Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

“So the two of you get along?” Eunice asked.

“Oh, yes, as well as can be expected. Considering she’s an adolescent.”

“Her mother is adolescent?”

“What? No, Kitty is. Kitty’s the adolescent. I’m sorry; you were asking about her mother?”

“I just meant… you know, do you talk with her mother on the phone and all.”

“We have to talk on the phone; we’ve got three daughters,” Liam said. “But I should be offering you coffee! It’s already made. Would you like a cup?”

“I’d love some,” Eunice said. She had a way of drawing back slightly when something pleased her. It gave her a bit of a double chin, which was surprisingly becoming.

She stayed in her chair while Liam rose and went to the kitchen. “Cream? Sugar?” he called.

“Just black.”

He could hear Kitty on her cell phone in the den, even through the closed door-the “ Na- na, na-na” of some protest or accusation. To drown her out, he said, “So! Eunice. Tell me about your job.”

“There’s not a whole lot to tell,” she said.

“Well, what exactly would you do in the average day, for instance?”

“Oh, I might go around to different places with Mr. C. Drive him out to check on a project, say. Or we attend a meeting of some sort.”

Liam brought her coffee in a cup with a real saucer, part of a matched set that he used so seldom, he’d had to wipe the dust off first. He sat back down in the rocker and said, “You stay with him through the whole meeting?”

“Yes, because I need to take notes. I take separate notes just for him, in a big ring binder that fills up every month or so. And also, well, if he gets a notion to leave, I’m the one who reminds him it’s not time yet.”

“I see,” Liam said. Then he said, “These notes are like regular minutes?”

“No, they’ve got, you know, tabs that are color-coded.”

“Aha!”

Eunice looked startled.

“Different colors for different memories,” he suggested.

“Or for different categories of memories, really. Like, red is for things that he’s already said about certain proposals, so that he won’t repeat himself, and then green is for personal information he might want for his conversations. Say somebody at the meeting turned out to have a son who went to school with Mr. C.’s son. That kind of thing.”

“Does that actually work?” Liam asked.

“Well, no,” she said. “Not very well.” She took a gulp of her coffee. “It’s just all I could come up with. I’m trying different approaches.”

“What else are you thinking of trying?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure.” She gazed down into her cup and said, “I’m probably going to get fired.”

“Why’s that?”

“There are such a lot of categories! Life has so many things in it that people need to remember! And Mr. C. is falling farther and farther behind. I’m working as hard as I can, but even so… I suppose pretty soon he’ll have to retire.” She gave Liam a brief, perky smile and said, “So we’d better get busy, right? I won’t have an inside track with Cope Development for much longer.”

She placed her cup and saucer on the lamp table and bent to rummage through her purse. “First I’ll just jot down some of your facts,” she said. She brought forth a steno pad and a ballpoint pen.

“I get a notebook all my own!” Liam said in a jokey voice.

“What?”

“A notebook like Mr. Cope’s.”

She looked at the steno pad and then at Liam. “No, well, Mr. Cope’s is more of a binder,” she said.

“Yes, I realize that, but… I was thinking how nice it would be if you were to keep my memories.”

“Oh!” she said. She flushed a deep pink and let her pen fall to the floor. Bending down to retrieve it turned her even pinker.

It was possible, Liam thought, that Kitty had been right: Eunice harbored some personal feeling for him. On the other hand, maybe she just reacted this way to life in general.

Kitty chose that moment to emerge from the den. She held her cell phone out at arm’s length. “Mom wants to talk to you,” she told him. She walked over to him and handed him the phone.

Liam spent a second trying to figure out how such a tiny object could make contact with both his ear and his mouth at the same time. He gave up, finally, and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?” he said.

Barbara said, “Kitty tells me she wants to stay with you all summer.”

“She does?”

“Have the two of you not discussed this?”

“No.”

Kitty suddenly fell to the floor, surprising him so that he nearly dropped the phone. Kneeling in front of him, she pressed her hands together like someone praying and mouthed a silent Please please please please.

“I won’t deny that I could use a little help, here,” Barbara said. “But I still have a lot of reservations. If we do this, I need to be sure you’ll set some limits.”

Liam said, “Wait, I-”

“First you’ll have to promise me she’ll be home by ten on weeknights. Twelve on Fridays and Saturdays. And she is absolutely not allowed one moment alone in the apartment with Damian or any other boy. Is that clear? I’ve no desire to end up with a pregnant seventeen-year-old.”

“Pregnant!” Liam said.

Kitty lowered her hands and gaped at him. Eunice’s eyes grew very wide behind her glasses.

“No, of course not,” he said hastily. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want that either. Merciful heavens!”

“You act as if it’s an impossibility, but believe me, these things happen,” Barbara told him.

“I’m aware of that,” Liam said.

“Okay, Liam. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“But-”

“If she wants to come by for her clothes, I’ll be here till late afternoon. Put her on, will you?”

Wordlessly, Liam handed the phone to Kitty. She sprang to her feet and walked off with it, saying, “What. Yes, I hear you. I’m not a total dummy.”

The den door shut behind her. Liam looked at Eunice.

“Seems all at once I have a long-term visitor,” he said.

“She’s going to live here?”

“For the summer.”

“Well, isn’t it nice that she wants to!” Eunice said.

“It’s more a case of her not wanting to live with her mother, I believe.”

“Is her mother a difficult person?” Eunice asked.

“No, not particularly.”

“Then why did you two divorce?”

This was beginning to feel like a date, somehow. It might have had to do with the way Eunice leaned forward to ask her questions-so attentive, so receptive. But Liam wasn’t sure now that he wanted a date. (At the moment, her head of curls reminded him of a Shirley Temple doll.)

He said, “The divorce was Barbara’s idea, not mine. I don’t even believe in divorce; I’ve always felt marriages are meant to be permanent. If it were up to me, we’d still be together.”

“What was she unhappy about?” Eunice asked.

“Oh,” he said, “I guess she felt I wasn’t, um, forthcoming.”

Eunice went on looking at him expectantly.

He turned his palms up. What more could he say?

“But you’re forthcoming with me,” she said.

“I am?”

“And you listen so well! You asked all about my job; you want to know every detail of how I spend my days… Men don’t usually do that.”

“I didn’t do it with Barbara, though,” Liam said. “She was right. I told her that. I said, ‘It’s true, I’m not forthcoming at all.’”

This made Eunice blush again, for some reason. She said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

He was still trying to figure out why it should be a compliment when she said, “Maybe your marriage was troubled because of your loss.”