Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Sophia just said, “All right,” and we set off toward her car. I got the impression she was glad, even. Probably she could use a night alone herself.

Earlier it had been raining, and now the air had a damp, chilly feel. The car windows misted over before we’d gone a block. I grew extremely conscious of how closed in we were. Our breaths were too loud, and the tinny sound of Sophia’s cake platter, sliding across the back seat at each turn, made our silence more noticeable.

Finally she said, “You didn’t tell me your mother offered to give you back that money.”

“How could I? It just now happened,” I said.

“I don’t see why you refused it.”

I stared at her. I said, “What: you too?”

“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, after all. Think what we could do with that.”

“Well, lots. Obviously. But that’s beside the point. I didn’t want to worry about that money anymore.”

“So you’d rather I worry about money.”

“You? How do you figure that?”

“Well, I’m the one who couldn’t buy a new outfit for Thanksgiving because my money’s in the flour bin.”

“So? Get it out of the flour bin. You said yourself you’ve been in touch with your aunt again.”

“Oh, I knew you’d hold that against me!” she cried, swinging the car onto Northern Parkway.

I said, “Huh? Hold what against you?”

“She’s my aunt, Barnaby. I don’t have so many relatives that I can afford to discard a perfectly good aunt.”

“Well, sure. I realize that,” I told her.

“And it made me feel just awful, being on the outs with her. So I called her on the phone one day last week. I meant to tell you about it; honestly I did, but somehow it slipped my mind. I asked her how she was, and she said she had a cold. Well, what could I do? Hang up on a sick old woman? I went by to see her at lunch hour. I brought her some soup and some nose drops. I couldn’t just let her fend for herself!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I said.

Did she think I didn’t know how these family messes operated? The most unforgivable things got … oh, not forgiven. Never forgiven. But swept beneath the rug, at least; brushed temporarily to one side; buried in a shallow grave. I knew all about it.

I rolled down my window a quarter of an inch, thinking it might help defog the windshield. I said, “But you still haven’t gotten your money out of the flour bin.”

“No.”

The whistling sound from my window helped to fill the silence.

“Why not?” I asked her finally.

“Hmm?” she said. She leaned forward to swab the windshield with her palm — a mistake, but I didn’t point that out.

“Why haven’t you gotten your money?”

“Oh, it’s … never been the right time,” she said.

“Now would be a good time,” I told her. “While your aunt’s in Philadelphia.”

“Barnaby! I can’t just sneak in like a thief!”

She kept her eyes on the road while she said that. It made her indignation sound fake. All at once I found her irritating beyond endurance. I noticed how the streetlights lit the fuzz along her jawline — fur, it almost was — and how large and square and bossy her hands looked on the steering wheel. Managerial: that was the word. Wasn’t that why her other romances had ended, if you read between the lines? “I’m probably too … definite,” I seemed to remember her saying. “Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.” Darn right she was too definite!

And then that lingering, doting voice she used when she spoke of herself as a child—“When I was a little girl …”—as if she had been more special than other little girls. And her eternal Crock-Pot dinners; oh, Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-colored one-dish meal, I’d croak!

And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos and panty-hose washing, her total lack of adventurousness. (Wasn’t it a flaw, rather than a virtue, that she’d been so incurious when the passport man gave her that envelope?) Her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I had stolen from her aunt. Here I’d been hoping she would bring me up to her level, infuse me with her goodness! Instead she had fallen all over herself rushing to protect my badness.

I said, “Sophia. Let’s go get that money.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and she was so prompt about it, she practically overlapped my words.

“Why not? If it belongs to you, why can’t you?”

She said, “Don’t badger me, please. It’s really none of your concern what I do with my own private funds.”

“In fact, it is, though,” I said. “In fact, every time I turn around, you’re telling me how hard your life is now that you’ve lost your money. You’re going on and on about all the things you can’t afford because your money’s in the flour bin, and you know what I think, Sophia? I think you like to have it in the flour bin. I think you feel that as long as it’s in the flour bin, I owe you something. I’m starting to suspect you have no intention of getting it back. You prefer it that I’m beholden to you for your sacrifice.”

“Well, that’s just simply not true,” Sophia told me.

You would think she’d have raised her voice, at least, but she didn’t. Her tone was low and reasonable, and she went on staring straight ahead, and she remembered to signal before she pulled into my driveway. Even that I found irritating. She was just as angry as I was; I knew it for a fact, but she’d already lost two boyfriends, and she’d promised herself she would hang on to this one no matter what a … ne’er-do-well he might turn out to be. Oh, I could read her like a book!

I remembered what I’d told Mrs. Alford when I was describing Great-Grandpa’s visit from his angel. Angels leave a better impression, I’d said, if they don’t hang around too long. Or something to that effect. If they don’t hang around making chitchat and letting you get to know them.

Here is how my Pop-Pop happened to give me the Sting Ray:

I was just about to graduate from the Renascence School, and I’d been accepted at Towson State, and Dad had promised to find a summer job for me. So far he hadn’t succeeded, but that’s a whole other story. The point is, I was doing okay for once. My life was looking up. There was a lot of talk about clean slates and new beginnings, et cetera, et cetera.

Then, at Easter, I came home for the long weekend and got into a little trouble. Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it: I locked my parents out of the house and set fire to the dining room.

I can’t explain exactly how it started. How do these things ever start? It was your average Saturday-night supper; nothing special. My brother had brought a girlfriend. He was living on his own by then, in an apartment down on Chase Street, and he wanted us to meet this Joanna, or Joanne, or whatever her name was. But that was not the problem. The girl was innocuous enough. And my parents were putting on their happycouple act, telling how they themselves had met and so on — my father describing Mom as lively and vivacious and “spunky” (his favorite word for her); my mother turning her eyes up to him in this adoring, First Lady manner. No problem there, either. I’d seen them do that plenty of times. Oh, I’ve never claimed my parents were to blame for my mistakes. My mother might lay it on a little thick — working so hard at her Guilford Matron act, wearing her carefully casual outfits and frantically dragging the furniture around before all major parties — but I realize there are far worse crimes. So, I don’t know. I was just in a mood, I guess. All through supper I kept fighting off my old fear that I might burst out with some scandalous remark. It was more pronounced than usual, even. (Do you think I might have Tourette’s syndrome — a mild, borderline version? I’ve often wondered.) But I made it through the evening. Bade Jeff and What’s-her-name a civil goodbye in the front hall, watched Mom and Dad walk them to the street.