For one brief summer I was a nanny. Not Fran Drescher the Nanny - just CeCe the nanny. 3 Children. And I was barely old enough to be … well, their mother, obviously - but I was more of an older sister to them, it felt like.

I had my own room and I was away from my parents for the summer, and I thought that was by far the best thing EVER. Especially to a girl my age.

The family owned a farm - and I’m not sure what kinds of crops they grew - but it was a very very large large large farm and they had migrant farm workers that worked in the fields from sun up to sun down, it seemed like. Lexie, a daughter of one of the families, lived in a small trailer on the grounds, and during my free time we would play together. But I didn’t have that much free time. I still remember the smell of the trailer though… it was sort of like the smell of corn, probably from the tortillas her mother would make and fry and fill with the best tasting meat I had ever tasted in my 13 years alive. We would sit on this sort of couch/bed thing and just exist together because with her limited English and my limited Spanish - that’s all we really could do. Sometimes we would walk in the fields and watch her brothers, uncles, and father work - but we knew that we could only do that for a brief moment before they would put US to work.

When the kids were in bed for the evening, I would wander downstairs to Mr. E’s library. He had tons of books - mostly on agriculture or politics or other boring things, but every so often I would come away from the library with a book. I would carry it up to my room and read and read until I fell asleep. I loved reading, even then.

One evening while I was searching his bookshelf for the next big novel I could read, I ran across a book turned pages out. It seemed out of place - it was a small paperback and pulling it out of it’s hiding place I realized that it had no cover. I flipped it open and read from the very top of the page and my heart just tapped slowly to a near stop. The Happy Hooker.

Now I knew that I probably shouldn’t be reading such a book - but I also knew that neither should Mr. E. He was a friend of our families, a christian man, and someone who I just never equated to having a book quite like that one. I figured in my juvenile, curious mind that if HE was allowed to read such a book - then I surely was. I tucked the book under my shirt and drifted up stairs to read it.

I don’t even remember the details of that book. I remember leaving at the end of the summer and not putting the book back into the hiding place, though. And I remember my father coming to my room and telling me that what I had done was really wrong and that that book was a very old book that Mr. E. forgot that he had - but it certainly wasn’t the type of book for a little girl to read. I remember being mortified - and wishing that I had spent a little more time with Lexie eating corn tortillas. I remember that the Happy Hooker was actually very happy and I wondered why and kept reading the book to figure it all out. I remember thinking that Mr.E. was a fool to even admit that he found the book because I wasn’t about to confess to finding the damn thing.

I remember turning down a few pages - dog earring them I believe the correct term is - that were particularily engrossing. I remember that there were quite a few dog ears. I remember the sound the book made, that last night on the farm, when it slipped thru the crack of the bed and headboard - and landed on the hard wood floor.

You know what I don’t remember besides the details on those dog earred pages?

I don’t remember turning those dog ears back over.