Chapter 1

As I think back on it, I’m pretty sure it all happened because I didn’t have any parenting skills. And, of course, because my sister trusted me to babysit her daughter for a month while she and her husband went to Europe to try to get contracts to make and sell this thing my sister had invented. It was some kind of kitchen gadget and she even went on Shark Tank with it. They said it was a pretty good idea, but nobody on the show backed it. So Molly and Paul, my brother-in-law, thought they could make a go of it on their own. They needed me to babysit Beth, though, because they didn’t want to drag her around Europe with them. So I hopped on a flight to California to help my sister out. It was early July, which meant a plus to my situation was leaving humid heat and going to sunny, dry weather.

Let me say right up front that “babysit” isn’t the right word. Maybe it was in Molly’s mind, but “the baby” was having none of that.

“I don’t need a fucking babysitter, Mom!” Elizabeth yelled, when I got there. “I’m not a baby!”

“First - language,” said Molly, patiently. “Second, I know you’re not a baby, but the decisions you’ve been making lately make it very clear you’re not a responsible adult, either.”

“Just because you don’t like my friends, don’t make me stay here with some guy I hardly know!” wailed my niece. “This is embarrassing, Mom! What if my friends find out?”

“Third, they’d better not find out,” said Molly. “You are to have no contact with them while we’re gone, other than to explain that you can’t spend time with them. No parties. No sleepovers. No hanging out at the park until one in the morning. No nothing! If you want to tell them you’re grounded, fine. If you want to tell them something else, I don’t care. But you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to leave the house alone.”

“This isn’t the Taliban!” screamed Beth. “This isn’t right! It isn’t fair!”

“Beth, you’re sixteen. You don’t even have a driver’s license, yet. I don’t care how grown up you feel, or want to be, you’re not an adult and I won’t allow you adult freedoms, either. And Bob isn’t a stranger, either. He’s your uncle and you’ve met him before. He is going to take care of you while we’re gone and that’s that. I do not expect to get any frantic phone calls from him and if I do, you’re going to suffer the consequences. We’ve already discussed what those consequences might be. Do you read me, young lady?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now, we have to go or we’ll miss our flight.” She looked at me. “Beth will show you where things are. Maybe you can teach her some computer coding while you’re here, or something. Thanks for doing this. I love you, little brother.”

Then she was gone and I was alone in somebody else’s house with an irate teenager who was under my care and control. I even had a power of attorney to prove it.

My sister had always done the right thing, for the most part. She had some problems in her youth that will be illuminated later, but after that she settled down and did everything right. She went to college, met a great guy, got married, had both a career as an engineer and a family. She could have posed for Norman Rockwell.

I had taken a slightly different path. I went to college, too, but I didn’t get married. I met a ton of great girls and slid my horny boner into as many of them as I could, but I wasn’t about to give up my independence and become a one-woman man. I was an engineer, too, but in computer science, rather than in civil engineering like my sister. Gradually, over the years, I had specialized in restoring systems that had been hijacked or taken for ransom. Generally those jobs only lasted a week or two, a month if it was a big company, so I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, but worked all over the country. My sister sucked from the government teat in California and while I did work in that state, occasionally, I never had time to go visit a lot.

As a result, I hadn’t seen little Beth since she was ten. At that time she had no interest in me. She was just a shy little girl whose parents had invited what she thought of as a distant relative into the house for a few days. Looking at her now, it was plain she wasn’t so little anymore. I knew she was sixteen, but if I didn’t know her and just saw her on the street, I’d have thought she was eighteen with no doubt. I hadn’t had to think about age since college, when high school girls tried to sneak into frat parties and such. I met lots of secretaries and administrative assistants and coffee girls and even some junior execs in my line of work. Of course I never had to ask how old they were. They were employees, not blushing school girls. I’d dated the same girl for a month or two, before, but none of them had any kids, which meant I haven’t been exposed to children since ... well ... since I was one.

So it’s understandable that I had never learned much in the way of parenting skills. Add to that that Beth looked way older than she was and I was probably the wrong guy to be a surrogate parent for a month. It didn’t help that she was killer cute, with jet black hair in a shag that went just past her jaw line. On this particular day she was wearing a peasant blouse that made it crystal clear there was no bra under it, and short shorts that were so tight they might has well have been a second skin. Sandals exposed pretty, painted toenails. Only the frowns and her attitude spoiled the image of a hot young woman on the prowl and ready to meet Mister Happy.

