Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [28]
“I’d be mighty surprised if she was,” he said. “We’re in the process of a divorce.” Then he placed her fingers in the right position on the keys—what he called “home base”—and taught her to type a sad mad lad, which made her laugh. When he left he gave her his card so she could call him with any questions.
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