Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet

She said, “No …,” and stopped scrubbing her coat and looked over at me. In a friendlier tone, she said, “Really. I’m fine. I should have let the counterman put a lid on, the way he wanted.”

“Well, how could you have foreseen you’d be sitting next to a klutz?” I said. I passed her the cup. Then I removed the screw of soaked tissue from her hand and stuffed it into my seat pocket. “It was nerves, I guess,” I told her. “I think I’m a little nervous.”

“Nervous! About a train trip?”

I looked into her eyes. Don’t you know? was the thought I sent her, but she gazed pleasantly, blankly back at me. Her eyes were blue. Her mouth was large and well shaped, lipsticked in too bright a shade of red, and the light from the window behind her gilded the powdery down along her jawline.

I said, “I’m, ah, heading up to Philly to see my little girl on not my normal visitation day.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sure it will all work out.”

Was this an official prophecy? No, of course not. Get a grip, Gaitlin. She took a sip of her coffee and shifted in her seat so she could pull her newspaper from beneath her. I said, “And besides!” (I was desperate. I didn’t want to let the conversation die.) “Not only is it not my normal day; I’m not supposed to see her any day, ever again.”

Her eyes came back to me. “Why is that?” she asked, finally.

“Last time I had car trouble, and I got there late, and her mother claimed it broke her heart,” I said.

Then I said, “My little girl’s heart, I mean. Not her mother’s. Lord knows, not her mother’s.”

Sophia laughed. I caught the faint scent of flowers mingled with the coffee, as if she’d been chewing roses.

“So today I’m going up blind,” I said. “I don’t even know if Opal’s going to be there.”

Which was true enough, certainly. I hadn’t given Opal a thought. I’d assumed that once I reached Philadelphia, I would turn around and catch the next train home. But I said, “Kids need their fathers. You can’t just break off ties like that.”

“You can’t, indeed,” she told me. “How old is she?”

“She’s — um — nine? Yes, nine.”

“Oh, at nine they definitely need their fathers.”

“The trouble is,” I said (for lack of any other subject), “I doubt my visits are anything she looks forward to. I’ve been seeing her once a month, is all. Last Saturday of every month. When they’re that young, they can change completely in a month! Not to mention she’s a girl. What do I know about girls? Do you have any daughters yourself?”

“Oh, no,” Sophia said. She hesitated. Then she said, “I’m not married, actually.”

I’d have been flabbergasted to hear she was, but I just said, “At least you’ve been a little girl.” (Though in fact I wasn’t so sure.) “You remember how it feels.”

“Well, but I suspect I wasn’t typical,” she told me. “I was an only child. I think that tends to keep children childlike longer, don’t you?”

“Opal’s an only child too,” I said. “Oh — sorry. My name’s Barnaby Gaitlin.”

“Sophia Maynard,” she told me.

“Sophia, if you had your say,” I said, “what would you advise a guy in my general position to do about his life?”

“I’d advise you to persevere, of course,” she said.

“Persevere?”

“Why, certainly! I can guarantee that no matter what, Opal wants to keep seeing her daddy.”

“Oh. Opal,” I said.

Actually, Opal had never called me “daddy.” “Daddy” sounded like someone else — someone who’d treat her to Shirley Temples in stodgy, flocked-wallpaper restaurants. I was starting to feel like some kind of impostor.

“But I don’t have to tell you that,” Sophia was saying, “because look at you!”

“Pardon?”

“You’re already on your way to visit her!”

“Ah. Except that, well, this visit was really just a … random activity, so to speak.”

“I know just what you mean,” Sophia said.

“You do?”

“Sometimes intuition is our truest guiding force, don’t you agree?”

“Intuition? Hmm,” I said, paying close attention now.

“You can be led to get on a train, not even knowing why,” she said.

“Is that a fact.”

“And once you arrive at your ex-wife’s, you’re going to be led to say exactly the words that will change her mind.”

“But see,” I said, “I’m not sure that … at this point, I don’t believe my family situation is the central issue anymore.”

“I’m going to tell you a story,” Sophia said.

I grew very still. I said, “Okay.”

“Two weeks ago, I went to visit my mother. Well, I do that every week; she’s elderly and she lives alone. But this time she was in such a fretful mood; so fractious. I made her some tea, and she said, ‘This tea tastes moldy’ ‘Moldy?’ I said. ‘It’s a new box! How could it taste moldy?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, but it does.’ I said, ‘Very well, Mother.’ This was not fifteen minutes after I had got there, mind. I was still exhausted from my trip. But I said, ‘Very well, Mother,’ and I picked up my purse and went out to buy more tea bags. I was walking toward this little store nearby, but once I reached it, do you know what I did? I walked right past. I kept walking till I came to Thirtieth Street Station, and I hopped on a train and rode home. And all the way, I was thinking, Heavens, what have I done? Then something told me, This is what you were led to do; so it must be right. Well, my point is, that evening Mother telephoned, which she almost never does — she has that old-time attitude toward long distance — and she said, ‘Sophia, I apologize. I don’t know what got into me. All day I’ve been regretting my behavior, and I promise that when you come next week I will watch my p’s and q’s.’ And true to her word, when I went back up last Saturday she was an entirely different person.”

I couldn’t figure out how this related to me. I said, “Well. That’s very interesting.”

She must have sensed my disappointment, because she said, “You think I acted terrible, don’t you?”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“You’re shocked I would walk out on her like that.”

“I’m not a bit shocked,” I told her. “I know all about these aged parents. The kind that want everything done for them, and the kind you can’t do a thing for, and the humble, self-denying kind, and the cranky, picky, dissatisfied kind … I must have seen every existing model. They’re who my company deals with, mostly.”

“What company is that?” Sophia asked.

“Rent-a-Back, it’s called. We go around to people’s houses, perform whatever chores they aren’t quite up to.”

“Oh! What a valuable service!”

“Well, we try,” I said. (I wanted to look as good as possible.) “How about you?”

“I work in a bank. Equity loan department,” she said. And while I was adjusting to this, she gave a little laugh and said, “Nothing like as helpful as what your company does!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “A loan can be extremely helpful.”

She made a face, turning her mouth down. (She had no idea.) “And can people just telephone and you send somebody over?” she asked. “Or do they have to be on a schedule of some kind?”

“Either way. We offer both arrangements,” I told her.

“Would a client be able to get her groceries carried in? Her garbage taken out to the alley? Little humdrum things like that?”

“Oh, the humdrum is our specialty,” I told her. Then it dawned on me that she might have her mother in mind; so I added, “We operate just in Baltimore, though.”