Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

That night she whizzed through the first five lessons in a single sitting. Agatha woke in the dark to hear the clacking of the keys, and when she came out to the kitchen her mother said, “See how far I’ve gone! At this rate I’ll be an expert in no time.” Agatha went back to bed and slept better than she had in weeks.

The next morning the kitchen table was covered with sheets of typing— pat rat sat hat and pop had a top . Agatha poured Coca-Cola into a glass and added a spoonful of instant coffee (her mother’s favorite way to get herself going) and carried it into the bedroom. Her mother was asleep in her slip with an arm hanging over the edge of the mattress, so it looked like one of those times when she would have trouble waking. But she opened her eyes at just the clink of the glass on the nightstand and she thanked Agatha very clearly. She spent that morning on Lessons Six through Eleven while Agatha, who this once was allowed to skip school, watched over Thomas and Daphne. Lesson Twelve was not important, their mother decided. That was only numerals, which she could go on doing hunt-and-peck unless she had to work for an accountant or something, which she certainly wasn’t planning on. She was planning to work for one of the downtown law firms, something at a nice front desk with flowers in a vase, she said, where she would answer the phone in a la-de-da voice and type letters clickety-click while the clients sat in the waiting room waiting. She demonstrated how she would look — nose raised snootily in the air and fingers tripping smartly as if the keys were burning hot. She was still in her bathrobe but you could see she was going to be perfect.

Around lunchtime that day they walked to Cold Spring Lane and bought a newspaper. They used to have home delivery but now they couldn’t afford it. Once she was hired, their mother said, they’d have home delivery again and they would sit around the breakfast table reading their horoscopes before she went to her office. Agatha had a thought. She said, “But Mama, who’s going to stay with us?”

“We’ll work that out when we come to it,” her mother said, tipping the stroller up onto a curb.

“Work it out how?”

“We’ll manage, Agatha. All right?”

“You wouldn’t just leave us on our own, would you?”

“Have I ever, ever left you on your own?”

Agatha opened her mouth but then closed it. Thomas looked over at her. His eyes filled with tears.

“Stop it,” Agatha told him.

He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and his face crumpled up.

“What in the world?” their mother asked. She turned to stare at him.

“He’s just … feeling sad,” Agatha explained. She didn’t want to remind her about Danny.

At home, their mother had spread the paper across the coffee table and circled every secretarial ad — dozens of them. The problem, she said, was not finding a job but choosing which one. “If I’d known how easy this was I’d have done it years ago,” she said. Then during Daphne’s nap she took the paper off to the bedroom telephone. For a while her voice murmured: “Da-dah? Da-da-dah? Da-de- dah -da …” Finally a long quiet spell. Thomas and Agatha looked at each other. They were watching soap operas with the sound turned off. Thomas took his thumb out of his mouth and said, “Go see.”

So Agatha went to tap at the door. No answer. She turned the knob and peered through the crack. Her mother was sitting against the headboard with the telephone on her lap. She was staring into space.

“Mama?” Agatha said.

“Hmm?”

“Did you find a job?”

“Agatha, do you have to keep pestering me? Isn’t there any place in this house where I can be private?”

“Maybe there’ll be something tomorrow,” Agatha said.

“Well, even if there is,” her mother said, “I’ll lose out the minute I tell them the truth. These people just want you to lie. They practically beg you to lie. ‘I’ve got thirty years’ experience,’ they want me to say. Even though I’m not but twenty-five.”

“Should I bring you a Coke, Mama?”

“No, just let me get on with this. I’m going to try a couple more.”

Now what they heard from the living room was louder and firmer, though still no easier to make out. “Dah- da. Dah -da-da.” And when she came to stand in the doorway, she was smiling. “Well,” she said, “I’ve set up an interview.”

They could tell it was something they should hug her for.

That evening she practiced her typing — little rushes of clacks separated by pauses when she had to make capital letters. She let Agatha phone Passenger Pizza even though they couldn’t afford it. And the next morning she took them to stay at Grandma Bedloe’s while she went to her interview. Grandma Bedloe said, “Doesn’t Agatha have school today?” but their mother said, “Her head was hurting.” She gave Agatha one of her secret looks — not a wink but more of a twinkle, without a single muscle moving. Then off she went to the bus stop, wearing the rose-colored suit she had married Danny in. Grandma Bedloe said, “She is way overdressed.” This worried Thomas, you could tell. His thumb homed in to his mouth and he glanced at Agatha. But Agatha had seen how perky their mother looked spiking down the front steps with her hair flouncing over her shoulders, so she wasn’t concerned. Anyhow, of all people to talk! Grandma Bedloe in her slacks and a man’s plaid shirt, with the skin beneath her eyes grown so loose and droopy and pleated since Danny died.

When their mother came back, she was walking more slowly. “How’d it go, dear?” Grandma Bedloe asked.

“Fine,” their mother said.

“You got the job?”

“We’ll have to see.”

“When will they let you know?”

“It may be a while,” their mother said, and she didn’t seem to move her lips as she spoke.

She wouldn’t stay for lunch. She said she had to get Daphne home for her bottle. “This is why I think your Aunt Claudia’s so smart to breast-feed,” Grandma Bedloe told the children, and their mother spun around from settling Daphne in her stroller and said, “Well, I don’t breast-feed. All right? I never breast-fed a one of them and I don’t intend to start now!”

Grandma Bedloe said, “Why! Lucy? All I meant was—”

“Some people can let themselves get saggy and baggy but I don’t have that luxury. I can’t afford to take anything for granted in this life, I’ve learned. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that. You think I enjoy this? Watching my weight and painting my nails, never letting my guard down, always on the lookout for split ends?”

“Split ends?”

“Oh, forget it. Thanks for keeping the children,” their mother said, and she took hold of the stroller and pushed it through the door.

On the way home, she wouldn’t talk. Or she talked, but only to herself. “Snob!” she whispered once. She stalked behind the stroller awhile and then whispered, “Conceited!” Agatha thought at first she meant Grandma Bedloe (who had never acted like a snob that she knew of and was not a bit conceited). But then their mother said, “Just tell me what words per minute have to do with anything!” So Agatha knew it must be someone at the interview.

At home, their mother left Daphne in her stroller in the middle of the kitchen while she phoned the typewriter man. “You can come and fetch this machine of yours,” she started right in. “Pick it up and haul it back. I’ll be glad to see the last of it. What? This is Lucy Bedloe. You brought me a Smith-Corona day before yesterday.”

He must have said something. She paused. Unsmiling, she made a short laughing sound. “Oh, really. What a thing to say,” she said.