The next morning, Steven suffers a hangover during his graduate fiction workshop; Over the years, sometimes three drinks a day had become a punishment. The first page of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” appeared on a projection screen synchronized to his laptop.
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“Let’s look at all the important details in the first paragraph,” he said, pacing the room like a lawyer in front of a jury, hoping to revive his energy. “Who wants to start?”
No one worked voluntarily.
“Well, how do you say grandma’s ‘skinny hips’ and her ‘newspaper rattle’ in the same sentence?”
Again, nothing but the sound of old radiators. Before he could plead again, one of his students raised his hand. They had difficulty distinguishing between the slutty, bumbling boys whose imaginations’ quality – and lower-class men were never the world’s most sensitive interpreters – deteriorated with every minute of porn they watched, reactionary podcasts they listened to, and hyperviolent video games (Pot, Kettle) they played.
“Umm, Professor Hammer?” The boy said. “Are you getting a notification?”
In her hazy haze, she had neglected to disable notifications, and a message popped up on Lucy Myers’ projection screen in the room: “I have sent you the kids’ camp forms. Please fill out. I have paid the tuition. Also sent you the stipend.”
He walked towards the laptop as fast as he could, without making it obvious that he was in a hurry. But the room was cluttered with chairs, and before he could get there another alert arrived: a bank notice about money sent to him by Lucy Myers, specifying the amount and labeling the transaction stipend.
The classroom had been quiet after the camp lesson, but now there was at least one snoring sound.
In his haste to clear the text, he accidentally clicked on another one. It opened up every previous communication from the financial institution, identical monthly messages – twelve of them – all confirming the same transfer, all tagged stipend.
Exactly a year ago, he had told Lucy that he was short of money. He asked if he could get a teaching job. He had already tried to garner employment; His old graduate school friend, now a department head at this university, had only one peanut-paying class he could offer him, with the hope that a tenure-track role might open up in the next year or two.
Meanwhile, Steven has proposed that she become the children’s full-time caregiver, and that the money they have saved by quitting the nanny can be allocated to her.
Lucy said, “I would like you to finish your novel and sell it.”
She wondered whether his motive wasn’t purely financial – or even because, in his corporate environment, it was basic for a man to put aside his career and care for his children – so much so that he was threatened by the prospect of growing even closer to his children. Although with Constanza’s assistance, she changed many more diapers, fixed more snacks, applied more Band-Aids than Lucy; Those small daily acts of service connected her to Sophie and Caleb in a way that their mother, who occasionally parachuted, never could.
“In that case,” he said, “so I can focus on this, how would you feel about giving me a… kind of fellowship stipend?”
Unlike his brother, he was not too proud to accept help. He could understand her frustration – not at giving up the money, which she could easily afford, but at what it said about her dwindling prospects. He never owed her his breadwinning status, which included everything else in their life: the titanic mortgage and maintenance on their condo, the private school tuition, the live-in nanny. But he didn’t have to do this. Even if unspoken, it was the arbiter of all family decisions, and should they enter into this new understanding, it would now resurface not only with every check placed in front of Steven, which he – after the waiter had left – then passed on to his wife, but also with every shirt, cocktail and hardcover he independently purchased, for which she ultimately footed the bill.
Nevertheless, he agreed. And since then, on the first of every month, she would transfer a generous “stipend” from her bank account. It did not automate transactions; He wondered whether it was best to ensure that both of them got a monthly reminder of their unbalanced arrangement, one that lends itself to a more dignified noun than allowance.
Only now his entire class was reviewing his disastrous ledgers, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what his code word really meant. He eventually deleted the messages and disabled further notifications.
“‘Skinny hips’ and ‘rattle’ suggest a skeleton, and ‘rattle’ also suggests a rattlesnake,” he said, pretending that none of that had exposed his household finances – and marriage. “All this foreshadows his death.”
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From au pair By Teddy Wayne. Copyright © 2026 by Teddy Wayne. Reprinted here with permission from HarperCollins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
