Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“Going fine,” I told her.

“I just thought I’d stop by and make sure the two of you were getting along.”

“Well, we haven’t had all that much to do with each other,” I said. I could speak in a normal tone, because Mrs. Glynn had returned to the parlor after ushering in Sophia. “So far I’ve just been following what she’s got on her list,” I said. “But I’m not sure there’s enough here to fill the whole hour.”

“Oh, this is just the beginning, when she’s not used to the luxury of having you around. Believe me: there’s a lot to be done! I can name some things if she can’t. I’ve been nagging her for years now to pack up my uncle’s lawbooks in the sun-porch.”

She was watching me replace the saucepans. They were filmed with dust — Mrs. Glynn must not cook much — so I gave each one a rub with my shirtsleeve before I hung it. Then I worried that would strike Sophia as sloppy I said, “Do you suppose she would want to run these through the dishwasher?”

“Well, maybe,” Sophia said. But she didn’t go ask. She said, “My ulterior motive here is to get Aunt Grace’s belongings organized somewhat and then move her to an apartment. Something nearer to my place, so I could keep an eye on her. She’s nearly eighty years old, after all.”

I decided to give up on the dishwasher idea. I hung another pan. “Eighty, huh?” I said. “Is she actually your aunt, or is she a great-aunt?”

“No, she’s my aunt. My father’s sister. I was a late arrival,” Sophia said. “My mother was in her forties when she had me. By now she’s almost eighty herself, and I’m only thirty-six.”

I was ready for the next job: fixing a loose knob on a cupboard in the pantry. I headed off to see to it, taking the screwdriver with me.

“I guess you think thirty-six is old,” Sophia said in the pantry doorway.

“Gosh, no,” I told her politely. “Not when I’ve been hanging out with people in their nineties.” I jiggled the knob and then squatted down in front of it.

“How old are you, Barnaby?”

“I turned thirty last week.”

“Oh. Well, happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“Did somebody throw you a party?”

“Just my parents had me to dinner,” I said. I opened the door slightly to study the inner side of the knob.

“How about your little girl?”

“How about her.”

“Did she come down for the dinner?”

“Nah. Well, she’d already given me my present, see. And besides, I knew I’d be going up there Saturday.”

“Yes, I looked for you on the train,” she said.

“You did?”

“I remembered you always visit her the last Saturday of the month.”

“This time I drove,” I said. “I generally do, if my car’s not on the blink.”

“Oh, you drove.”

“It’s cheaper.”

“I should do that too, I suppose. If I weren’t so nervous on interstates,” she said.

I was trying to tighten a screw now, but it kept slipping away from me. Sophia was making me self-conscious. I’m not a bona fide handyman; I do these little fix-it jobs by trial and error. So I looked at her, and she must have understood, because she said, “Well. I’ll let you get on with it.”

Then she straightened up from the doorway and left, and a moment later I heard her out front, telling her aunt goodbye.

My second day on the job, Mrs. Glynn had me take her to the grocery store. She was a quicker shopper than the Cartwrights but a much worse back-seat driver. Although we were in my car (she’d given hers up years ago, she said), she slammed a Nike down hard every time we neared a stoplight, and she wouldn’t talk at all but concentrated fiercely on the traffic.

Even in the store, conversation was tough, because the background noise Made her hearing worse. When I asked her, in the canned-fruit aisle, whether she liked mandarins, she said, “I like any kind of instrument,” and at the register she took offense when the clerk offered plastic or paper. (“Naturally I can pay for it, or why else would I be here?” she snapped.) But we did okay. Used up slightly more than an hour — though I didn’t note the extra on my time sheet — and at the end, she told me I’d been a help. “I hate to rely on Sophia for every little thing,” she said. “Not that she isn’t sweet as pie about it, but you know.”

Wednesday, I bought a new curtain rod and installed it in her dining room where the old one had started to sag. Thursday, she asked me to pack up those lawbooks of her husband’s. So I drove off to the liquor store for some boxes, and when I got back, I found Sophia in the sunporch. She had her coat off and her sleeves rolled up, and she’d covered the desk with cleaning supplies — rags and a can of furniture polish. “Hello, Barnaby,” she said. “I thought I’d follow along behind you and wipe off the shelves as you clear them.”

“Oh, I can do that,” I told her.

“I wouldn’t dream of it! You’re not her housekeeper, after all.”

“No, but a lot of our jobs edge over into housekeeping,” I said. “We’re used to handling pretty much anything that’s required. I’ll be glad to wipe the shelves.”

“Well, aren’t you nice,” she told me.

But when I returned from the car with the second load of boxes, she’d already emptied one bookshelf onto the desk and started dusting. So I gave up. She must have been one of those people who couldn’t bear sitting by while other people worked — unlike her aunt, who was off in the parlor happily talking baby talk to Tatters.

“I have no idea what to do with these books once we get them packed,” Sophia told me. “I suppose some charity might want them.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Dibble. She keeps a Rolodex for things like that.”

“Uncle George has been dead for twenty years or more, and every book he ever owned is still sitting here. I think all his clothes are still in the upstairs closet too.”

“That’s nothing compared to some of our clients,” I said. “This one woman, Mrs. Morey: she sleeps with her husband’s bathrobe laid across the foot of the bed, and he’s been gone as long as I’ve known her.”

“Oh! How sad!”

“Yeah, well.”

“You must see so many sad things in this job.”

“Well, quite a few,” I said. I stopped to consider, bracing a carton of books against my shoulder. “On the other hand,” I said, “I see quite a few happy things too. This same Mrs. Morey, for instance: she just loves her garden. Come spring, you’d think she was in heaven. She says, ‘As long as I can walk out in my garden first thing every morning — take that gardener’s early-morning walk, to check what’s sprouted overnight and what’s about to bloom,’ she says, ‘—why, I feel I have something worth staying alive for.’ ”

Sophia lifted her dustcloth and turned to look at me. She said, “You’re a very kindhearted person, Barnaby Gaitlin.”

I said, “Me? I am?”

Of course, I no longer believed that Sophia was my angel. Not literally, at least. But still, I paid close attention whenever she told me something in that quiet, firm tone of voice.

Martine said Sophia had designs on me — that she was hanging around at her aunt’s all the time in the hope I’d ask her out. I said, “She’s what?” We were loading the books onto Marline’s boyfriend’s truck when she came up with this. Granted, Sophia had put in several appearances — at the moment, she was in the attic, checking for more lawbooks — but the notion of any romantic interest was absurd. I heaved a box onto the truck bed and said, “Get serious, Pasko. She’s thirty-six years old.”

“So?” Martine said.

“She’s a … lady! She works in a bank!”