Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“Well, maybe he wasn’t,” I said. I turned to Martine. “Do you think we made a mistake?”

“We must have,” she said promptly. “Okay! Better be running along!”

“Wrong?” Mrs. Glynn asked. She stared from one of us to the other.

“Sorry about the mix-up,” I said as we sidled past her. “See you, Mrs. Glynn! Bye-bye!”

And we escaped.

Before we went on to Mr. Shank’s, I had Martine drive past my apartment so I could stash Sophia’s money. No sense tempting fate. I ran in, leaving Martine in the truck, and hid the plastic bag behind the bar.

What had Sophia been thinking of, choosing a plastic bag? Had she wanted her aunt to know for sure that this money was a substitution?

It would serve her right if I kept it, I thought. Kept it and bought a car with it — say a used VW. One of those cute little Beetles.

No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that.

I smoothed a jumble of T-shirts over the money, and I left.

Mr. Shank, then Mrs. Portland, then Mrs. Figg. Wouldn’t you know Mrs. Figg was the toughest. She wanted eight strands of Christmas lights woven around the two boxwoods beside her front door — a job that just about froze our fingers off — and then when we got done she said it looked artificial. “Artificial!” I said. “Of course it looks artificial. These are red and green and blue lightbulbs; what occurrence in nature are they supposed to imitate?”

“I mean, they’re spaced artificially. I wanted them more random.”

So Martine and I did them over. When we’d finished, Mrs. Figg said that she had no intention of paying for the extra time it took. She said anybody with half a brain would have done it right the first time. I said, “Have it your way, Mrs. Figg. Merry Christmas.”

It was worth it just to see the look on her face. She hated it when someone deprived her of a good argument.

That was our last job of the day, luckily. (By now it was completely dark.) I dropped Martine at her brother’s, and just as she was hopping out, I said, “Thanks for the help with, you know. The money.”

“No problem,” she told me, and then she slammed the door, because her sister-in-law was on the front porch, itching to get to the hospital.

This was Sophia’s last night home before she left for the long Christmas weekend, and we had talked about having dinner at some not too expensive restaurant whenever I got off work. I figured that was my chance to return her money. It did occur to me, Oh, Lord, I hope now she won’t go out and buy me a Christmas present. But I didn’t want to wait till Christmas was over, because I worried about keeping that much cash around.

She was leaving a message on my machine when I walked into the apartment. “… and I would just like to know …,” she was saying.

I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Barnaby,” she said. “Would you please tell me what is going on?”

“Huh?”

“What were you doing at Aunt Grace’s house? Why did you and that Martine person go there when you surely must have known she would be out? I couldn’t believe my ears. I said to Aunt Grace, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Who did you say was there?’ ”

I put the receiver back down.

Then I thought, Oops.

It was my body proceeding without me again. I didn’t hang up on purpose. I almost seemed to forget that I had to keep the receiver off the hook to continue talking.

But instead of phoning her back, I grabbed the money from behind the bar and I left the house.

The night was clear enough so the stars were out — what few of them could be seen within the city limits — but as soon as I crossed the patio, the automatic lights lit up and doused them. On a hunch, I stopped walking and held still a moment. The lights clicked off, and then, sure enough, the sky did its color-change trick. Loom! it went, and that transparent midnight blue swung into focus. Of course, it lasted no longer than a second. After that, the blue started seeming ordinary again, and I continued on toward the truck.

I drove to Sophia’s, parked in front of her house, and looked around for suspicious strangers before I got out. (The money made an obvious bulge in the right-hand side of my jacket.) Then I climbed her front steps and rang her doorbell.

An immediate, perfect silence fell. You know how sometimes your ear does something funny and there’s an instant when the sound goes off? That’s the kind of silence. Noises I hadn’t even been aware of — mechanical hums and creaks, a murmur behind the curtains — suddenly stopped. And nobody came to the door.

I rang again. Cars hissed down the street behind me, and a faraway train whistle blew, but the house went on giving off its numb, dead silence.

If there had been a mail slot, I’d have slipped the money through it. What she had, though, was one of those black metal postboxes, the kind that doesn’t lock, and I wasn’t such a fool as to entrust her money to that. So I stood there awhile longer, and then I turned and left.

Probably she was watching me as I walked back to the street. She was peering out from behind her curtains to make sure I left. I felt self-conscious and stiff. I made a point of adding a carefree bounce to my step. Even after I reached the truck — after I was home again, parking in the Hardestys’ driveway — I had a spied-upon feeling. When the automatic lights came on, I ducked my head. I scurried across the patio with my shoulders hunched, like a suspect on the evening news.

Okay, so she was mad at me. She was planning to make this difficult. But the nice thing about fussy people is, they have their little routines. You always know where you can find them, and when, if you want to track them down.

AT 9:58 the next morning, she was sitting on a bench at the far end of Penn Station, gazing straight ahead. I know she saw me coming. But I couldn’t read her expression until I got closer. (I was traveling through squares of sunlight; she was hardly more than a silhouette.) I arrived in front of her and stood there. She raised her chin. Her eyes were swimming in tears.

She said, “You hung up on me, Barnaby.”

“I apologize for that,” I told her.

A woman sharing the bench glanced over at us curiously. I sat down between her and Sophia, blocking the woman’s view. “I don’t know what got into me,” I said.

“Nobody’s ever hung up on me. Ever!”

I reached into my jacket and drew out the money, which I’d transferred to a plain white envelope for privacy’s sake. (I’d thought of every possible scenario — even put a note inside, in case she refused to speak to me.) “Sophia,” I said, and I cleared my throat, preparing to make my announcement.

But Sophia went right on. “I simply wasn’t raised that way,” she told me. “I’m sorry, but that’s how I am. I was raised to be respected and treated with consideration. I was taught that I was a special, valuable person; not the kind that someone could hang up on.”

I said, “See, it was only that I felt … interrogated, you know? On account of the tone of voice you used.”

“Why wouldn’t I interrogate you? You walked into my aunt’s private home without her permission! Naturally I would wonder what you were doing there.”

“Well, I should think it was obvious what I was doing there. I wanted to get your money back.”

“Did I ask you to get my money back? Did I request your assistance? I tell you this much, Barnaby: I’d have thrown that money in your face if you brought it back!”

Then she glanced at my envelope. She said, “Is that what this is?” in a piercing, carrying tone that made me slide my eyes toward the other passengers. “Is that what you came to try and give me?”