Nanette was different. She didn’t happen in the usual way. She just happened. The second floor of the Peeler place boasted four bedrooms and four beds, of which the older members of the family occupied three. The one remaining was reserved for guests or the next offspring, but as the latter had been tardy in its arrival despite frequent encouragement from Mommy and Daddy, the Beans had resigned themselves to leaving their guests without competition. Then one morning the family returned from a short trip to find that a small child, by appearance less than two years of age, had crawled into bed number four. Five years later, she was still there.
     Nanette was never to exhibit any memory of her life before her advent upon the Beans, aside from a fitful recollection of someone with eyes like a dog’s. But eventually she developed notions on how her story was to play out. Someday, she decided, her true parents would show up to reclaim her, and they were to be fabulously wealthy, royal, and exotic, and were to shower upon her dazzling rubies, fabulous food, and miraculous playthings, not necessarily in that order. They would serve Daddy with a Writ, and Mommy would cry, and the court case would drag out a hundred years or so until, with Mommy and Daddy about to lose, she would stand up dramatically and announce that she wanted to be a Bean, at which the whole courtroom would cry, and her real parents would apologize to Daddy and tear up the Writ and go back to their kingdom, and she would live happily ever after with Mommy and Daddy and the toys her real parents would continue to send on special occasions, like Christmas, or her birthday, or their birthdays.
     Nothing like that ever happened. What happened was Daddy made inquiries with the police and the hospitals and the adoption agencies and Missing Persons and Child Protective Services, and Mommy made a poster to put on telephone poles like people do for found kittens, but it was never put up because Mommy decided before the day was out that she wanted this baby, and even gave her a name, which was not Nanette and was only used once because Daddy once again put his foot down. For that matter, the mystery of Nanette’s real parents was no mystery for long, except to Nanette, from whom it was long kept. They had not left her; she had left them, most likely, when the situation had become bad enough. Within days, it was bad enough that both were discovered, in a house just down the block. There were sirens, flashing lights, three police cars and an emergency van, yellow tape, and stories and editorials in the Courier-Bulletin. Something dire had happened there, and perhaps in consequence that house remained vacant after, until that terrible day it burned down when Nanette was six, still unaware of her past connection with the place. The important things were that her parentage was soon well known to those whose business it was to know such things, and that, to the advantage of Mommy and Daddy Bean, there appeared to be no next of kin. So they kept her and went and spoke to people they knew, both Mommy and Daddy knowing a surprising number of people in interesting walks of life, many of whom had influence in places no one would have suspected an acquaintance of Mommy or Daddy as having. This was shown plainly when they sat down to their initial interview at the Agency, conducted by a plump yet pinched lady who had apparently arisen on the wrong side of her bed that morning, possibly every morning. The agent proved hostile, questioning every aspect of the prospective parents’ background, in which she took great satisfaction in discovering much to question. Daddy spent the interview nodding politely, his eyes wandering randomly about the premises without any obvious perception of the strong head of steam building up in his better half, and when the line of questioning took a particularly difficult turn he excused himself and wandered off, leaving the field to Mommy. Before she and the agent between them had quite managed to cook the Beans’ goose he returned, chatting amiably with the agent’s supervisor over all the wonderful assistance they had been given, about which the supervisor gushed in turn to the agent herself in most flattering terms, and the upshot of it all was that somehow no option was left for turning the Beans down.
     Therefore when the people came for Nanette it was merely to confirm they would make reasonably suitable parents and if it seemed like they would pronounce them so—provisionally, with permanence to ensue after, on the condition that they had. This time Daddy ensured beforehand the interview would proceed unexceptionally, by inquiring of Mommy when her next Crazy Day was due, ascertaining it might come any time within the week, and advising that it be discouraged from putting in an appearance on the day in question.
     Mommy’s Crazy Days occurred once a month, on average, with precursors and postscripts of an eccentricity Daddy claimed to find endearing, though Daddy was fully capable of lying when necessary. Cindy told Nanette once that she had heard Mommy used to have Crazy Days most of the time, but that was before Nanette, or Jonathan, or even Cindy herself, and so the details that might have been expected to accompany this interesting revelation were lacking.
     On this occasion, Mommy had protested that she couldn’t control when a Crazy Day might come, “not just like that,” and Daddy replied “you can if it’s important enough,” and Mommy said she couldn’t, and Daddy said she could, with the suggestion that Nanette might just be important enough. Mommy grew thoughtful and abandoned the contest, and somehow Crazy Day failed to come at all that month, prompting speculation for a time that a fifth bedroom might be required, though in the event it wasn’t. So the people who came in regard to Nanette left happy, and left Nanette with the Beans, which left them happy as well.
     There was some question at first to what her name was going to be. Mommy’s choice was “Nanobot,” originally suggested by Jonathan as a cool word, on the grounds that the new addition to the family was small, infectious in her charm, and all in all a deux ex machina solution to her hitherto frustrated hope of increasing the size of the family. Cindy was adamant against the proposal, expressing her opposition with all the vehemence peculiar to a person possessed of her own particular grievance on the subject of names, and who was disinclined to permit a similar saddling of her new sister. She easily enlisted her father to the cause, and it was his practical suggestion that effected the compromise between maternal whim and convention that was ultimately adopted. Knowing Mommy’s attachment to the lyrics of “Tea for Two,” with their delightful convolutions, it took little effort to direct her attention to the title of the musical from which it derived. In time, Mommy even found it practical when steering her new charge from the path of mischief. “No-no, Nanette!” she would exclaim to the girl, with an odd little smile. The girl herself, oblivious to her name’s history, was left to assume the phrase a private joke between her mother and nobody else.