Noah's Compass

“It’s like Mr. C.,” Eunice said.

“Ah,” Liam said, and he grew very alert.

“You won’t breathe a word of this, will you?”

“No, no!”

“What I do for Mr. C. is, like, I’m his external hard drive.”

Liam blinked.

“But that is not to go beyond these walls,” Eunice said. “You have to promise.”

“Yes, of course, but-”

“Mrs. C. was just worried to bits, was what she told my mother.”

“So… excuse me, you’re saying-”

“But forget I mentioned it, okay? Let’s change the subject.”

Liam said, “Okay…”

“How can you be both divorced and widowed?” she asked him.

He tried to collect his thoughts. He said, “The divorce was the second wife. The first wife died.”

“Oh, I am so, so sorry.”

“Well, it was long ago,” Liam said. “I never think about her anymore.”

Eunice started picking her chicken wing apart with the very tips of her fingers, putting slivers of meat in her mouth while she kept her eyes on his. He didn’t want her to ask what Millie had died of. He could see the question forming in her mind, and so he rushed to say, “Two marriages! Sounds pretty bad, right? I’m always embarrassed to tell people.”

“My great-grandfather had three marriages,” Eunice said.

“Three! Well, I’d never go that far. There’s something… exaggerated about three marriages. Cartoonish. No offense to your great-grandfather.”

“This was back in the old days,” Eunice said. “His first two wives died in childbirth.”

“Oh, then,” Liam said.

“How did-?”

“But!” Liam said loudly, slapping both hands on the table. “We don’t have a vegetable! What am I thinking? I’m going to make us a salad.”

“No, really, I don’t need a salad.”

“Let’s see,” he said, and he jumped up and went to the refrigerator. “Lettuce? Tomatoes? Hmm, the lettuce seems a bit…”

He returned with a bag of baby carrots. “Did you know there’s a store on York Road called Greenish Grocery?” he asked as he sat back down. “I’ve driven past it. I always picture they’d have brown-edged lettuce, shriveled radishes, broccoli turning yellow… Here, help yourself.”

Last month, as it happened, had marked the thirty-second a

“I understand these carrots aren’t really babies at all,” he told Eunice. “They’re full-sized but they’ve been whittled down by machines to make them little.”

“That’s all right,” Eunice said, and she laid the single carrot she’d selected onto her plate. For someone so well padded, she seemed a very dainty eater. “Now, I haven’t spoken yet to Mr. McPherson,” she said.

“McPherson. Oh. At Cope.”

“I thought first you could write him a letter of inquiry, and then I would stop by his office and put in a word of recommendation.”

“Well, but-” Liam began.

He was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. Maybe he was edgier these days than he realized, because his heart gave a sudden thump. Someone called, “Poppy?”

Kitty came staggering in with her duffel bag and a large canvas tote. She still wore her work clothes-the pink polyester tunic she always complained about. Her mascara or whatever it was had blurred so she seemed to have two black eyes. “Oh!” she said when she saw Eunice.

Liam said, “Eunice, this is Kitty, my daughter. Kitty, this is Eunice, um…”

“Dunstead,” Eunice said. She was sitting almost sway-backed now with her hands folded under her chin. She looked a little bit like a chipmunk. “It’s such a thrill to meet you, Kitty!”

“Hi,” Kitty said flatly. Then she turned to Liam. “I’ve reached the end of the line, I tell you. I’m not staying under that woman’s roof another minute.”

“Well, why not have a piece of chicken,” Liam said. “Eunice here was kind enough to bring a-”

“First of all, I am seventeen years old. I am not a child. Second, I have always been an extremely reasonable person. Wouldn’t you say I’m reasonable?”

“Should I go?” Eunice asked Liam.

She spoke in a low, urgent voice, as if hoping Kitty wouldn’t hear. Liam glanced at her. In fact, he did wish all at once that she would go. This was not working out the way he’d imagined; it was getting complicated; he felt frazzled and distracted. But he said, “Oh, no, please don’t feel you have to-”

“I think I should,” she said, and she rose, or half rose, watching his face.

Liam said, “Well, then, if you’re sure.”

She stood up all the way and reached for her purse. Kitty was saying, “But some people just take this preconception into their heads and then there’s no convincing them. ‘I know you,’ they say; ‘I don’t trust you as far as I can-’”

“Sorry,” Liam told Eunice as he followed her toward the door.

“That’s all right!” she said. “We can always get together another time. I’ll phone you tomorrow, why don’t I. Meanwhile, you can be looking through those materials I brought. Did I give you those materials? What’d I do with them?”

She stopped walking to peer down into her purse. “Oh. Here,” she said, and she pulled out several sheets of paper folded haphazardly into a wad.

Liam accepted them, but then he said, “Actually, Eunice… you know? I really don’t think I’ll apply there.”

She stared up at him. He took another step toward the door, meaning to urge her on, but she held her ground. (He was never going to get rid of her.) She said, “Are you saying that just because Mr. C. forgot he had met you?”

“What? No!”

“Because it means nothing that he forgot. Nothing at all.”

“Yes, I understand. I just-”

“But we won’t go into the particulars,” she said, and she slid her eyes in Kitty’s direction. “I’ll phone you in the morning, okay?”

“Fine,” he said.

Fine. He would deal with it in the morning.

“Bye-bye for now, Kitty!” she called.

“Bye.”

Liam opened the door for Eunice, but he didn’t follow her out. He stood watching her cross the foyer. At the outer door she turned to wave, and he lifted the wad of papers and nodded.

When he went back inside he found Kitty sitting at the table, grasping a chicken breast with both hands and munching away at great speed. She said, “Any chance you’ll be going by an ATM any time soon?”

“I hadn’t pla

“Because I spent my very last dollar on the taxi.”

“You came by taxi?”

“What do you think, I carried all this luggage on the bus?”

“I gave it no thought at all, I suppose,” he said, and he dropped back down on his chair.

Kitty set her chicken breast on the bare table and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. The napkin turned into a greasy shred. “That woman’s younger than Xanthe,” she told him.

“Yes, you’re probably right.”

“She’s way too young for you.”

“For me! Oh, goodness, she’s got nothing to do with me!”

Kitty raised her eyebrows. “Think not?” she asked him.

“Good Lord, no! She came to help with my résumé.”

“She came because she has this big huge crush on you that sticks out a mile in every direction,” Kitty said.

“What!”

Kitty eyed him in silence as she took a carrot from the bag.

“What a notion,” Liam said.

He didn’t know which was more shocking: the notion itself, or the slow, deep sense of astonished pleasure that began to rise in his chest.