The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett Page B

Mr. Fairchild,” Mrs. Martin continued. “When they can talk without interruption.” Blandly, as if there were nothing odd about what she’d just said, she added, “How are your parents?”
    â€œI don’t interrupt them,” Eudora said. “Why would I? My parents are fine.”
    â€œGood,” Mrs. Martin repeated. “I thought your father was looking a trifle run-down.” Gazing steadily at Eudora, she added, “Miles is a wealthy man. A kind one too. I see the way he looks at Naomi. If she gave him a little encouragement—surely you want what’s best for her? You’ve always been her friend.”
    â€œI still am,” Eudora said stiffly, stepping back. “Would you tell her I came by?”
    She pulled her bicycle from the hedge and pedaled down the hill and back along the village streets, wondering, as she overshot the turn to her house and continued westward, how Mrs. Martin could understand so little about her own daughter. Always she seemed to miss what was most obvious, including the fact that in the past two years, Naomi had come close to running away half a dozen times.
    Ahead Baker’s Ridge loomed, black against the graying sky and already casting the village into shadow. Eudora pedaled faster, remembering how Mrs. Martin’s clumsiness had helped bring her and Naomi together. Although her aunt employed Naomi’s mother, they might not have become real friends if she hadn’t found Naomi weeping stormily one afternoon under a spruce near her Aunt Elizabeth’s house. Mrs. Martin had visited the school that day, delivering one of her lectures on home economics, and at first Eudora suspected that Naomi was weeping with annoyance; the lecture had been very dull. Instead, Naomi confessed that her mother’s newest boarder, a Mr. Elliot, had that morning pulled her into his bathroom as she’d dropped off his clean towels and then stood there, beaming and naked.
    â€œAnd then,” Naomi had said—but Eudora, transfixed by that image, had heard nothing for a minute.
    â€œIt’s not as if this is the first time either,” Naomi added. “Other men do things like this, like they think their weekly fee covers me along with their meals. Whenever I try to tell my mother she claims I’m exaggerating, or if someone really did say or do something he didn’t mean it, it was just a passing weakness brought on by fever.”
    â€œThey touch you?” Eudora said. They’d been, she thought now, thirteen and fourteen then.
    Naomi shook her head impatiently. “They don’t really do anything—they’re so feeble, most of them, I could push them over if I had to. But just listening to them, and the way their eyes crawl over me when I’m serving meals—and then this.” She leaned back against the tree and gestured toward the house. “I was going to see if your aunt would talk to my mother about it.”
    â€œMaybe,” Eudora said, thinking of her aunt’s firmness with her housekeepers, “that’s not the best idea.”
    Instead she’d talked to Naomi herself, the two of them circumnavigating the lake as Naomi complained about her mother and her chores at the house. Eudora, who had similar chores, was surprised to learn how much Naomi disliked them. At her Aunt Elizabeth’s cure cottage, where she helped out after school and on weekends, she’d found that she liked being useful. Her oldest sister, Helen, had married and had twin daughters by then; Ernest had already moved to New York and Eugene had started sharing quarters above the garage with his two friends. Sally was about to move to Plattsburgh, leaving her—always the baby, the one everyone forgot—with no one to talk to and nothing to do. Her father stayed in the shop out back, struggling to keep up with the changing fashions in taxidermy, always a few years behind. Her mother lived in the