Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

I said, “Where does your mother live, exactly?”

“On Walnut Street,” Sophia said. “How about your daughter?”

“Locust,” I said.

Thank goodness.

A truck roared past, and we walked awhile without speaking before Sophia asked, “Is your ex-wife a Philadelphian?”

“No,” I said, “but her husband is.”

“Oh, so she’s remarried.”

“Right.”

“That must be difficult for you.”

“Difficult? Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Seeing her with someone else, I mean. I suppose inevitably there’s a bit of—”

“I never give it a moment’s thought,” I said, and then I stopped short, at the corner of Twenty-second Street, and said, “Well, here’s where I’ll be—”

But Sophia turned down Twenty-second and kept walking. I had hoped she would continue east. “It must have been an amicable divorce, then,” she called over her shoulder.

I said, “Oh …,” and took a few extra steps to catch up. “It was sort of amicable,” I said. (No sense going into the gory details.)

“Were you very young when you married?”

“Lord, yes. I was way too young. And she was even younger. We got married on her twentieth birthday.”

Then I happened to glance down the street, and who was walking toward us? Natalie. She was wearing a red coat and holding Opal’s hand. It was unsettling, because I’d just had a flash of how she had looked on our wedding day: all dressed up for the registry office, so pale and prim and solemn in a red coat that was not this same one, I guess, but close enough; close enough.

She hadn’t seen me yet. She was speaking to Opal, turning to look down at her, and it was Opal (gazing straight ahead) who spotted me first. Opal wrenched her hand free and cried, “Barnaby!” and ran to meet me. There was enough of a breeze so she had lost that careful, prissy look. Her hair was tumbled, her cheeks were pink, and her jacket was flying behind her. She barreled into me and threw her arms around my waist, which she wouldn’t ordinarily have done. She wasn’t a very warm child, in my limited experience. But she said, “It’s not true you’re stopping your visits, is it?”

“Who, me?” I asked, and I looked past her to Natalie. She approached more slowly, with a hair-thin line of puzzlement running across her forehead as she noticed Sophia. (Maybe she imagined we were together.) I said, “Hey there, Nat.”

“Mom said you weren’t going to come anymore,” Opal told me. She grabbed hold of one of my thumbs and started tugging on it, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet in an edgy, agitated manner I’d never noticed in her till now. “She said you’d talked it over and you’d be stopping your visits. But I knew you wouldn’t do that. Would you? You’d want to keep on seeing me! Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, sure I would,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would take this so personally. I felt kind of touched. In a funny way, I felt almost hurt. My throat got a hurtful, heavy feeling halfway down to my chest.

And Natalie must have felt the same, because she said, “Oh, honey. Of course he would! I didn’t realize you would mind so much.”

Then a hand arrived on my arm, so light it took a moment to register, and I turned and found Sophia smiling into my eyes. It was the most serene and radiant smile; the most seraphic smile. “Goodbye, Barnaby,” she said, and she dropped her hand and walked away.

I never did explain her presence to Natalie. I honestly don’t know what I would have said.

MY FAVORITE MOMENT of the day comes before the sun is up, but conditions have to be right for it. I have to be awake then, for one thing. And the weather has to be clear, and the lights lit in my room, and the sky outside still dark. Then I switch the lights off. If I’m lucky, the sky will suddenly change to something else — a deep, transparent blue. There’s almost a sound to it, a quiet sound like loom! as the blue swings into focus. But it lasts for only a second. And it doesn’t happen that often.

It happened on my thirtieth birthday, though. I took that for a good omen. My thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday, which was garbage day for more than half our clients. I hadn’t gotten around to setting out their trash cans the night before, because I’d indulged in this private little one-man birthday bash, instead. So there I was, up before dawn in spite of myself, just opening my door, which is the only place in my apartment I can even see the sky from; and I switched my lights off, and loom!

I decided turning thirty might not be so bad, after all. I thought maybe I could handle it. I went off to work whistling, even though I had that balsa-mouth feeling that comes from too many beers.

It was a bitter-cold day, the kind that turns your feet to stone, and after I’d dealt with the trash cans I went home and wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to get back to sleep. Only trouble was, the telephone kept ringing. I let the machine answer for me. First call, Mrs. Dibble wanted me to take the Cartwrights grocery shopping. Second call, she needed a sack of sidewalk salt run over to Ditty Nolan. Third call was my grandparents. “Barnaby, hon,” my grandma said, “it’s me and Pop-Pop, just wanting to wish you a—”

I leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. “Gram?” I said.

“Well, hey there! Happy birthday!”

“Thanks. Is Pop-Pop on too?”

“I’m here,” he said. “Hope you got plans to celebrate.”

“Oh, yeah; well, yeah,” I said in this vague sort of way, because I couldn’t tell if they knew about the dinner Mom was fixing. I never could be certain. Some years she invited them, but other years she thought up reasons not to. (My grandpa had driven a laundry truck till poor vision forced his retirement, and Gram still clerked in a liquor store. “God gave” them — their wording — only one child, my mother, and they were very proud of her, but the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual.) I said, “Probably I’ll just, you know, drop by home for dinner or something.”

“That’s my boy!” Gram said. “That’s what I like to hear! A visit’ll mean the world to them, hon.”

“Yes, Gram,” I said.

Then Pop-Pop asked, “How’s the car doing?”

“Oh, chugging along just fine,” I said. “Had to take it in and get the steering linkage tightened, but no big deal.”

“Why, you could have done that yourself!” he said. “That’s what I always did, when she was mine!”

“Maybe next time,” I told him.

I’d given up trying to convince him I wasn’t a born mechanic.

The way the conversation ended was, I would stop by and see them later in the week. They had a little something for me. (A book of coupons good for six take-out pizzas, I already knew. It was their standard birthday gift, and one I counted on.) Then after I hung up I called Mrs. Dibble, because my conscience had started to bother me over the Cartwrights. They tended to feel rushed when somebody else took them shopping. “So,” I said. “Cartwrights’ groceries, Ditty Nolan’s salt. What: she’s expecting snow?”

“I have no idea,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “We’re just the …”

We’re just the muscles, not the brains. I said goodbye and stood up to unwind myself from my blanket.

The Cartwrights were a good example of why Rent-a-Back was so sought after. They weren’t all that old — early sixties, which in this business was nothing — but Mr. Cartwright had permanently ruined his right ankle several years before while stepping off a curb in Towson. So he couldn’t drive anymore, and Mrs. Cartwright had never known how and did not intend to learn, she said, at this late date. Nor could they afford a chauffeur. Rent-a-Back offered just what they needed: somebody (usually me) to drive their big old Impala to the grocery store, and unfold Mr. Cartwright’s walker from the trunk when we got there, and follow behind as the two of them inched down the aisles debating each and every purchase. I could have just waited at the front of the store, but I got a kick out of listening to their discussions. Today, for instance, Mr. Cartwright expressed a desire for sauerkraut, but Mrs. Cartwright didn’t feel he should have it. “You always think you want sauerkraut,” she told him, “and then you’re up half the night with indigestion and it’s me who has to bring you the Turns. You know how cabbage in any form gives you indigestion.”