Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

He sank into an armchair and let her babble on until she said, again, “Hello?”

He looked at her.

“Did you hear what I just told you? I won’t be staying for supper.”

“Okay.”

He wasn’t hungry for supper himself, but when he checked his watch he found it was after six. He rose heavily and went to the kitchen alcove to fix himself whatever was easiest. In the refrigerator he found half an onion, a nearly empty carton of milk, and a saucepan containing the dregs of the tomato soup he’d heated for lunch. (“Progresso lentil; that was our major food group once,” he heard Norman say.) He definitely didn’t want soup. In the cupboard he found a box of Cheerios, already opened. He shook a cupful or so into a bowl. Then he added milk, got himself a spoon, and sat down at the table.

Kitty was trying on a beach robe striped in hot pink and lime green. “Does this make me look like a watermelon?” she asked him.

He forgot to answer.

“Poppy?”

“Not at all,” he said.

He took a spoonful of Cheerios and chewed dutifully. If Kitty said anything further, he couldn’t hear it over the crunching sound.

He’d forgotten how he disliked cold cereal. It had something to do with the disjunction between the crispy dry bits and the cold wet milk. They didn’t meld, or something. They stayed too separate in his mouth. He took another spoonful, and he started considering pomegranates. He knew what Norman had meant about trying to eat the juicy part without biting into the seeds. The few times he’d eaten pomegranates himself, he had done the same thing, and Norman’s description brought back vividly the tart taste behind the sweetness, and the sensation of little hard pieces of seed lodging in his molars. Yes, exactly; he knew exactly.

He could almost be Norman; he knew so exactly how Norman felt.

Kitty said, “Is this one better?”

She was modeling another beach robe, a short blue terrycloth affair that wouldn’t protect her nearly as well from the sun. Before he could tell her so, though, there was a knock on the door.

Kitty called, “Come in?”

Instead of coming in, whoever it was knocked again.

Kitty heaved a put-upon sigh and went over to open the door. Liam took another spoonful of cereal. “Oh,” he heard her say. “Hi.” He twisted in his chair to see Eunice walk in, hugging a gray nylon duffel bag. It was a large bag but it couldn’t have been very full, because it flopped loosely over her arms, empty in the middle and bulging only slightly at either end.

He set his spoon down and stood up. He said, “Eunice?”

“Barbara be damned,” she told him in a hard bright voice. “Norman be damned. Everyone be damned.”

“Eunice, no.”

“What?”

“No,” he said. “We can’t do it. Go away.”

“What?”

Kitty was staring from one of them to the other.

“I’m sorry, but I mean it,” he told Eunice.

He could see her start to believe him. The animation drained gradually from her face until all her features sagged. She stood motionless, flat-footed, her clunky sandals turned outward in a ducklike fashion, her arms full of withered gray nylon.

Then she turned and left.

Liam sat back down on his chair.

Kitty seemed about to say something, but in the end she just gave a little shake of her shoulders, like a shiver, and tightened the sash of her beach robe.

Liam’s rocking chair, where he had so fondly imagined himself whiling away his old age, was not really all that comfortable. The slats seemed to hit his back wrong. And the smaller of the armchairs was too small, too short in the seat for his thighs. But the larger armchair was fine. He could sit in the larger armchair for days.

And he did.

He watched how the sun changed the color of the pines as it moved across the sky, turning the needles from black to green, sending dusty slants of light through the branches. There was a moment every afternoon when the line of shade coincided precisely with the line of the parking-lot curb out front. Liam waited for that moment. If it happened to pass without his noticing, he felt cheated.

He told himself that the shine would soon enough have worn off, if he and Eunice had stayed together. He would have started correcting her grammar, and she would have begun to notice his age and his irritability. He would ask why she had to stomp so heavily when she walked, and she would say he never used to mind the way she walked.

Oh, and anyhow, the world was full of people whose lives were meaningless. There were men who spent their entire careers picking up litter from city streets, or fitting the same bolt into the same bolt-hole over and over and over. There were men in prison, men in mental wards, men confined to hospital beds who could move only one little finger.

But even so…

He remembered an art project he had read about someplace where you wrote your deepest, darkest secrets on postcards and mailed them in to be read by the public. He thought that his own postcard would say, I am not especially unhappy, but I don’t see any particular reason to go on living.

One morning as he was sitting there he heard a knock, and he sprang up to answer even though he knew he shouldn’t. But he opened the door to find a stranger, a lipsticked woman with wildly bushy red hair and brass earrings the size of coasters. She stood with one hip slung out, holding a can of Diet Pepsi. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I’m Bootsie Twill. Can I come in?”

“Well…”

“You’re Liam, right?”

“Well, yes…”

“I’m Lamont’s mom. The guy they arrested?”

“Oh,” Liam said.

He stepped back a pace, and she walked in. She took a swig from her can and looked around the living room. “You get way more light than I do,” she said. “Which direction is this place facing?”

“Um, north?”

“Maybe I should lose my window treatments,” she said. She crossed the room to plunk herself down in the chair he had just vacated. She was wearing pedal pushers in a geometric red-and-yellow print, and when she set her right ankle on her left knee the hems rode up to expose gleaming, bronzed shins.

This was not the plump little Jack-and-the-Beanstalk widow Liam had envisioned when he heard of her son’s arrest.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Twill?” he asked, settling in the rocking chair.

“Bootsie,” she said. She took another swig of soda. “Lamont is out on bail,” she said. “He wants to have a jury trial. He’s going to plead not guilty.”

Liam wondered how that could possibly work. But then, what did he know about such things? He tried to look sympathetic.

“I figured I would ask you if you’d be a character witness,” she told him.

“Character witness!”

“Right.”

“Mrs. Twill-”

“Bootsie.”

“Bootsie, your son assaulted me, did you know that? He knocked me out with a blow to the head and he bit me in the palm.”

“Yes, but, see, he didn’t take anything, now, did he. He did not take one thing of yours. He was probably, like, overcome with remorse when he saw what he’d done, and he left.”

Liam rocked back in his chair and stared at her. He considered the possibility that this was all a joke-some sort of Candid Camera situation set up by, maybe, Bundy or someone.

“Don’t you think?” she prodded him.

“No,” he said levelly. “I think I made a noise and the neighbors heard and he got scared and ran away.”

“Oh, why are you so judgmental?”

He chose not to answer that.

“Hey,” she said. “I realize you’ve got reason to be mad at him, but you don’t know his whole story. This is a good, kind, good-hearted, kindhearted boy we’re talking about. Only he’s the product of a broken home and his father was a shit-head and in school he had dyslexia which gave him low self-esteem. Plus I think he might be bipolar, or whatchamacallit, ADD. So okay, all I’m asking is a second chance for him, right? If you could tell the jury how he broke into your apartment but then had remorseful thoughts-”