Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“We’re not going to Mr. Shank’s,” Martine told me.

“Where are we going?”

But I knew the answer to that, even before she took a right, and another left, and came to a jerky stop in front of the Rent-a-Back office.

“Back in a jiff,” she said.

I sat quiet while she was gone. I looked out my side window, watched two squirrels chase each other across the remnants of snow, listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. Then Martine was hopping into the truck again. “Ready?” she asked, and she gave me a foxy, sharp-toothed grin and held up her left hand. Nestled in her palm was a house key, attached to one of Rent-a-Back’s oval tags. #191, the tag read. I didn’t have to be told that #191 was Grace Glynn.

When we pressed the doorbell, checking to make sure she wasn’t home, I had this flash of déjà vu. In the old days, I used to check by phone. I’d phone my prospective victims and listen through a dozen rings or more. (Answering machines were not so common back then.) The feeling now was the same — that strung-up feeling where you’re braced for them to be there, and then the surge of energy and purpose when you find out they’re away. We lounged nonchalantly on Mrs. Glynn’s front porch, in case anybody was watching, but the only sound was the dog barking. So finally Martine stepped forward and fitted the key in the lock.

It was clear from Tatters’s frantic little frenzy that you could just ignore him, which we did. We walked straight through to the rear of the house while he scuttled around our ankles, making busybody sounds with his toenails.

The house had a bitter smell, as if Mrs. Glynn had recently burned some toast. On the drainboard next to the sink, a clean china cup and saucer sat upside down on a dish towel. Everything else was tidied away. I opened a cabinet: glassware. I closed it and opened another. Four white canisters in graduated sizes read TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, FLOUR. I reached for the flour canister, and it rattled. Inside I found a pale-green mug and the handle that had broken off from it; nothing more. Martine let out a small breath next to my shoulder. Tatters sniffed my sneakers.

What if Sophia had made this whole thing up? What if she had merely claimed she’d stowed her money here, in order to seem noble? The thought made me instantly angry. Then I reminded myself that Sophia was not the type to lie. Even so, the anger hung on a moment, like the white spot that stays in your vision after you have looked at a too bright light.

“That’s not a bin,” Martine said. “It’s a canister.”

I said, “Okay, where’s the bin, then?”

She opened a lower cabinet. Saucepans. The one next to it held cookie sheets, muffin tins, and pie plates. Not a bin in sight. I felt personally thwarted, as if Mrs. Glynn were taunting me. “I could kill that woman,” I told Martine.

“Forget about it,” Martine said, closing the second door. “She didn’t mean any harm.”

“No harm! I practically lost my job!”

“Oh, you did not,” Martine said. She was checking the shelf under the sink, but that held only a trash bucket. She said, “You honestly believe Mrs. Dibble would fire you? She’d have to shut down the company. You saw how all our clients backed you up.”

“Well,” I said. “Yes.”

I walked into the pantry. There was a bin at the head of the basement stairs — a tall metal cylinder — but that contained dry dog food. I said, “I wonder how they heard.”

“Heard what?”

“That I needed backing up.”

“Oh,” Martine said. “I told them.”

“You did?”

I turned to look at her. She was standing in the doorway between the pantry and the kitchen, her plaid woolen jacket buttoned wrong and the earflaps sticking up from her cap at two different angles.

I said, “Well. I guess I ought to thank you.”

“What for?” she asked. “Jeepers! They’re the ones you should thank. Getting on the phone like they did and volleying around.”

Rallying around was what she meant, but I didn’t correct her. I had this vision of a crowd of old folks on a volleyball court, keeping me up, up, up and not letting me fall, stepping forward one after the other to boost me over the net. When one of them had to leave, another would take that one’s place. Even if the faces changed, the sea of upraised hands stayed constant.

So, no, I didn’t correct her.

Then Martine came over to the white wooden cabinet behind me. She opened the upper door, exposing what looked to be a huge tin funnel with a crank handle. She reached into the funnel and brought out a plastic sandwich bag full of money.

I said, “Whoa!”

She handed the bag to me. It had a dusty feel from the traces of old flour clinging to it.

“How did you do that?” I asked her.

“This tin thing is a sifter,” she explained.

“A what?”

She turned the crank, demonstrating. “You store your flour inside it,” she said, “and when you go to bake something, you crank the sifter and the flour falls into this box-looking place underneath. My grandmother has almost the same kind of cabinet.”

I peered into the plastic bag. I saw hundreds and a few twenties, fanning out slightly because no band or clip held them together.

Sometimes when you’ve been looking for an object and you find it, there’s a fraction of a second where you feel a kind of … letdown, although that’s too strong a word for it. It’s like you miss the suspense of the hunt. Or something of the sort.

Then I heard the front door open.

Tatters went skittering out of the kitchen, yap-yap-yapping, and Mrs. Glynn said, “Sweetums! Did you miss me?”

Martine and I stared at each other.

“Was he a lonely boy. Was he a lonesome boy,” Mrs. Glynn crooned, proceeding steadily closer. “Oh, oh, oh. I wonder what I—”

A purse or shopping bag was set down on a hard surface, but she continued moving toward us. “Maybe a cup of tea,” she said. “Or hot water with some lemon; that might be more … My, those cabdrivers talk and talk, don’t they? How he did go on! I’ve never understood what makes cabdrivers so …”

She entered the kitchen. I seemed to have run out of oxygen.

Martine said, in a normal tone, “Do you think she left a list in the parlor?”

My jaw dropped.

“Because no way would she go off and not tell us what she wanted done,” Martine said, and she took a step toward the kitchen, still talking. “I bet she left a list someplace and we just have to find it, or else we could call the office and see if—”

Her voice was louder now — loud enough even for someone hard of hearing, although it had started out soft. She was letting our presence dawn on Mrs. Glynn by degrees. “Maybe Ray Oakley would know. Do you think?” she asked.

I said, “Well …,” and followed after her. I had no choice. I stuffed the plastic bag in my jacket pocket as we emerged from the pantry.

Mrs. Glynn was standing beside the stove, wearing this kind of flown-open expression. Both hands were pressed to her chest. She said, “Oh!” And then, “How …?”

“Look! There she is!” Martine told me. “Mrs. Glynn! Great to see you!”

“Why, it’s … Barnaby,” Mrs. Glynn said. “Barnaby and young …”

“We’re just covering for Ray Oakley,” Martine said. “I hope we didn’t give you a scare. Ray couldn’t make it today, and so he sent us instead, and when nobody answered the door—”

“But … today? Was he coming today?” Mrs. Glynn asked.

She had a long, drapey coat on, and her hair was screwed into those bottle-cap curls that old-lady beauty shops favor. It made her face look naked and uncertain. She said, “I don’t think he was due to come today. Was he?”