The Checkers

I had a regular babysitting gig when I was sixteen years old. Several evenings a week I looked after a little girl while her mother worked the midnight shift at one of the local car plants. Of course my boyfriend Malcolm would come over and we’d play house after hurriedly getting young Kate to bed. This pattern continued until Kate’s grandparents started to drop up unexpectedly, say around eight or nine o’clock in the evening to talk with Kate’s mum, or to pick something up. And I always thought it very odd how they never knew their daughter’s work schedule.