Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“What.”

“Call off your dog. He’s eating my wallet.”

She started to smile but held it back. Her mother’s two dimples deepened in her cheeks. The dog really was nibbling at my wallet. George Farnsworth, his name was; heaven knows why. “George Farnsworth,” I said sternly, “if you’re short of cash, just ask straight out for a loan, okay?”

Now I heard a definite chuckle. I took heart. “Hey, Ope, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “First I had car trouble, see—”

“You always have car trouble.”

“Then my alarm clock didn’t go off—”

“It always doesn’t go off.”

“Well. Not always,” I told her. “Then once I got to Penn Station, you’ll never guess what happened. It was like a secret-agent movie. Guy is walking up to people, pulling something out of his coat. ‘Ma’am,’ ”—I made my voice sound menacing and mysterious—“ ‘would you please take this package to Philadelphia for me?’”

Opal didn’t speak, but I could tell she was listening. She watched me with her pinkish-gray eyes, the lashes slightly damp.

“ ‘Take it to my daughter in Philly; all it is is her passport,’ he said, and I thought to myself, Ha! I just bet it’s her passport! So when this one woman said she would do it, I followed her at the other end of the trip.”

“You followed her?”

“I wanted to see what would happen. So I followed her to her rendezvous with the quote-unquote daughter, and then I hung around the phones while the daughter placed a call to—”

“You hung around the phones?”

I was beginning to flounder. (This story didn’t have what you’d call a snappy ending.) I said, “Yes, and then — um—”

“You were only dawdling in the station all this time! It’s not enough you don’t look after your car right and you forget to set your alarm; then you dawdle in the station like you don’t care when you see me!”

It was uncanny, how much she sounded like her mother. Her mother in the old days, that is — the miserable last days of our marriage. I said, “Now, hon. Now wait a sec, hon.”

Which was also from those days, word for word. Some kind of reflex, I guess.

“You promised you’d come at ten,” she said, “and instead you were just… goofing around with a bunch of secret agents! You totally lost track of where you were supposed to be!”

“In the first place,” I said, “I take excellent care of my car, Opal. I treat it like a blood relative. It’s not my fault if my car is older than I am. And I did not forget to set my alarm. I don’t know why it didn’t go off; sometimes it just doesn’t, okay? I don’t know why. And I honestly thought you’d like hearing about those people I was so-called goofing around with. I thought, Man, I wish Opal could see this , and I followed them expressly so I could tell you about it later over a burger and french fries. Wouldn’t that be great? A burger and fries at Little Pete’s, Ope, while I tell you my big story.”

It wasn’t working, though. Opal’s eyes only got pinker, and for once she had her mouth tightly shut.

“Look at George Farnsworth! He wants to go,” I said.

In fact, George Farnsworth had lost interest and was lying beside the rocker with his nose on his paws. But I said, “First we’ll take George for a walk in the Square, and then we’ll head over to—”

“It sounds to me,” Natalie said, “as if Opal prefers to stay in.”

She was standing in the doorway. Damn Oriental rugs had muffled her steps.

“Am I right, Opal?” she asked. “Would you rather tell him goodbye?”

“Goodbye?” I said. “I just got here! I just came all this way!”

“It’s your decision, Opal.”

Opal looked down at her lap. After a long pause, she murmured something.

“We couldn’t hear you,” Natalie said.

“Goodbye,” Opal told her lap.

But I knew she didn’t mean it. All she wanted was a little coaxing. I said, “Hey now, Ope …”

“Could I speak with you a minute?” Natalie asked me.

I sighed and got to my feet. Opal stayed where she was, but I caught her hidden glimmer of a glance as I turned to follow Natalie down the hall. I knew I could have persuaded her if I’d been given more time.

We didn’t stop in the living room. We went on through to the kitchen, at the other end of the apartment. I guess Natalie figured my jeans might soil her precious upholstery. I had never seen the kitchen before, and I spent a moment looking around (old-fashioned tilework, towering cabinets) before it sank in on me what Natalie was saying.

“I’ve been thinking,” she was saying. “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t come anymore.”

This should have been okay with me. It’s not as if I enjoyed these visits. But you know how it is when somebody all at once announces you can’t do something. I said, “What! Just because one Saturday I happen to run a little behind?”

Her eyes seemed to be resting slightly to the left of my left shoulder. Her face was as untroubled as a statue’s.

“I’m traveling from a whole other city, for God’s sake!” I told her. “A whole entirely other state! No way can you expect me to arrive here on the dot!”

“It’s funny,” she said reflectively. “I used to believe it was very important for Opal to keep in touch with you. But now I wonder if it might be doing her more harm than good. All those Saturdays you’ve come late, or left early, or canceled altogether—”

“It was only the once or twice or three times or so that I canceled,” I said.

“And even when you do show up, I imagine it’s started to dawn on her how you live.”

“How I live! I live just fine!”

“A rented room,” she mused, “an unskilled job, a bunch of shiftless friends. No goals and no ambitions; still not finished college at the age of thirty.”

“Twenty-nine,” I corrected her. (The one charge I could argue with.)

“Thirty in three weeks,” she said.

“Oh.”

There was a sudden silence, like when the Muzak stops in a shopping mall and you haven’t even been hearing it but all at once you’re aware of its absence. And just then I noticed, on the windowsill behind her, our old china cookie jar. I hadn’t thought of that cookie jar in years! It was domed on top and painted with bars like a birdcage, and it looked so dowdy and homely, against the diamond-shaped panes. It made me lose my train of thought. The next thing I knew, Natalie was gliding out of the kitchen, and I had no choice but to follow her.

Though, in the foyer, I did say, “Well.” And then, in the hall outside, I turned and said, “Well, we’ll see about this!”

The door made almost no sound when she closed it.

My train home was completely filled, and stone cold to boot. Some problem with the heating system. I sat next to a Spanish-type guy who must have started his New Year’s partying a tad bit early. His head kept nodding forward, and he was breathing fumes that were practically flammable. Across the aisle, this very young couple was trying to soothe a baby. The husband said, “Maybe he’s hungry,” and the wife said, “I just fed him.” The husband said, “Maybe he’s wet.” I don’t know why they made me so sad.

After that, it seemed all around me I saw families. A toddler peeked over his seat back, and his mother gave him a hug and pulled him down again. A father and a little girl walked toward me from the club car, the little girl holding a paper cup extremely carefully in both hands. The foreigner and I were the only ones on our own, it seemed.

The father glanced at us as he came close (at the foreigner’s head bobbing and reeling, and me with my jacket collar flipped up and a wad of cottony white stuff poking out of a tear in one sleeve), and then he glanced away. It made me think of the passport man, refusing to meet my eyes. And that made me think of the woman in the feather coat. Sophia. So honorable, Sophia had been; so principled. So well behaved even when she thought nobody was looking.