Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Sometimes I thought if I could just show her, just once and for all show her, I would be free of her.

I reached my apartment, finally. Switched on the lights, unzipped my jacket, punched the button on my answering machine. Mrs. Dibble needed an errand run for Miss Simmons, provided I got home before six. Too late now; so I took off my jacket and started emptying my jeans pockets. Mimi Hardesty, upstairs, left a message about an eentsy bit of laundry she wanted to do in the morning even though it wasn’t a Saturday. Then Mrs. Dibble again. Never mind about Miss Simmons — she’d sent Celeste, instead — but tomorrow I should meet with a brand-new client. A Mrs. Glynn. “It was her niece who made the request,” she said. “She told me you two had talked on the train. Good work, Barnaby! You must be quite a salesman. The niece says her aunt will need hours and hours; that was her exact phrase. She inquired about our weekly rates. She wants you to come to her aunt’s house tomorrow evening.”

Mom’s envelope was made of paper so thick that it unfolded by itself as I set it on the counter. I lifted the flap and peered inside. Whoa! Not a gift certificate, but cash — a hundred dollars. Five twenties new enough to stick together slightly when I fanned them out. Well, good; I didn’t need clothes, anyhow. I hadn’t yet redeemed my certificate from Christmas.

I restacked the bills and fitted them into Opal’s money clip. Then I stood weighing the clip in my hand, looking down at it and thinking.

Let’s say I made a hundred dollars extra every week. Say I lined up this aunt of Sophia’s with her hours and hours of chores; say I stopped dodging the clients I didn’t care for, the assignments I didn’t find convenient, and added a clear hundred dollars to my weekly income. Eighty-seven weeks, that meant. Eighty-six with the birthday money; eighty-five and eighty-four if we could count next birthday and next Christmas too.

I would hand it to Mom in cold cash: eighty-seven crisp new hundred-dollar bills. I’d slide them out of the money clip and slap them smartly on her palm.

Everybody else’s angel had delivered a single message and let it go at that. Wouldn’t you know, though, my angel seemed to be more of the nagging kind.

MRS. GLYNN lived on a shady street just south of Cold Spring Lane, in a brown shingle-board house with peeling green shutters. I was supposed to meet Sophia there at five-thirty, which would give her time to drive over after work; but when I pulled up early, about a quarter past, she was already waiting out front. She was leaning against the hood of her car — a silver-gray Saab. I had always thought Saab owners were shallow, but now I saw I might have been mistaken.

I parked behind her and stepped out. “Yo! Sophia,” I said, and then I wondered if I should have called her Miss Maynard. Mrs. Dibble had her rules about how we addressed our clients. Except that Sophia wasn’t a client, strictly speaking. And she didn’t appear to mind; she just smiled and said, “Thanks for coming, Barnaby.”

Today she was wearing a different coat, black wool with a Chinese type of collar. It made her hair look blonder. Also, it seemed to me she had more makeup on. This must be her loan officer outfit. I said, “I thought bankers’ hours were shorter. You mean you have to work till five like everybody else?”

“Yes, alas,” she told me. We started up the front steps. “It was nice of you to agree to meeting my aunt first,” she said. “I need to sort of talk her into this, as I explained to your employer.”

“Oh, no problem,” I told her.

“Is that who she is?” Sophia asked.

“Who who is?”

“Mrs. Dibble,” Sophia said. She pressed the doorbell, and a dog started yapping somewhere inside. “Is Mrs. Dibble your employer?” she asked me.

“Yes, she owns the whole company. Started it from scratch and owns it lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Because I had somehow understood that the company was yours,” she said.

“Mine? No way.” I had to raise my voice, since the yapping was coming closer. “I’m just a peon, is all.”

“Well, surely more than a peon,” she said. “It must take quite a bit of skill, dealing with your older clients.”

“Oh, a fair amount. Shoot, some of us have Ph.D.s, times being what they are,” I said. “Not me, though, I don’t mean.” I was consciously trying to be truthful, so she wouldn’t get any more wrong ideas. But before I could explain that I didn’t even have my B.A., the front door swung open and Sophia’s aunt said, “There you are!”

She was no bigger than a minute — a tiny, cute gnat of a woman with a wizened face and eyes so pouchy they seemed goggled. She wore a navy polka-dot dress that hung nearly to her ankles, although on someone else it would have been normal length, and loose, thick beige stockings and enormous Nikes. Over her forearm she carried a Yorkshire terrier, neatly folded like a waiter’s napkin. “This is my doorbell,” she said, thrusting him toward me. “I’d never have known you were out here if not for Tatters.”

“Aunt Grace,” Sophia said, “I’d like you to meet Barnaby.”

“Bartleby?” her aunt said sharply.

“Barnaby.”

“Well, that sounds more promising. Won’t you come in?”

“My aunt, Mrs. Glynn,” Sophia told me, but Mrs. Glynn had already turned to lead us into her parlor. There was something about her back that let you know she was hard of hearing. And clearly the place was getting to be too much for her. The lace curtains were stiff with dust, and the walls were darker in the corners, and the air had the brownish, sweet, woolen smell that comes from a person sleeping extra-long hours in a tightly closed space.

“Sophia thinks I’m too doddery to do for myself anymore,” Mrs. Glynn said. She waved us toward the couch. When she perched in a wing chair opposite, her Nikes didn’t quite touch the floor. She set the dog down next to her, tidily arranging his paws. “Lately she’s been after me to hire a companion. I say, ‘What do I want with a companion? I’d just end up waiting on her , like as not, and we’d bicker and snipe at each other all day and I wouldn’t know how to get rid of her.’ ”

“Well, there you see the value of Rent-a-Back,” I told her. I was speaking in that narrower range of tone that carries well. (I had it down to a science.) “We can go about our business without a word, if you want. You can leave a key at the office, and we’ll let ourselves in while you’re out; be gone before you get home again.”

“It’s not that I’m antisocial,” Mrs. Glynn said. “Am I, Sophia.”

“Goodness, no, Aunt Grace. Just independent.”

“Pensive? Well, I do like to have my thinking time, but—”

“Independent , is what I said.”

“Oh. Independent. Yes.”

She faced me squarely, raising her chin. “But we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you. Are you a Baltimore boy, by any chance?”

“Yes, ma’am. Born and bred,” I said.

“Is that right. Would I know your parents? What’s your last name, anyhow?”

“Gaitlin,” I told her.

“Gaitlin.” She thought it over. “As in the Foundation?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Really.”

There was a pause. Sophia smoothed her skirt across her lap. Mrs. Glynn said, “Why don’t you work for them, then?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Lost art? Why is that?”

“A long story. Complicated.”

“Aha,” she said. “So you, too, are independent. Refuse to take any handouts from rich relations. Well, I don’t blame you a bit, young man. Good for you!”