Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

Well, no surprise there. Just because we were related didn’t mean we were any good at understanding each other.

“In the afterlife,” Maud May told me, “God’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

“What about?” I asked. I was unpacking groceries, and she was smoking a cigarette at her kitchen table.

“Oh,” she said, “children suffering, cancer, tidal waves, tornadoes …”

“You think those need explaining? Tornadoes just happen, man. You think God sits around aiming tornadoes at people on purpose?”

“… old ladies breaking their hips and becoming a burden …”

“The most He might explain is how to deal with a tornado,” I said. “How to accept it or endure it or whatever; how to do things right. That’s what I’m going to ask about when I get to heaven myself: how to do things right.”

Then I said, “Anyhow. You’re not an old lady.”

“Good Gawd, Barnaby, you’ve gone and bought those goddamned generic tea bags again!”

I looked at the box I was holding. I said, “Rats. I thought they were Twinings.”

“Interesting that you imagine you’ll get into heaven,” Maud May said wryly. She blew a cloud of smoke in my direction.

“And also, you’re not a burden,” I added.

She inspected the end of her cigarette and then turned to stub it out. “Though who knows?” she asked the ashtray. “Nowadays, they’re probably letting all kinds of people in.”

Christmas fell on a Monday this year; so Friday the twenty-second was full of those last-minute chores our clients wanted seen to when guests were about to descend. Folding cots brought down from attics, wreaths hung from high-up places, major supplies of liquor hauled in. Most of this I had to handle alone, because Martine was helping out at her brother’s. The new baby was in the hospital with pneumonia. I hadn’t even realized new babies could get pneumonia. So Martine spent the first part of Friday baby-sitting her nephews, and then at three I stopped by her brother’s house to collect her for a job at Mr. Shank’s. Mr. Shank had taken it into his head he needed his entire guest-room furnishings exchanged with the furnishings in the master bedroom, and he needed it now, and next week or next month wouldn’t do.

Only, things at Martine’s brother’s house were never simple. First the sister-in-law was late getting back from the hospital, and then when she did get back she was weepy and distraught, and Martine didn’t want to leave her that way. So I sat in the kitchen, which was a mess, racing wind-up cars with the nephews, while Martine gave her sister-in-law rapid little pats on the back and told her everything would be fine. No mother in the world, she said, would have guessed that a tiny sniffle could go to a baby’s lungs that way. And of course he and Jeannette would still bond; wasn’t she with him in the hospital most of every day and half the night? So Jeannette brightened up and insisted on serving us fruitcake before she would let us leave. I’m a sucker for fruitcake. I like the little green things, the citrons. Why don’t we ever see citrons in the produce section? What are citrons, anyhow? I had two slices and had just cut myself a third, when Jeannette said, “Oh, great. Hand me the breast pump, will you, Barn? I’m leaking all over the last clean blouse I own.” Which reminded me in a hurry that we really ought to be going.

Martine drove, so that I could finish my fruitcake. She was still at her brother’s house, mentally. She nearly ran a stop sign telling me how Jeannette was going to land in the hospital herself if she wasn’t careful. “That fruitcake’s the only thing I’ve seen her eat in the last three days,” she said, “and fruitcake’s not exactly what you’d call the staff of life. I tried to get her to have some breakfast this morning before she left, but she said she couldn’t. I told my brother, at least she ought to be drinking fluids. You need your fluids for the breast milk.”

“Must you?” I asked her. “I’m trying to eat, here.”

“What’d I say? Breast milk? Big deal.”

“That whole business puts me off,” I told her. “I don’t see how women stand it. Leaky breasts, labor pains …”

“Well, aren’t you sensitive,” Martine said. She was drifting behind a slow-moving cement truck. In her place, I would have switched lanes. “Hey,” she said. “I’ll let you in on a secret. There’s no such thing as labor pains.”

“Say what?”

“It’s all a bunch of propaganda that’s been spread around by women. In fact, they don’t feel so much as a twinge.”

“They don’t?” I asked.

“They have this hormone that’s an anesthetic, see, that the body releases during labor. Kind of like natural Novocain.”

I laughed. For a moment, she’d had me believing her.

She glanced over at me with a glint in her eye, but her face stayed all straight lines. “Don’t tell anyone else,” she said. “Women have been keeping it from men for millions of years. They like for men to feel guilty.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said. Maybe too emphatically, because she sent me another, keener glance.

We were traveling up North Charles Street now, past huge houses where electric candles lit the windows even in the daytime — pale, weak white prickles of light that struck me as depressing. I wrapped the rest of my fruitcake in my napkin. I said, “Like Sophia, for instance.”

“Oh, well,” Martine said. “Sophia.”

She hadn’t said a word against Sophia since she first found out we were dating, but I could guess what she thought of her. Or I imagined I could guess. What did she think of her? I studied Martine’s profile. On her head was a boy’s leather cap with big fleece earflaps that reminded me of mutton-chop whiskers. I said, “Like Sophia’s flour-bin money, for instance.”

“Flour bin?”

“The money she put in Mrs. Glynn’s flour bin when I was accused of stealing.”

Martine slowed for a traffic light. She said, “Sophia put money in Mrs. Glynn’s flour bin.”

“Right.”

“Before she learned Mrs. Glynn had changed her hiding place.”

“Right.”

Martine was silent.

“Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty dollars,” I said, as if prompting her.

Martine said, “What: is she out of her mind?”

I had this sudden feeling of relief. I almost said, “Ah,” although I didn’t.

“She thought you really did steal it!” she said. “She actually thought you stole it!”

“Looks that way,” I agreed.

“And so then she goes and … Is she out of her mind?”

“And the thing of it is, it’s still there,” I said.

“What’s still where?”

“The money is still in the flour bin.”

“So?”

“It’s, like, hanging over my head,” I said. “She keeps reminding me of it. Every time she wants to buy something, it’s, oh, no, she can’t, because she gave up all her savings for my sake; everything she owns is sitting in the flour bin.”

“Well, that’s her problem,” Martine said.

But I rode on over her words. It was all pouring out of me now. “Talk about guilt!” I said. “That money is just … weighing on me! But I know she could get it back if she really wanted. Anytime she visits her aunt, she has the run of the house after all. Or if she worries she’ll get caught, she could go on Tuesday, her aunt’s podiatrist day. Take her own key and go Tuesday, or some Friday afternoon when her aunt is having her hair done.”

“What time does she have her hair done?”

“I don’t know; maybe four or so, because she always used to be home again before I got there.”

The light changed to green, and Martine took a violent left turn. I had to grab my door handle. I said, “Mr. Shank’s house, Martine. Straight ahead.”