Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Maybe I should have said something. Brought things out in the open. But how would I put it, exactly? Hey, okay; so we did something stupid. You’re not going to let it change things, are you? Could we just hit the Erase button, here, and go back to the same as before?

But I didn’t say any of that, and she went on facing straight forward. She seemed to be driving with her nose. Both hands gripped the wheel; her house key dangled from the brown leather band that was looped around one wrist. I thought of something. I said, “The key.”

“What key?”

“The key to the Corvette. I left it on the ring. I turned over my whole key ring, with that Chevy emblem my Pop-Pop gave me when he put the car in my name.”

“So what? You’ll be driving a Ford now. What do you want with a Chevrolet key ring?”

She was right. I couldn’t argue with her logic. But that emblem had been with me a very long time. The plastic surface was so yellowed and dulled, you could barely make out the two crossed flags encased beneath it. At tense moments I would run my thumb across it, the way I used to stroke the satin binding of my crib blanket. I thought of Len doing that, and it killed me.

I must be more of a car man than I’d realized.

On Monday evening, I dropped by my parents’ house, choosing an hour when I figured they would both be home. Sophia offered to come with me, but I had this picture in mind: me facing Mom and Dad in the entrance hall, slipping the money from Opal’s clip and saying, “Here. I just stopped by to drop this off.” And then I’d lay it on the flat of Mom’s palm and leave. Sophia wasn’t part of this picture; no offense to her. I needed to do it alone.

But these things never work out the way you imagine. First of all, it emerged that eighty-seven one-hundred-dollar bills made a stack too thick for a money clip. I had to ask the teller to fasten one of those paper bands around the middle. And then when I got to the house, my parents did not obligingly show up together at the door. (When did they ever, in fact?) Just my mother came, carrying a cordless phone and continuing with her conversation even as she let me in. “It’s only Barnaby,” she told the phone. “Wicky,” she mouthed at me before she turned away So I couldn’t stay in the hall. I had to follow her into the living room, and settle on the couch, and wait for her to finish talking.

“Honestly,” she told me as she punched the hang-up button. “I know I swore I would always get along with my daughters-in-law, but sometimes it’s an effort.” She turned toward the stairs and called, “Jeffrey?”

“What?” came back dimly, moments later.

“Your son is here.”

“Which son?”

“The bad one,” I called, just to save her the trouble.

Mom rolled her eyes at me and then came to sit in the chair to my left. She was wearing slacks and the man’s white shirt she gardened in. (I had envisioned her more dressed up, somehow. Mom in her Guilford Matron outfit, Dad in his suit. Like a dollhouse couple, hand in hand in the doorway) “How’s Sophia?” she asked.

“She’s fine.”

“Why didn’t you bring her with you?”

“Oh, well …”

“Sophia would never act the way Wicky does,” she said. “Sophia’s so considerate.” And then she sailed into this tale about the birthday party Wicky was planning for Dad. “I said, ‘We don’t want you going to any bother, Wicky,’ and she said, ‘It won’t be the least bit of bother,’ and now I know why. Because first she told me all I had to do was show up, and then she told me, well, maybe I could make my artichoke dip, and then—”

“Whose truck is that in the driveway?” my father wanted to know. He walked into the room with a magazine suspended from one hand, his index finger marking a page. He did have his suit on still, but his tie was missing and he wore his velvet mules instead of shoes. “Red pickup,” he told me. “Did you drive that here?”

“Yes; um …”

“You left your lights on.”

“Well, I’ll be going pretty soon,” I said.

“Oh, don’t hurry off!” my mother cried. “Stay for dinner! We’re having shrimp salad. There’s lots.”

“Thanks, but I already ate,” I said. “I just stopped by to—”

“Already ate? Ate dinner?” she asked. She checked her watch. “It’s barely seven-thirty.”

“Right.”

“Goodness, Barnaby. You’re so uncivilized!”

I looked at her. I said, “How do you figure that?”

“We always eat at eight,” she said.

“Dine,” I told her.

“Pardon?”

“You always dine at eight. Isn’t that what you meant to say?”

She drew up taller in her seat. She said, “I don’t see—”

“Gram and Pop-Pop dine at five-thirty, however,” I said, “and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me.”

“Of course it is!” Dad told me. He bent to set his magazine on the coffee table, as if he’d decided the situation required his full attention. “But you could join us for cocktails,” he said. “Scotch, maybe? Glass of wine?” He rubbed his hands together.

“Really I just stopped by to give you this,” I said, and I picked up the denim jacket that was lying across my knees. The weather wasn’t cool enough for jackets yet, but I’d needed something with roomy pockets. “Here,” I said. I pulled out the brick of money and leaned forward to place it in my mother’s lap.

She stared down at it. My father stopped rubbing his hands.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said.

“What’s to understand?” I asked her.

“Well, what is this?” she asked.

“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, Mom. Surely that must ring a little bell.”

She glanced up at my father. He gazed off over her head, suddenly abstracted.

“But … is it yours?” she asked me. “Where did you get it? And in cash! Walking the streets of Baltimore with all this cash! How would you have come by such a large amount, I’d like to know?”

“No trouble at all,” I told her. “Though it did make kind of a mess when the dye pack exploded.”

“Seriously, Barnaby. Have you been up to something you shouldn’t?”

Odd that it hadn’t occurred to me she would jump to this conclusion. I made a snorting sound. I said, “Don’t worry. It’s legal. I sold the Corvette to Len Parrish.”

“You sold the Corvette?” my father asked, suddenly coming to. “Son,” he said. “Was that wise?”

I wasn’t going to argue about it. I told Mom, “Feel free to count the money yourself, if you like. Make sure I didn’t shortchange you.”

For a moment, I thought she would do it. She picked up the bills in a gingerly way and turned them over. But then she said, “That’s all right.”

When they gave me the wad of cash at the bank it had seemed so bulky, but now I was struck by its slimness. For all these years, that money had loomed between us. I recalled Mom’s hints and reproaches, her can’t-afford-this, can’t-afford-that, her self-assured air of entitlement as she inquired into my finances. I recalled my old daydream that she would cancel the debt when I married, or after my first child was born. And yet it made such an unimpressive little package! Granted, it was a lot of money — a lot for me, at least — but you’d think I could have come up with it before now.

I said, “Well, then. Are we fair and square? Everything settled?”

“I suppose,” my mother said faintly.

Somehow there should have been more to this. More excitement, more relief; I don’t know. I stood up. I said, “Well! Guess I’ll be going.”

My mother went on sitting there. It was Dad who walked me to the door.