Free Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler Page B

one. Some were big complicated electrics and some were little low-slung manuals. If it were up to Agatha, they’d have a manual. Those looked easier. But her mother’s was electric, with keys that chattered loudly almost before you touched them.
    They had first come to this store in the spring, shortly after Danny died. Their mother had decided to be a secretary. “I have endured my very last of the Fill ’Er Up Café,” she told them. “This time I want an office job.” So one afternoon they had walked to Rumford’s, where their mother asked a lady with squiggly hair if she could use a machine to learn to type. “Do what?” the lady said. Their mother had explained that she wanted to sit at a desk for just exactly twelve days and teach herself out of a book called
Touch Typing in Twelve Easy Lessons
, and she promised that all three children would be as quiet as mice. “Hon,” the lady said, “this is not a secretarial college.”
    “Well, don’t you think I know that?” their mother cried. “But how do you suppose I could manage a
real
secretarial college? How do you expect me to pay? Who would watch my children?”
    “Hon—”
    “This is all I’ve got to go on, don’t you understand? I need to find a job of some kind, I need to find employment!”
    Then the typewriter man came over. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked, and the lady looked relieved and said, “This is Mr. Rumford, the owner.
He
can tell you,” and she walked away. Mr. Rumford had been much more sympathetic. Not that he let theirmother carry out her plan (he was really just the owner’s
son
, he said, and his father would have a conniption), but he admired her spunk and he suggested that she rent, instead. She could rent from this very store and practice in the privacy of her home. Their mother said, “Oh! I never thought of that,” and she took a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.
    “Know what I recommend?” the man had said. “An electric. Look at those pretty fingernails! You don’t want to ruin your nails, now, do you?”
    Their mother tried to smile.
    “A manual, you have to pound down hard,” he told her. “That’s why you see those professional stenographers with their squared-off, ugly, short fingernails.”
    Agatha hid her own hands behind her back. Her mother looked up into the typewriter man’s eyes. She said, “But wouldn’t an electric be more expensive?”
    “Pennies a day! Just pennies.”
    “And heavy, too. I mean an electric must weigh a lot more. And I’m not … I’m all on my own. I don’t have anyone to carry things.”
    “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll bring it by myself, after work.”
    “You would do that?”
    “It’ll be my pleasure,” he told her. “Let me show you the machine I have in mind.” And off he went, leading them through the rows of desks.
    The machine he had in mind was a blue metal hulk with a cord so thick that when he brought it that evening, the only outlet they could plug it into was the one behind the refrigerator. He had to move the refrigerator and pull the kitchen table over so the cord would reach, and then he was red in the face and their mother made him sit down and have a beer. While he was drinking his beer, he showed her the special features—the electric return and the keys that would repeat. “This is justso nice of you,” their mother told him. “I know
Mrs
. Rumford must be having to keep your supper warm.”
    “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,