The notice hanging on the bulletin board of my dormitory caught my eye. Someone wanted to hire a live-in nanny for the summer. I did not want to go home for the summer. So, I called the number.

The woman and her friend came to interview me at my college student union. I can’t remember anything of the interview, but afterwards, I was desperately hoping for the job, sure I wouldn’t get it. And then she called and said, “I just felt like God was telling me to take you under my wing. So, you’re hired.” I must have sounded pathetic with my tale of divorced parents and not wanting to go home for the summer. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled.

I’m sure it broke my dad’s heart, but at the time, that never occurred to me. I was determined not to return to my suburban home, to a job at a fast-food restaurant or worse. A job as a nanny sounded exciting.

The first day, the 10-year old boy called me “fat,” and nicknamed me “Mamabahama.” I was not amused. In addition to the 10-year old, I was in charge of a 7-year old girl, a 5-year old boy and a 6-week old baby. Their mother didn’t have a job outside the house, but her husband was a doctor and she wanted help over the summer. I was the help. I was the playmate, the idea-gal, the errand-runner. I was the relief pitcher, the back-up mom, the one who walked that fussy baby for miles back and forth on the hardwood floors until she slept. I grocery-shopped, took kids to amusement parks, drove the car on long trips.

I lived next door in an apartment attached to the neighbor’s house. Goldie, the wrinkled and tan landlord, was said to be an alcoholic, but I never saw evidence of that. The apartment was furnished with the same kind of gold fake-Americana furniture I’d left behind in my suburb. A few Reader’s Digest condensed novels lined a shelf. I had practically nothing, hardly any clothes, even.

One night, I opened the door and flipped on the overhead light to see a scattering of cockroaches on the floor. I sprang into action, terrified, inexperienced, but fierce. I grabbed juice glasses from the cupboard and trapped a cockroach under each one. I’m sure I squealed like a girl during this battle, freaked out completely. I’d never seen a cockroach before in my young, sheltered life.

The problem, of course, occurred when I finished catching cockroaches beneath glasses. I couldn’t crunch a bug skeleton. I still can’t. I had no bug spray. What’s a nineteen year old girl to do? I lived alone, remember, with a mostly invisible alcoholic landlord. And I’ve never been one to ask for help.

So I did what any clever girl would do. I slid paper under the glasses and carried the whole contraption to the toilet where I dumped the cockroaches one by one into the toilet bowl. My system broke down, however, when a particularly boisterous cockroach–the last one– scrambled on the thin paper, causing me to panic, screech and fling my hands up in a girlish display of fear. When I did so, the glass somersaulted and landed in the toilet, broken upon impact. The cockroach crawl stroked past the jagged edge, laughing.

Not to be outdone despite my racing pulse, I ran for the kitchen and grabbed the Dawn dish-washing liquid and squirted until the cockroach passed out from laughing or smothered in the bubbles. I’m not sure which. Then I gingerly extracted the broken glass from the toilet, flushed and shuddered.

I didn’t have a television, so I read those condensed novels and part of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. But mostly, I worked.

And those kids hated me, especially the 10-year old boy. I cut them no slack. One day, I’d taken them to Silver Dollar City and the boy purchased a plastic comb fashioned to look like a switchblade. He tormented his siblings on the way home, continually flicking them. I told him, “If you do that again, I will take that from you.” And he did. And I did. And then the parents questioned me and as I recall, very reluctantly backed me up.

He was a trial, that boy. His sister was 7, easy as pie. The 5-year old boy was dreamy, distracted, adorable. I remember him with his feet on the breakfast table, a sticky cereal spoon in his hair. The baby was a girl, too, and a fussy thing. My job involved walking up the gravel road, cradling that baby in my arms until she slept. Blackberry vines reached out with thorny arms to scratch me, the mosquitoes and their loud-Missouri bug cousins shrieked in my ears. We in the Pacific Northwest might have too much rain, but we do not have bugs that whistle and click and holler and shout like those southern bugs do. I never got used to that outdoor noise at Tablerock Lake.

Nor did I ever grow comfortable with the idea that cottonmouth snakes lurked under the dock. We do not have poisonous swimming snakes, either, in my home state. But the kids swam, and so I had to swim, too. The back yard sloped down to the shores of Tablerock Lake and the view was pretty (for the Ozark so-called Mountains). Sometimes we went for boat rides, but mostly, we sat on the dock, sometimes catching tiny fish with kernels of corn on our hooks.

I hated that summer. I liked the mother quite well. Aside from the 10-year old, I grew fond of the children. But I was lonely, desperately lonely for my new college friends, and far from my home in Washington state. I hated the hot humid weather. Friends came to visit a few times and my sisters and stepmother stopped by for a couple of days. I received letters from friends, which helped sate my loneliness some, but I was a giant black hole of loneliness. I was unfillable at the point in my life and pretty much everything good leaked out the bottom of my broken heart.

And so I wasn’t a very good nanny.

That summer, we drove to Cedar Park for vacation, then on to West Virginia to stay with grandparents. Another time, we went to New Orleans, but I stayed in a round hotel with the baby the entire time we were there. Once, the father had a car accident (a race car accident, if I recall correctly) and the mother had to rush out of town and the housekeeper and I were in charge of all the children for a few scary days.

We went to a cultish little Pentecostal church which freaked me out almost as much as the cockroaches, even though I’d been raised in a Pentecostal church my whole life. We had season’s passes to Silver Dollar City and a water-park, which was the scene of the worst sunburn of my life. We rode bikes, did crafts, went to the library.

I earned five hundred dollars a month. Plus room and board. And when I started, she took me to Wal-Mart and bought me frumpy culottes, a horrifying sort of uniform.

But I was grateful. I earned my own way for a whole summer and I triumphed over cockroaches. And when I returned to school, things went from bad to worse, but that’s a story for another day.

So what was your worst summer job?