The Two-Family House(61)

A week and a half after the accident, Mort was back at work. He put the oversized green math book in the center of his desk, lying on its side with the spine facing him. On top of it he placed a new silver frame holding Teddy’s school photo from September. In anyone else’s office, both items might have gone unnoticed among the ordinary clutter of files, family photographs and paperwork piles. But on the barren surface of Mort’s desk, the book and the photograph were painfully conspicuous. Mort knew, but for the first time in his life, he didn’t care about attracting attention. He didn’t care what questions people asked. Mort had given up his point system a long time ago. Either God wasn’t counting, or His adding machine was broken.

The first Thursday Abe brought Natalie to the office after school, the newer secretaries, Rhonda and Maryanne, insisted on opening up a tin of butter cookies in honor of her visit. Sheila, who had known Natalie since she was a baby, gave her a hug and asked whether she might like to help them answer the phones. Did she want to sit in the reception area with them? Use some of the blank typing paper for drawing? The women assumed Helen was busy for the afternoon and that Natalie was still too upset to be left at home without a parent. They wanted to make her feel welcome. But after a few weeks went by and it became clear that Thursday was going to be Natalie’s regular afternoon at the office, everyone stopped making a fuss.

Mort wondered what Sheila and the others thought. Did they think it was odd that Natalie went into his office to do her homework? He got his answer one Friday morning when he was on his way to get a cup of coffee. Rhonda and Maryanne were waiting for a fresh pot to brew, so Mort headed back to his office. Once he was out of view, Rhonda picked up the conversation where Maryanne had left off. “… always so serious,” Mort heard her say. “No wonder Natalie does her homework in his office—it’s the quietest place in the building!”

Mort wasn’t offended. Rhonda was right—his office was quiet. The only time it wasn’t was when Natalie was there. He remembered the way his niece had frowned the first Thursday when she knocked on his door. “Do you keep your door closed all the time?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I can’t concentrate unless it’s closed.” He had forgotten that she had never been in his office before. Most people hadn’t.

Natalie took a few steps into the room, looked around and frowned some more.

“You only have one chair.”

“I’ll get an extra one from the reception area for you.”

“But where do people sit when they come here to talk to you?”

“They don’t come here to talk.” Why did she have to ask so many questions? When he returned with the chair, Natalie had further observations.

“You need some more pictures. Dinah’s school picture was taken the same day as ours, so you should have that one. I don’t know about Mimi’s, though, because she’s in the high school. Do they take Judith’s school picture in college?”

“Let’s just start with the math.” There was no mistaking his brusque tone, and Natalie could sense his frustration. Her smiled dimmed, so Mort tried to explain. “I just don’t like a lot of photos and knickknacks around to get in the way. I like to keep my desk neat.”

“I understand. The thing is, I’d be really upset if my dad had a picture of one of my brothers on his desk and no picture of me.”

“But the girls never come to the office. They don’t even know the picture is here.”

“I know, but still. Maybe you should put up a family photo. I’ll bring you one from home.”

And that was that—the slow transformation of his office had begun. After the third week, Natalie suggested he leave the extra chair against the wall. “That way, you won’t have to keep lugging it back and forth,” she told him. On the fifth Thursday she brought in a framed photo of Mort’s family that had been taken at a relative’s wedding the year before Teddy died.

“Where did you find that?” he asked.

“My mom had it in one of her albums. She said I could bring it to you. Do you like it?” Natalie looked up at him expectantly and smiled. What could he say? The photograph found a permanent spot on his desk.

After that, there had been no stopping her. She brought a tin of hard candies one week and a dark green pencil holder several weeks later. Natalie understood that he needed time to acclimate to each new item before another one was introduced. She developed a slow-paced yet relentless momentum, and Mort found himself incapable of rejecting her offerings.

He didn’t want to admit it, but he found himself enjoying the small changes she made. He put his feet up on the extra chair sometimes when he had his coffee, and he liked how the pencil cup looked when it was filled. There was something satisfying about seeing so many neatly sharpened pencils all in one place.

Every Thursday, Natalie brought some work to do with Mort. Some days she brought equations to solve and some days she brought sketches of shapes she was trying to find the area of. One day she even brought in a story she had written. Mort smiled when he read the geometry-themed fairy tale she wrote about Princess Polygon and the evil dragon Decagon.

“What made you think of this?” he asked.

“Last week you taught me about tangents, and then the next day at school the same word was in our book, but it meant something else. The main character ‘went off on a tangent.’ It made me think about all of the geometry words I know, so I wrote a story.”