A Patchwork Planet

14

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.

I’d heard about that planet quilt often, but I’d never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map — a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford’s version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment.

“Pretty,” I said. Because it was sort of pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way.

Valerie folded it up again and smoothed it gently before she laid it in the chest.

“We’re having a very small service,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly when. Then afterwards, I suppose we’ll need your help getting the house in shape to sell it.”

“I’ll be glad to help,” I told her. “Just call Rent-a-Back anytime you’re ready for me.”

When I left, Valerie hugged me again, and the brother shook hands again at the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

I said, “Well, I’ll miss her.”

It was nothing but the truth.

Of course, I had no way to get home, since Martine had driven off to mail Ditty Nolan’s Christmas parcels. So I sat on the curb out front and waited for her, hugging my knees and digging my chin into my folded arms. The curb was still damp from the melted snow, and I could feel a thin line of cold seeping through the seat of my jeans.

“Oh, my! All done?” Mrs. Alford used to say when I’d finished with a job. “Doesn’t that look lovely!” Her chirpy, cheery, determined voice. “Weren’t you quick about it!”

And then other clients’ voices — some cheery and some not, some sad, some downright cranky.

“Pasta? What’s this pasta business? In my day we called it spaghetti.”

“You’ll find out soon enough, young man, it is not especially unselfish to wish on your birthday candles that your children will be happy.”

“Back in Baltimore’s golden age, when the streetcars were still running and downtown was still the place to go and we had four top-notch department stores all on the same one block: Hutzler’s, Hochschild’s, Stewart’s, and Hecht’s …”

“… and at noon or so the phone rings, and my niece says, ‘I’m waiting for Dad but he hasn’t come and he said he’d be here at ten.’ I say, ‘Oh, now, you know how he is.’ About one o’clock, she calls again; two, she calls again. ‘Where can he be?’ she asks me. I say, ‘He’ll show up; don’t you worry.’ Though I’m fairly worried myself, to tell the truth. Along about three-thirty, I think, Oh! I think, Oh, my stars above! Because all at once it comes to me — I can’t say what brought it to mind — it comes to me that her dad had phoned me at eight o’clock that morning. ‘Sis,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach Sue but her line is busy and I want to hit the road so you call her later on, will you, please? And tell her I’ve decided not to stop at her place,’ he said.”

Martine tapped the truck horn. I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Don’t do that, okay?” I said, as I opened the passenger door. “A simple ‘Hey, you’ will suffice.”

“What’s up?” she asked me. She had already cut the engine. “I thought we were trimming a tree.”

“Mrs. Alford died,” I said.

“No!”

I hadn’t meant to be so blunt about it. I settled in my seat and shut my door. “She had a heart attack,” I said.

“Well, damn,” Martine said. Then she started the engine again. But she drove very slowly, as if in respect. “She was one of my favorite clients,” she said when we reached Falls Road.

Mine too, I realized. I wouldn’t have felt that way once upon a time. It used to be that Maud May was my favorite. Maud May was so let-it-all-hang-out. But I don’t know; you start to appreciate the other type of person, by and by — those ultracivilized types who keep their good humor and gracious manners even though their joints are aching nonstop and they can’t climb out of their baths without help and they’re not always sure what day it is. I’d be terrible at that myself.

• • •

“What are you giving Sophia for Christmas?” my mother asked on the phone.

“Oh …,”I said, hedging.

“Because I don’t want to interfere, but if you’d ever care for a piece of your grandmother Gaitlin’s jewelry — such as, say, for example, maybe perhaps a ring, perhaps, or something of that sort — you have only to ask.”

“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ve agreed not to bother with presents this year.”

“Why, for goodness’ sake?”

Why was a question of money, but I didn’t want to say so for fear Mom would segue into the eighty-seven hundred. Instead I told her, “Just lacking in Christmas spirit, I guess.”

Mom sighed. “But you do plan to bring her to dinner,” she said.

“She’s going up to Philly that weekend.”

“To Philly? Does that mean you’re going too?”

“No, I thought I’d stick around and pester you and Dad,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I can see you’re overjoyed at the prospect.”

“Well, naturally we’re delighted to have you! But I was thinking her people might like to get to know you a little better.”

“Evidently not,” I told her.

Sophia had, in fact, invited me, but I had made up this story about how I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. “For someone so down on his family,” she’d said, “you certainly seem to see an awful lot of them.” I told her I felt obligated, because Jeff and Wicky would be visiting Wicky’s folks for Christmas and Mom was all upset about it.

Which she was, no lie, but my presence at dinner was hardly going to change that. “Christmas will be so pathetic this year!” she was saying now. “Just you and Gram and Pop-Pop. I wonder if I should invite Dad’s cousin Bertha.”

“You detest Cousin Bertha,” I reminded her.

She said, “It’s such a pity Opal’s not coming.”

“We’ll have our turn next Christmas.”

“The two of you have been getting along so well together…. She should start spending her summers here, don’t you think? Or winters, even. We could enroll her in one of the private schools. Then for college, of course, she would go to Goucher. She could room with us, if she likes, although I suppose she’d prefer the dormitory. But dorms are so noisy! Studying in a dorm is such a struggle!”

“Mom. She’s barely ten years old,” I said.

She sighed again. Then she asked, “Should I invite Len Parrish?”

“I wouldn’t bother.”

“I could tell him to park the Corvette around the corner, where your Pop-Pop won’t have to look at it.”

“It’s not the Corvette,” I said.

“What, then?”

Someday I should get credit for all the things I don’t say. Like, “Your hero is a sleazeball, Mom.” What I told her was, “He’s got other plans, I’m sure. He’s a very popular guy.”

“Well,” she said. “All right.”

This was so untypical of her — I mean, the resigned and listless tone she used — that I caught myself feeling sorry for her. I remembered what she had said at Thanksgiving: how I was more her son than Dad’s, more related to her. It seemed that now I was taking that in for the very first time. Poor Mom! It hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me, I bet.

So when she told me she’d better hang up because she had a hair appointment, I said, “Mom. You know what I think? I really think your hair would look great if you stopped dyeing it.”

It was meant to be a kindness, but it backfired. “You may not like it, but all my friends say it looks lovely!” she snapped. And then she told me goodbye and slammed the receiver down.

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.”

“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?”

“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.