The babysitter in fiction: flash, one word, etc.

Nine o'clock p.m. didn't feel like an appropriate time for a nine year old to go to bed, not when I was the nine year old anyway. But if we were still up when my brother got home from his job at the Grab It Here grocery store, there would be hell to pay. So she would tuck us in and sing to us. Or maybe it was just to me. Maybe the other kids went to bed without hassle.

Her voice was beautiful, Doris Day on late night black and white tv movie beautiful. Or maybe it was those were the songs she chose. My favorite, knowing nothing of foreign language, was "Que Sera Sera... whatever will be will be." She liked that one best, and in those last late nights we spent with her as our babysitter, she sang it alot.

She got the job after our neighbor, who used to come over after school and do crafts with us... crafts! moved away. She knew us well by then, having dated my brother for several months...months! by then. We were used to her and we loved her, as only kids can do, our allegiance more to her than our brother, who sometimes yelled at us.

But after she tucked us into bed, sang her songs and closed our doors, my brother came home from work. The house would be adult free for another three hours, and they spent the time as other seventeen year olds with opportunity spent the time. Tucked into bed, usually mom and dads. And it being the sixties, and the part of the country where the good part of the sixties didn't happen until the seventies, they soon found out that they were "in trouble."

The wanted to do the right thing, get married and live happily ever after. But he was a 17 year old boy, and there was a draft going on, and if he wasn't in school, baby or no baby, his number would be called. When her dad called instead, drunk, in the middle of the night, actually threatening that he had a shotgun and that there better be some marrying going on, mom and dad bought him a ticket to Pasadena, where our uncle lived.

We never saw her again, but I heard several years later that she'd had a son, and named him Mike, and married my brother's best friend, whose name was, of course, Mike. He was killed in Da Nang, before the baby walked.

Que Sera Sera?