Mister Happy is what I call my cock, but you probably already figured that out.

Beth wasn’t very sexy, though, because she was pouting and trying to pick a fight and that’s just not sexy.

“You wanna show me where to put my stuff?” I asked.

“No,” she said, both casually and sullenly.

“We don’t have to get along,” I said. “We do, however, have to live together for a month, and it will be a lot less miserable for both of us if we do get along,” I said. “It’s up to you.”

She set her lips in a grim line and showed me the bedroom I had been allotted. Then she said, “I’m going to my room. Don’t bother me.”

The first three days were tense, but eventually things got a little better. I watched a lot of TV while I tried to watch her. She spent most of her time in her room, avoiding me. I treated those first few days as a vacation from work and binge watched several series on Netflix. I tried a Korean series about a guy who could see ghosts, and helped them get their unfinished business handled so they could go on to where deceased souls are supposed to be. Other than having to read the translations, it was really good.

I “cooked”, but the only appliance I used was a microwave. Over the years I had figured out how to cook almost anything in a microwave. It wasn’t always tasty, but to me food was simply fuel to keep my body going. Beth, on the other hand, had some pretty impressive cooking skills. After the first four or five meals I “prepared” for us, she decided she needed to become the cook.

“I’m going to starve, or waste away to nothing, if I keep eating what you put on the table,” she said one day.

I looked at her and I admit my eyes fell on her breasts, which were full and healthy-looking, cupped lovingly in the halter top she was wearing that day.

“I don’t think you’re in any danger of wasting away,” I said. It didn’t sound inappropriate in my mind, but she caught me staring at her boobs when I said it and her interpretation of things was on another plane.

“Are you a pervert, Uncle Bob?” she asked, clearly and plainly. It was the first time she’d used my name in a sentence.

“Nope,” I said, understanding what had just happened. I was pretty good with women, all in all, and felt like I understood them better than most guys.

So, to recap, I had no parenting skills, and was under the illusion I understood women. I know that now. I just didn’t think about things that way back then.

“It takes months on a starvation diet before you waste away, and you’re not on a starvation diet,” I went on. “You might not like what I serve up, but it’s nutritious and you’re not going to starve unless you decide to, on purpose.”

She surveyed me with gray-green eyes and sniffed.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll take over cooking duties,” she said.

“Fine by me,” I said.

“We need to go to the market,” she said.

“Okey doke,” I replied.

Her parents had left the keys to their cars and she chose the SUV as our chariot for that day. We passed a Walmart, which I pointed out.

“I don’t shop at Walmart,” she sneered. “Walmart is for losers.”

She directed me to a grocery store that clearly tried to appeal to the upper classes and I pushed the cart around while she chose things to put in it.

“Just give me the card. I’ll take care of it,” she said, casually. Molly had left a credit card for me to use in situations like this.

“Did your mother leave the card in your care?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Sullen teenager was back. It was like magic.

“Then let’s not mess with the established order of things,” I said. “Besides, you don’t need it for anything without talking to me, first.”

She didn’t talk to me for the rest of that trip, but she had calmed down by the time we got back to the house and were putting things away.

“I’m going to go lay out,” she said, when the last item was stowed.

“Okay,” I said. “I need to check in with a client. What’s your wifi password?”

“Gee,” she said, putting one finger against her lush lips. “I forgot.”

“No problem,” I said, catching on instantly. “I’ll just call Molly and ask her. I’ll explain you can’t remember.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” she snarled.

She gave me the password and stomped off to her room.

I spent maybe twenty minutes reading and answering emails and then went looking for her. They had a pool in the back yard, which was surrounded by a tall privacy fence. This was a good thing because the bikini she was wearing was the kind made for catching a man, rather than swimming. It was bright yellow, or at least that’s what I surmised from the string across her back and the slim bit of fabric across her waist, which dropped and was clenched firmly between the golden globes of her ass. She was lying on her stomach, so I couldn’t see what color the front of this “swimsuit” was.

It was obvious she spent a lot of time out in the sun like this, because she looked slightly toasted in an “amber waves of grain” kind of way. She was lying on a chaise lounge that flattened into a bed, with a four inch thick cushion on it. A bottle of tanning lotion (not sunscreen) sat on the deck next to her and a towel was crumpled up next to that.

