Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Then Mrs. Alford started sorting her belongings. That’s always a worrisome sign. For a solid week she had three of us come in daily — me, Ray Oakley, and Martine. (“Two men for the real lifting,” was how she put it, “and a girl so as to encourage the hiring of women.”) She wanted her basement sorted, then her garage, then her attic. This was in mid-April — a busy time for us anyhow, plus it was near Easter and lots of grown children were expected home and our clients were overexcited and crabby and demanding. But Mrs. Alford couldn’t wait, couldn’t put it off. Each morning she met us on her front porch, or even halfway down the walk. “There you are! What kept you?” Martine didn’t have the truck that week; so I had to pick her up, which once or twice made us late, and Ray Oakley was late by nature. But we’re only talking minutes here. Still, Mrs. Alford would be fretting and pacing. Half the time she called Martine “Celeste,” which was the name of our other female employee, and I was “Terry.”

“It’s Barnaby, Mrs. Alford,” I said as gently as possible.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I thought your name was Terry and you played in that musical group.”

Martine snickered — picturing me, I guess, at the harpsichord or something. “No, ma’am,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Must be somebody else.”

In my early days at Rent-a-Back, I’d have feared she was losing her marbles. But I knew, by now, that it was just anxiety. I’ve had an anxious client mistake me for her firstborn son; then next day, she’d be bright as a tack. I didn’t let it faze me.

Sorting the basement was easy, because that was mostly stuff to be thrown out. Paint tins that no longer sloshed; mildewed rolls of leftover wallpaper; galvanized buckets so old they’d been patched with metal disks by some long-dead tin-kef. We crammed them all into garbage cans and hoped the city would collect them. It took us less than a day. I had time to drop Martine off and check my messages before I headed to Mrs. Glynn’s.

The garage was where it got harder. Mrs. Alford’s husband had left a fully stocked workbench there — the lovingly tended kind, with each tool hung on the backboard within its own painted silhouette. Mrs. Alford must have dreaded to face it, because when we showed up the next morning, she managed to get our names one hundred percent wrong. “Hello, Celeste. Hello, Roy. Hello, Terry.” None of us corrected her. On her way up the back steps to the garage, she asked me, “How’s the music?” and I said, “Oh, fine,” because it seemed easier.

But then she wouldn’t let go of it. She said, “Now, what is it you play, again?”

“The … tuba,” I decided.

“Tuba!” She paused at the top of the steps and looked at me. One hand pitty-patting the speckled flesh at the base of her throat. “Funny,” she said. “I had thought it was something stringed.”

“No, it’s the tuba, all right,” I said, wishing I’d never begun this.

“Fancy that! A tuba in a chamber group! I hadn’t heard of such a thing.”

“Oh,” I said. “Ah. Chamber. You hadn’t?”

“But what do I know?” she asked me. “I’m such a babe in the woods when it comes to music.”

“Well, that’s all right, Mrs. Alford.”

We walked through her backyard, where daffodils were blooming in clumps. “I haven’t been to the garage in years,” Mrs. Alford said. “I never go! I don’t like to go.” She stopped at the door, inserted a key in the lock, and turned the knob. Nothing happened. “Oh, well. I guess we can’t get in, after all,” she said.

“Allow me,” Ray Oakley told her. He set his shoulder to the door — he was a big guy, with a giant beer belly — and gave it a shove and fell into the garage.

“Why, thank you, Roy,” Mrs. Alford said, sounding not the least bit grateful.

Mr. Alford’s workbench was one of those objects that seem to go on living after their owner dies. And clearly he had been a hoarder. The rows of baby-food jars on the shelves were filled with various sizes of screws in generally poor condition — some bent, some dulled, some rusted. You just knew he’d saved them for decades, even though his wife had probably begged him to get rid of them. I said, “Tell you what, Mrs. A. You go on back to the house and we’ll see to this without you.”

“But how will you know what to do with it all?” Mrs. Alford asked. A reasonable question. She wandered the length of the workbench, reaching up to touch a coping saw here, a claw hammer there. “My nephew, Ernie: he’s very good with his hands,” she told us. “I should probably give these to him.”

“And the screws and things?”

“Well …,” she said.

“Chuck them?”

She went over to the baby-food jars. She picked one up and looked at it.

“We’ll settle that,” I told her. “You go on back to the house.”

This time she didn’t argue.

So the garage took us slightly longer, what with locating empty cartons and packing them with tools and writing Ernie across the top, and stuffing all the discards into trash bags. “How do people end up with so many things?” I asked Martine. “Look here: a bamboo rake with three prongs left to it, total.”

“A rotary telephone,” Martine said, “labeled Does Not Work” She held it up.

“I hope she’s not fixing to die on us,” I said.

“Why would you think that?”

“I’ve seen it before. It’s something like when pregnant cats start hunting drawer space: old people start sorting their possessions.”

“Oh, don’t say that! Mrs. Alford’s one of my favorites.”

I had never given Mrs. Alford much thought one way or another. She didn’t have the zing that, say, Maud May had. But I wouldn’t want to see her die.

“Sounds to me,” Ray Oakley said, “like you two are in the wrong business.”

“Listen to him: Mr. Tough Guy,” I told Martine.

Then on Wednesday, Ray called in sick, and we had to start the attic on our own. What Mrs. Alford wanted was, we would carry everything down to the glassed-in porch off her bedroom, where she sat in a skirted armchair, waiting to tell us what pile to put it in: Ernie’s, or her daughter’s, or Goodwill. “How about the Twinform?” I asked her right off.

“Pardon?”

“That mannequin-type thing,” I said, because I’d already made up my mind to offer money for it if she put it in the Goodwill pile.

But she said, “Oh, I’ll keep that. It reminds me of my mother.”

She kept a lot. A humidor that used to be her father’s, a pipe rack of her husband’s, a cradle that dozens of Alfords had slept in when they were small. Each object we hauled down, she’d make us stand there holding while she told us the story that went with it. And it seemed that the more she remembered of the past, the more she forgot of the present. “Should you be lifting that, Celeste?” she asked Martine, and she mentioned twice again that Ernie was good with his hands. But when I wondered aloud how a big rolltop desk had managed to go up the attic steps in one piece, she was able to recall that it hadn’t gone up in one piece. Her husband had dismantled it first. “The top half’s attached to the bottom half with four brass screws under the corners,” she said, and she went on to recollect that her husband and her brother-in-law had carried the two parts up in the summer of ‘59. “You’ll find a screwdriver on my husband’s workbench,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, no! His tools are gone now!” and her eyes glazed over with tears.

I said, “Never mind, Mrs. A. I can dig that screwdriver out in half a second. I know just which box I put it in.”

She rearranged her face into an appreciative, bright expression. “Why, thank you, Terry,” she said. “Aren’t you clever!” And she kept her eyes very wide so that the tears wouldn’t spill over.