Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

For a month after Mrs. Glynn accused me, I had nothing to do with her. Sophia didn’t, either (she was never going to speak to her again, she said), but I heard a little about her from Ray Oakley. He was the one who was going there in my place. He said she had cut her hours back to one a week, and even then he hardly saw her. “I try and steer clear of her,” he told me. “I’m worried she’ll say I stole something too.”

Me, I had pretty much let her fade from my mind. Sophia thought that was incredibly charitable of me, but it was more that I just figured things always evened out, sooner or later. Look at it this way: I might have done time in jail if I hadn’t had rich parents. And even rich parents couldn’t have helped if anyone had discovered I stole a Buick convertible the night of my sixteenth birthday. So when Mrs. Glynn said I did something I didn’t, there was a certain justice to it.

Even losing my Corvette: a certain balance, you might say.

I was still in possession of Sophia’s little porcelain slipper. I brought it back one evening and put it among some doodads on her mantel, where it didn’t belong, so she would think she had simply misplaced it if she’d noticed it was missing. I didn’t believe she had noticed, though. I felt artful and deft and catlike as I set the slipper soundlessly between a brass clock and a hobnail vase. I slid my hands in my jeans pockets and walked away whistling.

It wasn’t entirely undeserved, Mrs. Glynn’s accusing me.

Then one Friday afternoon toward the end of September, she telephoned. “Barnaby Gaitlin?” she said — pert little old-lady voice. But I knew so many old ladies, I couldn’t think who she was. I said, “Yes?” in a guarded tone. When they called me direct, it was usually with a complaint.

“This is Grace Glynn.”

I got very alert.

“Sophia’s aunt,” she reminded me.

“Yes,” I said.

“How are you?” she asked me.

“Fine.”

“Doing well?”

I waited to see what she was after.

“I was wondering,” she said, after a pause. “Would you be so kind as to come to my house this evening?”

“Your house.”

“Just for a little chat,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

I said, “I guess I’ll pass on that, Mrs. Glynn. Thanks anyhow.”

“Please? Pretty please?”

“Sorry,” I said, and I hung up.

There were limits to how charitable I was willing to be.

When the phone rang again, a few minutes later, I let the machine answer for me. But this time it was Sophia. “Barnaby, I wanted to ask if—”

I picked up the receiver. “Hi,” I said. “I’m screening my calls. You’ll never guess who from.”

“Aunt Grace,” Sophia told me.

“Oh. You knew she was calling?”

“She called me too. I just now got off the phone with her.”

“What’s she trying to pull?” I asked.

“She didn’t say, but I guess we’ll find out tonight.”

“We will?”

“I told her we’d stop by.”

“I’m not stopping by,” I said.

“Oh, Barnaby. Please?”

She had a different voice from her aunt’s — steadier and much lower — but the upward note at the end was the same. “I think she wants to apologize,” she said.

“She didn’t tell me she wanted to apologize.”

“Well, why else would she ask us over?”

“Maybe to have me arrested,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. How she put it was, she wanted to ‘chat.’ She said, ‘I know you’re very cross with me, but please, please, the two of you, come for a chat.’ ”

“She’s got some kind of ambush planned,” I said. “SWAT team lying in wait for me behind her potted palm.”

Sophia laughed, but dutifully, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “How could I turn her down?” she asked. “So I said yes.”

“You can’t say yes on my behalf, Sophia. You had no business doing that.”

“Well, but, sweetie. She’s my aunt!”

I kept quiet a moment. Not to sound paranoid, but it crossed my mind that Sophia might be in on this, whatever it was. I knew she was too honorable for that, but even so, I had a little flash of doubt. Meanwhile, some other phone line seemed to be mixing in with ours — tiny distant voices I couldn’t quite decipher, a woman burbling away and another woman laughing. The two of them were so lighthearted. I felt as if we’d plugged into not just another conversation but another time, simpler and more innocent; and here I was in this muddy, confused life of mine.

I told Sophia, “All right, hon. For your sake.”

She said, “Oh, thank you! Thank you, Barnaby.”

“But we’re only staying a minute,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Just long enough to be polite, so things aren’t awkward with your relatives.”

“I understand.”

Hanging up, I felt like a phony. Face it: I couldn’t care less how things stood with her relatives. Underneath, my fantasy was that Mrs. Glynn really would apologize. And while she was at it, why couldn’t all the others too? The Amberlys and the Royces, and Mr. McLeod with his Chinese statue. I pictured them lining up in Mrs. Glynn’s parlor to say … what? Not that they’d wrongly accused me; that was too much to hope for. But maybe, oh, that they’d overreacted, or failed to allow for extenuating circumstances. Or that they still liked me anyhow. I don’t know.

The plan was, I would drive to Sophia’s after she got off work, pick her up, and then head to Mrs. Glynn’s. But Martine was late bringing the truck back; she was out somewhere on a job. I had to phone Sophia and ask her to come get me. This was fine with Sophia — no doubt she preferred her Saab to my jouncing, bone-rattling truck — but it made me mad as hell. In the two weeks since I’d let the Corvette go, I’d been marooned without a ride three times and been yelled at twice when I’d marooned Martine. Also, we were stuck in a situation where we were thrown together constantly. Mrs. Dibble had always tended to pair the two of us up, for some reason, but now it was even worse. Every job assignment had to take into account that Martine and I shared a vehicle, although we lived five miles apart and couldn’t stand to face each other anymore. What had I been thinking of, agreeing to such an arrangement?

And my poor little car, my little lost car. That car was my very identity — so ramshackle and rascally. I should never have let Martine talk me into selling it.

You see what I mean about my life being muddy.

Sophia arrived in her bank clothes, but I wore jeans and a stringy black sweater. No way was I dressing up for this. I climbed into the Saab, turning down her offer to let me drive. “Just gun that motor and let’s get this over with,” I told her.

She said, “Now, Barnaby, promise you’ll be nice to her.”

“Did I say I wouldn’t be nice?”

“She’s just a helpless old lady. Promise you won’t forget that.”

But as things worked out, it seemed to be Sophia who forgot.

Oh, she was congenial enough at the start. She pressed her cheek to her aunt’s cheek, and she told her how pretty she looked. Mrs. Glynn wore a baggy-chested silk dress and a strand of pearls she could have jumped rope with, looped and looped again and hanging to her knees. I’d never seen her in jewelry before. Or leather pumps, either, instead of Nikes. And Tatters was yapping frantically in the pantry. The only other time I’d known him to be shut away was when the minister came to call.

“How’ve you been, Aunt Grace?” Sophia was asking. “How’s your bursitis?” As if they were on the best of terms. It irked me some, I can tell you. When we sat down, I chose a rocker, not my usual seat beside Sophia on the couch. I tucked my hands between my knees and watched glumly as Mrs. Glynn arranged herself in her favorite chair.