Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Then I locked every single door behind them and stood inside with my arms folded, listening to my parents knock and ring and shout. (“Barnaby? Barn? You’ve had your little joke now. Let us in now, please.”) I didn’t say a word. When my father stepped off the front stoop, finally, and picked his way through the azaleas to peer in the dining-room window, I snatched up the silver box of matches my mother lit her candles with and I struck a match without a thought and set fire to the curtains. They were some kind of gauzy material, and they burned lickety-split. My father said, “Call the fire department!” (He was speaking to me, I had to surmise, since who else was near a phone?) But my mother said, “No! Think of the neighbors!” and that’s when I picked up a dining-room chair and sent it through the window. It felt spectacular. I can still remember the satisfaction. It made such a clean, explosive crash. Although it also provided Dad with an entryway into the house.

I didn’t try to stop him. I just sort of wandered off to my room, noticing the whole while that I seemed to be behaving like a crazy man. I climbed the stairs with my hands hanging loose at my sides and my expression spacey and vacant, and I watched myself doing it or even overdoing it, the same way years ago I’d overdone my limp when I sprained my ankle once, putting everything I had into the role of a cripple.

Well, you can imagine the brouhaha. Long-distance calls to Renascence, reaming them out for sending home a dangerous individual. Telephone consultations with the headmaster and my adviser. But not my psychologist, oddly enough. I did have one, of a fair-to-middling sort; but the focus here seemed to be my criminal intent rather than my mental state. There was talk, even, of bringing in the police, although that was probably just for effect. My father went so far as to mention jail. “I saved you from jail once before, but I’m not doing it again,” he said. I just kept my same vacant expression. I felt mildly interested, as if it didn’t involve me. I remember reflecting on the bizarreness of jail as a punishment — like sending someone to his room, really. Just put him away! What a concept. But did it ever occur to people that getting put away could come as a relief, on occasion?

Anyhow: the next day was Easter. So we all assembled for Easter dinner — me and my folks; Jeff minus the girlfriend (I believe she’d been hastily disinvited, due to recent developments); my Grandmother Gaitlin, who was still alive at the time; and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow. Of course The Event had been thoroughly discussed behind my back, and I could tell it was the only thing on anyone’s mind. Much shaking of heads, much whispering in the front hall. Sidelong glances at the cardboard-covered window and the charred and blistered frame. Surreptitious sniffs of the tarry-smelling air.

Except for Pop-Pop.

He just walked straight up to me. I was standing alone in front of the unlit fireplace in the living room, feeling like a Martian, and Pop-Pop walked straight up and said, “Happy Easter, Barnaby.”

“Well. Same,” I said.

“It’s wonderful to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Pop-Pop.”

Then he reached out and put something in my hand. The Chevrolet key ring.

I said, “What’s this for?”

He said, “You know about my eyesight. I shouldn’t have kept on driving even as long as I have.”

“But what’s—?”

“I want you to have my car,” he said. “She’s still got a lot of miles left in her! And she’s quite a machine, Barnaby. Only Corvette ever made with a split rear window.”

“You’re giving me the Corvette?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“You’re giving it, as in giving it?”

“I can’t think of anyone better, son,” he said.

I have no idea what Jeff’s face looked like at that moment. Did he, in fact, envy me? I never even glanced at him. I was staring down at the checkered flags and blinking back the tears.

THIS YEAR, Mrs. Alford was planning ahead for Christmas, she told us; not waiting till the last minute to get that tree of hers trimmed. So Martine dropped me off one morning in mid-December — a cold day, but sunny enough to start melting the film of snow that had fallen overnight. I climbed the front steps and pressed the buzzer before I wiped my feet, since Mrs. Alford always took some time answering. But it was her brother who opened the door. I recognized the two clouds of white hair puffing above his ears. Had I ever known his name? I’d only met him the once.

He knew mine, though. “Why,” he said. “It’s Barnaby. Oh, Barnaby. How very, very kind of you to call.” And he held out his hand.

I hadn’t been prepared to shake hands, but I did, and then I scraped my feet on the mat a few more times to show that I was ready to head on in and get to work. But it seemed he wanted the two of us to stand talking a while longer. “I can’t tell you how much this means,” he said. “My sister would have been extremely touched that you stopped by.”

Would have been?

Oh-oh.

“But come in! Come in! What am I thinking? Please,” he said. “May I take your jacket?”

“Well … ah, no, thanks. I’ll keep it,” I said.

But I did come in. I couldn’t see any way out of it, really.

“Valerie will want to meet you,” the brother said, leading me through the foyer. I guessed Valerie was Mrs. Alford’s daughter. We passed the dining room, where a bearded man in a bathrobe sat reading a newspaper. Next to him, a baby was pounding her high-chair tray, but the bearded man paid no attention, and when he caught sight of me he just nodded and turned a page. “Richard,” the brother told me. “Valerie’s husband. They left the older kids at home for now; it was such short notice. And school is still in session, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. We were climbing the stairs to the second floor. I hoped Valerie wasn’t in her bathrobe. I said, “It’s kind of early yet. Maybe I should—”

“Nonsense. We’ve been up for hours,” the brother said. “None of us slept very well, as you might imagine.” We reached the upstairs hall, and he called, “Valerie? Val! Look who’s here.”

In Mrs. Alford’s bedroom, a woman in baggy slacks was kneeling beside a cedar chest. She didn’t resemble Mrs. Alford. She was big-boned and gawky, with tortoiseshell glasses and lank brown hair, and you could see she had been crying. She stared at me blankly, which was understandable since we had never met.

“It’s Barnaby,” the brother told her.

“Barnaby!” she said, and she got to her feet and came over to hug me. She smelled of cedar. “Oh, Barnaby,” she said, “what’ll we do without her?” When she drew away, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. She seemed more like an overgrown girl than a wife and mother.

“I’m sorry about your loss,” I said. “Mrs. Alford was a super-nice lady.”

“She thought the world of you, Barnaby. Nearly every time I phoned her, she would mention something you’d done for her or some conversation you’d had.”

“I didn’t even know she was sick,” I said.

“Well, she wasn’t, so far as anyone could tell. It was a heart attack. But I think she had some inkling, maybe. I worried all this fall, because why else did she suddenly send me those things from the attic? And her quilt: just look. She seems to have finished her quilt in a rush, after months and months of claiming she would never get it finished.”

The quilt was draped over the edge of the chest. Valerie bent to pick it up and unfold it — a dark-blue cotton rectangle with a gaudy, multicolored circle appliquéd to the center. “Planet Earth,” she said, and the brother made a clucking sound.