JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Several months ago my friends (Itago mo na lang ako sa pangalang. . .) Zaida and Zaido adopted a baby. They needed help taking care of the child, so they hired a nanny—a stern woman in her 60s who had been recommended by a colleague. The woman had plenty of child-raising experience so they often deferred to her, and even found her fascist tendencies amusing—she would yell at them if she thought they weren’t holding the baby the right way, and she disapproved of their musical choices. She pronounced Beethoven and Mozart lugubrious (“Parang ponyebre!”) and preferred to sing Boom Tarat and other TV hits to the baby.

Everything was fine for a few months, and then one day the nanny returned from her day off dragging a 3-year-old child. “Who is that?” Zaida asked the nanny, remembering to smile lest she be viewed as unwelcoming. “This is my grandson Pemberley Darcy (not his real name, but close),” Nanny announced gruffly. “I had to rescue him and bring him here because his goddamn father isn’t taking care of him.” Apparently Pemberley Darcy’s parents had separated and he’d been left in the care of his father, a construction worker. Every day the father would leave Pemberley in the house with only a bottle of water and a plate of rice with soy sauce. Pemberley would cry and scream his lungs out. Sometimes a neighbor would take pity on him and feed him; sometimes he was left alone. This continued for months, until his grandmother brought him to Zaida and Zaido’s house.

Zaida wasn’t expecting to shelter a 3-year-old child, but he had no one else, and he’d had a rough life for one so young. “Poor kid,” Zaida thought, observing the boy who was hiding behind the nanny’s skirt. “He just needs to be treated well.” She would remember these thoughts of hers very soon.