Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

They laughed again, and Pop-Pop slapped his knee.

“Well, yes,” Sophia said, laughing too. “I admit it was sort of trumped up. But Aunt Grace did need assistance, and so I didn’t feel guilty about it.”

“Of course not!” Gram said soothingly.

“He’s been an enormous help to her — put her whole house in order again. You must be very proud to have raised such a caretaking person.”

“Why, thank you, Sophia,” my mother told her. “That’s sweet of you to say.” She glanced down the table to Dad. “It’s not as if he hasn’t caused us some worry, in times past.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Sophia said. “But look at how he turned out!”

Everybody looked. I gave them a little wave that was something like a windshield wiper stopping in mid-arc.

In those photo albums I used to rifle, people were so consistent. They tended to assume the same poses for every shot, the same expressions. You’d see a guy on page one, some young father at the beach, standing next to his wife and baby with his arms folded across his chest and his head at a slight angle; and then on the last page, twenty years later, there he still was with his arms still folded, hair a bit thinner but head still cocked, wife still on his left, although the baby had grown taller than the father and was settled into some favorite stance of his own by now. Even the beach was the same, often. I would turn page after page, ignoring my friends. (“Gaitlin! What’s keeping you, man? Look what we found upstairs!”) I would set my sights on, say, one little boy and follow him through infancy, kindergarten, college. I’d see him slicing his wedding cake, and darned if he wasn’t still wearing the same knotted-up scowl, or shamefaced smirk, or joyful smile.

What I’d wanted to know was, couldn’t people change? Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave?

Seated at that table, the night of Opal’s dinner, I felt I had changed. I waved a hand at my family as if I’d left them far in the distance — as if I’d become a whole other person, now that I loved Sophia.

THEN SOPHIA’S aunt accused me of theft.

She said I stole the cash she had been keeping in her flour bin.

“That flour bin’s famous!” I said. “Everyone and his brother knows she keeps her money there. Why is she picking on me?”

It was Mrs. Dibble I was talking to, because did Mrs. Glynn have the decency to accuse me to my face? Oh, no. No, she went behind my back. She telephoned the office on a Sunday night in mid-August, using the after-hours number that rang in Mrs. Dibble’s home. Announced right off that I had taken her money; no ifs or ands or buts. Not a question in her mind as to whether I was the culprit.

Mrs. Dibble asked her how she could be so sure. “There could be any number of explanations,” Mrs. Dibble told her — or at least she claimed she’d told her, when she reported the conversation to me. I wondered what she had really said. Maybe she’d said, “Yes, that particular worker does have a history of criminal behavior.”

Well, no, I decided; probably not. (It would reflect very poorly on Rent-a-Back, for one thing.)

Funny: when Mrs. Dibble broke the news to me, I felt this sudden thud of guilt, as if I might in fact have done it. I had to tell myself, Wait. Hold on. Why, from the first day I was hired, I had bent over backward not to meddle in our clients’ private belongings. It was almost an obsession. I would go out of my way; I would ostentatiously shut a desk drawer as I passed it, and had once, while delivering a lady’s diary to her hospital room, stuffed it into a grocery bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek.

Mrs. Dibble broke the news by phone, but that wasn’t her choice. First she asked if I would come see her in person. I said, “Why? What’s up?”

She said, “Oh, just this and that.”

“Spill it,” I said.

She sighed. She said, “Now, Barnaby, I don’t want you overreacting to what I’m about to tell you,” and then she said Mrs. Glynn believed I’d stolen her money.

I said, “I’ll go have a talk with her this minute.”

“You can’t. You have to promise you won’t. It would only complicate matters. I just thought I should warn you first, before the police get in touch.”

“The police!”

Something like a cold liquid trickled down the back of my neck.

“Do you think they’re going to arrest me?” I asked.

“No, no,” Mrs. Dibble said, giving a false laugh. “Arresting a person is not as easy as that! They’ll probably want to question you, though, to get your side of the story.”

“I hate that woman,” I said.

“Now, Barnaby.”

“What have I ever done to her? Why would she just up and decide it was me?”

Then I thought I knew why. I thought of how Sophia had presented me to her mother. “I guess you could call it a pickup,” she’d said, with that triumphant look on her face.

She was as proud of my sins as I was of her virtues.

Mrs. Dibble was calculating aloud how I could make up for those lost hours at Mrs. Glynn’s. An hour a week at Mrs. Alphonse’s, she said; an hour with a man in a wheelchair over in Govans … She knew how hard I’d been working to save more money, she told me. But I was only half listening. I had to get hold of Sophia.

First of all, her line was busy. I tried once, tried twice, and then slammed down the receiver. Drove to her house in record time and pounded on the front door. It was after eleven o’clock by now, on a Sunday night. Normally she’d have been in bed. But all the lights were on, even the one in her room, and the footsteps I heard approaching were hard-soled and wide awake, and when she opened the door she was wearing what she’d worn that afternoon.

“Barnaby,” she said.

Not surprised in the least; so I knew it must have been her aunt she was talking to on the phone.

“I didn’t take that money,” I said.

She pressed her cheek against the edge of the door and studied my face. She said, “Even if you did, it wouldn’t change how I feel about you.”

“I didn’t take it, Sophia. Do you really think I’d do such a thing?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Then she stepped forward and kissed me, and turned to lead me into the living room.

But after we had settled on the couch, she said, “I know you’ve been under some pressure, trying to pay off your debt.”

“So you figured I just waltzed into a little old lady’s kitchen and helped myself to eighty-seven hundred dollars.”

“Twenty-nine sixty,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty was what she told me she had in her flour bin.”

At the rear of the house, I heard the refrigerator door latch shut with a muffled, furtive sound, and then something made of glass or china clinked but was instantly hushed. Betty, trying to be discreet. No doubt they’d been discussing me before I came. (“I said all along he seemed fishy, Sophia. Didn’t I have a bad feeling, way back at the beginning?”)

“Level with me,” I told Sophia. “Did you ever happen to mention to your aunt that I’d been in trouble with the law?”

She flushed and said nothing. She met my eyes very steadily.

“Did you?” I asked.

She said, “I might have, at some point. Maybe I did say, I don’t know, you’d had some problems in the past. But I didn’t mean any harm! I just wanted to show that you were an interesting person! I also said you came from a very good background. I said it was just your age or whatever, your age and circumstances, and you’d changed your ways completely and I had total faith in you.”