Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

All this dwelling on the past was Eunice’s fault. If not for her-or the loss of her-he wouldn’t be thinking about such things.

In the most unforeseen way, Eunice really had turned out to be his rememberer.

Kitty came back from Ocean City with skin the color of caramel, except for the bridge of her nose, which was pink and peeling. She walked in with her bag slung over her shoulder, leaving the door wide open behind her. “Poppy!” she said. “Hi there!”

It was Sunday morning, and Liam was fixing scrambled eggs for breakfast. It took him a moment to register her presence.

“Can you give Damian a ride?” she asked him.

“Where to?”

“His mom’s, in a while. Otherwise he’d have to go right now with his aunt and uncle.”

“I guess so.”

She threw her bag on a chair and spun around to return to the door. “It’s okay!” she called in a piercing voice. So much noise, all of a sudden! Liam felt a bit dazed.

When she came back, she had Damian with her. He was carrying a knapsack and he was as white-skinned as when he’d left. “At least someone heeds the warnings,” Liam told him.

Damian said, “Huh?”

“The dermatologists’ warnings.”

Damian looked blank.

“He lay out as much as I did,” Kitty said, “but the sun doesn’t affect him.”

Liam said, “Really.” This seemed a bit creepy, as if Damian were some sort of vampire, but he put the thought out of his mind. “Anybody want breakfast?” he asked.

“Breakfast!” Kitty said. “It’s almost eleven.”

“I got a late start.”

“I’ll say you did.”

“It is the weekend, after all.”

“And you look like a homeless person. Are you growing a beard or something?”

“It’s the weekend!” he said again. He rubbed his chin.

Damian said, “I could go for some breakfast.”

“You ate breakfast hours ago,” Kitty told him.

“That’s why I could eat again.”

“Not now, Damian; we’ve got to talk.”

Liam was puzzled (hadn’t they had the whole beach trip to talk?), but then he realized he was the one she planned to talk to. She stepped up to face him and said, “Poppy, I’ve been thinking.”

He braced himself.

“I’m thinking I should stay here for the school year,” she said.

“What! Stay with me?”

“Right.”

He felt a confusing mixture of reactions to this proposal. How about his privacy, how about his nice solitary life? But also, he was conscious of an odd sense of relief. He set down his spatula. “There’s not enough room, though,” he said. “There’s only my study.”

“You’re not using your study!”

“I haven’t been able to, might I point out.”

“What would you be doing there?”

He couldn’t come up with an answer. He said, “Oh, well, let’s talk about this later. We’ve got plenty of time to discuss it.”

“No, we don’t. Summer’s almost over.”

“It is?”

“School begins in two weeks.”

“It does?”

Last Thursday, a woman had phoned from a place called Bet Ha-Midrash and told him she had heard he might be interested in a job there. “A job,” he’d said, caught off guard.

“A job as zayda in our three-year-olds’ class.”

“Oh,” he’d said. “Okay…”

“Would you like to send us your application?”

“Okay…”

But somehow he’d been assuming he had weeks and weeks yet to do that, and in fact he hadn’t given it any further thought. “It’s August,” he said now, disbelievingly.

“It’s late August,” Kitty told him.

“Isn’t that always the way?” Liam asked Damian. “Summer just flies right by.”

And Eunice had been merely a summer romance, if you didn’t know the whole story.

Damian had seated himself at the table, and he was biting into a piece of toast-Liam’s toast, as it happened. He might not have realized Liam was addressing him. Kitty said, “Summer didn’t fly by for me. I was buried alive in a dentist’s office.”

“Well, I’ll have to think this over,” Liam said, stalling for time. He dished his eggs onto a plate. “Of course it will depend on what your mother says.”

“She’s going to say no,” Kitty told him.

“So in that case you can’t do it, can you.”

“But if you talked to her-”

“I told you I would.”

“When?”

“Oh… I’ll call her this afternoon.”

“No, not on the phone! It’s too easy for her to say no, on the phone. We should go visit her in person.”

Liam studied her suspiciously.

“I want her to realize we’re serious,” Kitty said. “You and me should drive over there right this very minute and lay out all our reasons.”

“What are our reasons?”

“We don’t get in each other’s hair, for one thing.”

Liam said, “If by that you mean that I’m more lax, then your mother is going to say that you should be with her. And she would be right.”

Oops, he had sent Kitty into her prayerful-maiden pose. Plop onto the floor, hands clasped to her breast. Damian stopped chewing and stared at her. “Please, please, please,” she said. “Have I given you any trouble this summer? Have I violated my curfew by one single eentsy minute? I’m begging you, Poppy. Have mercy. All I could think of at the beach was, School’s about to start and I’m going to have to go back home and deal with Mom again. It’s not fair! I should get to live with you a while. I’ve never lived with you, not when I was old enough to know it. In my whole entire life all I’ve had is this little bit of summer-July and part of August. Xanthe and Louise had lots more time than that. And it’s only for a year, you know. After this I’ll be in college. You’ll never have another chance at me!”

Liam laughed.

It seemed ages since he had laughed.

“Well,” he said, “let’s see what your mother says.”

Kitty clambered to her feet and smoothed her clothes down.

Damian asked, “Have we got any marmalade?”

It was proof of how serious Kitty was about all this that she wouldn’t let Damian come with them to Barbara’s. “You would just complicate things,” she told him. “We’ll drop you off at your mom’s house on the way.”

Damian said, “Thanks a lot!” but Kitty paid no attention; she’d already moved on to Liam.

“I hope you’re planning to shave,” she told him.

“Well, I could do that, I guess. Once I’ve had my breakfast.”

“And how about what you’re wearing?”

“How about it?”

“You’re not planning to go out in those clothes, are you?”

He glanced down at them-a perfectly respectable T-shirt and a pair of pants that he always referred to as his gardening pants, although he didn’t garden. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “It’s not as if I’m appearing in public.”

“Mom will think you look… not reliable.”

“Fine, I’ll change. Just let me finish my breakfast, will you?”

Kitty backed off then, but he was conscious of her hovering at the edges of his vision, fidgeting and flouncing about and picking things up and putting them down. Damian, meanwhile, had assumed a horizontal position in an armchair with the sports section from the Sun. Every now and then he read out a baseball score to Kitty, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

As Liam was shaving, it occurred to him to wonder why he had said yes to her. He didn’t want this child living with him permanently! For one thing, he was tired to death of all these fruity-smelling shampoos and conditioners crowding the rim of his bathtub. And the carpet in the den had not been visible since she’d moved in there.