Feeling a distinctly inappropriate reaction in my shorts taking place, I turned and went back in the house. I had brought a five-book series with me. It was called The Dark is Rising and I had heard it reviewed on NPR. It was originally written for readers in the eight to thirteen age range, but the reviewer claimed that thousands of adults loved it and re-read it all the time. It sounded good so I thought I’d give it a try.

I was four pages into the first book and had already been introduced to a mysterious, adventurist great uncle, and a suspicious, also mysterious yacht out on the waters of the bay this family was vacationing at, when Beth sauntered in and I got to see the front of the bikini.

The front was actually almost decent. It cupped and covered her breasts, and the panel of the bottoms covered things there, too. The modesty panels, however, were missing and both her nipples and camel toe were on display.

“You can swim, too, if you want to,” she said.

Her attitude was off and I picked up on that immediately. She wasn’t there to tell me I could swim if I wanted to. She was there to show off her nipples and camel toe.

She was teasing me. The question was... why was she teasing me?

“Okay,” I said, looking back at the page in the book. It wasn’t easy to ignore her, but I managed.

She sniffed and went somewhere else while I tried, unsuccessfully, to read on.

My conundrum was that, while she was clearly a girl of tender years, she had already learned (and was willing to practice) feminine wiles more appropriate for a young woman who had graduated high school and was looking for a mate. I couldn’t “un-see” how hot she was, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that she obviously had some sexual experience. I didn’t know she had some sexual experience, of course, but the vibes were there and clearly detectable to my male mind. I assumed she was allowed to date (when her parents were there) and I knew any boy she went out with would go to extreme lengths to get her naked and panting. It was also common knowledge that girls, these days, lost their virginity at an average age of thirteen. So I assumed she was ... average.

This teasing continued, and she thought she was being clever about it. She wasn’t, though. She was an amateur and that actually made things better for me. If you’ve ever been around someone in the “in crowd” who looks like an adult but behaves like a child, you understand where I was. She paraded around in the yellow bikini and a couple of other ones that were a tad more age-appropriate. When she took a shower, she did that in the guest bath, instead of the one in her room, and walked out in a light robe that she left open. She didn’t face me and flaunt the fact she was naked under the robe, but she tried to make sure I saw her from the side or back while she was “relaxed.”

Her choice of dress was always sexy, or at least showed off her assets to the maximum. I found it to be a sort of exercise wherein I tried to figure out what her motive was. I knew she wasn’t actually trying to seduce me. That was ridiculous. So why was she teasing me like that? I decided it was her effort to try to get me to reduce or abandon my feeling of responsibility for her. If she didn’t look like a baby, then I wouldn’t think of myself as a baby-sitter. If she looked fully adult, then I might let her act like one.

Of course I didn’t tell her I was onto her. She was a fine bit of eye candy, after all, and a bit of fantasy, now and then, as I stroked out a load. I didn’t feel bad about that. It wasn’t going to hurt anybody. I had to suspend my usual ... social activities ... while I was there, and that put a bit of a strain on me. I knew there were tons of spicy women in California who would appreciate my approach to bedroom games.

But I had to be a big boy for a month, so Mother Palm and her five daughters were my only dates for a while. I could live with that.

When she thought she’d set the hook she showed her hand.

“Jennifer says she and a few girls are having a little party right down the street. It’s an ... um ... birthday party and I’d really like to go. She’s my best friend.”

It was obvious no birthday celebration was planned. This poor girl had a ways to go before she could pull the wool over my eyes.

“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to enter into any kind of negotiations. “Your mom said no parties.”

“Come on,” she groaned. “It’ll just be for an hour or two. You can give me a curfew and I promise I’ll obey it.”

“No parties,” I said, firmly. “Unless I come with you. You can go if I come with you.”

“Are you crazy?” she yipped. “Do you have any idea what would happen if I showed up with a geezer to a party?”

“Twenty-eight is not a geezer,” I said, wounded.

“You’re old enough to be my father!” she yelled.

“No, your father is thirty-seven, or something,” I said. Molly was thirty-seven, so I assumed Paul was, too. My sister was nine years older than me. I was a “surprise” to our parents, who had thought they were finished with babies, but weren’t, as it turned out.

“You’re still old,” she sneered. “I’m not bringing you to a party so my friends can laugh at me.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “You can Zoom in to the party. That will solve your problem.”

“Ohhh!” she yelled, stamping her foot. “This fucking sucks!”

“Life is hard,” I said. “And then you die.” I shrugged my shoulders at her.

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Parenting Skills? Not!

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