pressed it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Why aren’t you at work, Penelope?”
Oh no!
Penny held her flip phone a few inches from her ear and gathered her resolve. “Mom, if you thought I was at work, why did you call?”
It was a valid question, but she had a good idea why her mother was reaching out. In the past few weeks, the woman must have subscribed to a motivational quote service or picked up one of those daily inspirational journals with affirmations for maintaining a strong work ethic. Perhaps one of the assistants at the modest accounting firm her parents founded had one of those motivational calendars tacked to the wall. Whatever the origin of this strange new ritual, it was yet another one of her mother’s attempts to enlighten her youngest daughter on the art of attaining success.
“I simply wanted to offer my daughter a few words of encouragement and insight into setting and achieving goals. Is that so wrong?” Beatrice Fennimore remarked with just the right amount of concern-meets-searing disappointment.
Penny rolled her head from side to side as the muscles in her neck and shoulders tightened—otherwise known as her typical reaction to her mother’s calls. “No words of encouragement needed for your two older twin daughters?” she mumbled and instantly wanted to take back the cheeky retort.
Beatrice Fennimore chuckled. “Penelope, as you very well know, Diana is a neurosurgeon and the head of her department at a prestigious hospital in New Zealand, and Claudia is a physicist, recruited to work at CERN in Switzerland. The twins got the work ethic message loud and clear.”
Penny sighed. Oh, to be the Fennimore family’s black sheep! Yep, she knew all about her big sisters’ accomplishments. Her mom wouldn’t let her forget it.
With her father’s passing three years ago, the crack in her relationship with her mother had grown into a chasm. It didn’t help that her mom had ratcheted up her type-A tendencies. She wanted to give the woman a break. Still, each call and every message served as a jarring reminder that, at twenty-five years of age, she, unlike her sisters, twelve years her senior, hadn’t accumulated much of anything in the success department.
“All right, Mom, you took the time to call. Let’s hear those sage words of wisdom,” she replied, working to keep the irritation from her voice.
It didn’t work. Luckily, her mother didn’t seem to care.
“Oh good! You’ll love it. It’s a quote from Thomas Edison. Do you know who he is?” her mother questioned.
Heaven, help her! Did she know who Thomas Edison was? Really?
“Yes, Mom, I’m familiar with Thomas Edison—just like every five-year-old in the United States of America knows the guy invented lightbulbs,” she deadpanned.
“Ah, lovely! Here it is,” her mother continued, ignoring the disdain in her youngest child’s voice. “Are you listening, Penelope?”
“Yes, let it rip,” she replied, leaning her head against the auto shop.
“There’s no substitute for hard work,” her mother recited reverently. “Succinct and to the point, don’t you agree?”
Penny sighed. “Yes, it is.”
“You know, you could always apply to business school or take some online accounting classes. There has to be some program out there that would take you. Then you could come work for me,” her mother tossed out like a moldy bread crumb.
She should have known that this was coming.
