A Patchwork Planet

2

THE COMPANY I work for is called Rent-a-Back, Inc. How I got into it is a whole other story, but basically we provide a service for people who are old or disabled. Any load you can’t lift, any chore you don’t feel up to, why, just call on us. Say you want your lawn chairs piled in your garage in the fall. Or your rugs rolled up and stored away in die spring. We can do that. A lot of our customers have a standing order — like, an hour a week. Others just telephone as circumstances arise. Whatever.

On the Saturday of my dud trip to Philadelphia, I came home to find a message from my boss on my answering machine. “Barnaby, it’s Virginia Dibble. Could you get back to me as soon as possible? We have an urgent request for this evening.”

I really liked Mrs. Dibble. She was this dainty, fluttery lady a whole lot older than my mother, but I’d seen her tote a portable toilet down two flights of stairs when we were shorthanded. So even though I wasn’t in such a great mood, I dialed her number. “What’s up?” I asked her.

“Oh, poor, poor Mrs. Alford,” she started right in. “She needs a Christmas tree put together.”

“A what?”

“An eight-foot artificial Christmas tree. It’s in her attic, she says, and she needs it brought down and assembled.”

“Mrs. Dibble,” I said. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, you have plans?”

“I mean, it’s a week after Christmas. What does she want with a tree?”

“She says her seven grandchildren are stopping by for a visit. They’re spending the night on their way home from skiing, and she wants the house to look cheery, she says, and not old-ladyish and glum.”

“Ah.”

Grandchildren ruled the world, if you judged by most of our clients.

“She needs it decorated too,” Mrs. Dibble was saying. “She says she can’t manage the upper branches, and if she climbed onto a step stool, she’s scared she might break a hip.”

Breaking a hip was what else ruled the world — the fear of it, I mean. Big bugaboo, in the circles I traveled in.

I said, “Couldn’t she tell her grandchildren she did have a tree but took it down? Plenty of folks get rid of their trees on December twenty-sixth, tell her!”

But I knew what Mrs. Dibble’s answer would be (“We’re the muscles, not the brains,” she always said); so I didn’t wait to hear it. “Besides,” I said, “my car is in the shop and I won’t have it back until Monday.”

“Oh, Martine can drive,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “I thought I’d send the two of you, so as to finish that much faster. Can you do it if Martine picks you up?”

“Well,” I said. “I guess.”

“All the others have New Year’s plans. I’ll call Martine back again and tell her to come fetch you.”

There were eleven full-time employees at Rent-a-Back. That meant nine people that I knew of had New Year’s plans. And these were not particularly successful people. Several might even be looked upon as losers. But still, they’d found something to do with themselves on New Year’s Eve.

I lived in the eastern part of the city, in the basement of a duplex out Northern Parkway. Martine lived down on St. Paul. It would take her twenty-some minutes to reach me; so I had time to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich. (My only meal all day had been a bag of chips in Penn Station.) Then I grabbed a Coke and went to eat on the patio, where I could see a sliver of the driveway. I never hung around my apartment if I could help it. It was nothing but a rec room, really, which the family above me rented out because they needed the income.

By now the sky had clouded over and darkened. When the patio lamps switched on, they made a noticeable difference, even though it couldn’t have been much later than four o’clock. The patio had these tall pole lamps that were activated by motion. If anybody came near, they would all at once light up. Then after thirty seconds they shut off again. Usually, I enjoyed teasing them. I would take a step, freeze, take another step…. Once, when the Hardestys were gone and I was grilling steaks with this girl I’d met, I told her there was no way to make the lamps stay lit nonstop (which was a flat-out lie) and we would have to keep moving if we wanted to see what we were eating. So there we were, shifting hugely in our chairs, lifting our forks with these exaggerated gestures that the lamps would be sure to notice. Then after supper we got to making out and the lamps, of course, went dark, and we forgot about them till she stood up to pull her T-shirt off, and whang! they all flared on again. I laughed until my stomach hurt.

That afternoon, though, I wasn’t feeling so playful. I just sat hunched over my sandwich in a shreddy mesh lawn chair, and pretty soon the lamps clicked off.

I’d finished eating by the time Martine pulled in. She was driving her boyfriend’s battered red pickup, high off the ground and narrow through the eyes. I set my Coke can in a planter and came around to climb in on the passenger side. “Hey, Martine,” I said. “No date for New Year’s Eve?”

“He’s in bed with the throwing-up flu,” she said, backing into the street. “What’s your excuse, Mr. Peanut Butter Breath?”

“I’ve turned against women,” I told her.

“Ha!”

She shifted gears and took off.

Martine drove sitting on a cushion; that’s how small she was. Heaven knows what had possessed her to sign on at Rent-a-Back. She must have weighed ninety pounds at the most — tiny little cat-faced girl with sallow skin and boxy black hair squared off above her earlobes. But tough, I have to admit. A Sparrows Point kid, from steelworking stock. Scraped sharp knuckles on the steering wheel; gigantic black nylon jacket that smelled of motor oil. “How was your trip to Philly?” she asked, and her voice had a raspy scratch to it that made me want to clear my throat.

I said, “It stunk.”

“Stunk!”

“First thing wrong,” I said, “was I had to take the train. Car is acting up again.”

“What is it this time?”

“Steering.”

“Well, it serves you right for owning an endangered species,” she said.

“Tell that to my grandpa,” I said. “He’s the one who owned it in the first place. You think I’d go out on purpose and buy a Corvette Sting Ray? So I had to plunk down money for a train ticket. Then when I get to Philly, what does Natalie do? Sends me straight back home again. Says she’s decided to stop my visits altogether.”

“Why, she can’t decide that!” Martine said.

“She claims I do Opal more harm than good.”

“You just get ahold of your lawyer!”

“Right.”

I actually didn’t have a lawyer, but it seemed like too much work to explain that. Instead I slouched in my seat and watched the scenery slog by: bald brick houses, pale squares of grass, bushes strung with Christmas lights that were just now winking on.

“Anyway,” I said, “her husband is a lawyer. No doubt they have some kind of fraternity or something, some secret circle she can mobilize against me. Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I ever hooked up with such a woman.”

“Well? Why did you?” Martine asked.

“I believe it was her hairline,” I said.

Martine laughed.

“Seriously,” I said. “She had this sterling-silver barrette pulling her hair straight back on top so you could see her forehead. Her clean, shiny forehead. It kind of hypnotized me, you might say.”

Martine swerved around a liquor truck that was parking at someone’s curb.

“I’ve got to start viewing the whole picture more,” I said. “I can’t go on falling for people’s foreheads.”

“With me, it’s mouths,” Martine said.

“Really.”

I began chewing on a thumbnail, incidentally covering my own mouth with my fist.

“First time I met Everett, all I saw was his mouth. That curvy upper lip of his. Did I ask if he had a steady job, or whether he was the type who’d want to get married?”

I said, “Married?” and tucked both fists between my knees.

“Did I ask why he was still living with his mom, who dotes on him and serves him breakfast in bed and makes his truck payments for him when he can’t come up with the money?”

“Geez, Pasko,” I said. “I never figured on you getting married, exactly.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know….”

“You think I’m not old enough? I’m twenty-six and a half!”

“Well, sure, you’re old enough, I guess.”

“Or you think I’m not frilly and girly enough? Not pretty enough? What?”

“Huh? No! Honest! I think you’re very, um …” It didn’t help that just then she sent me this crosspatch, unalluring scowl, but I said, “Very … attractive! Honest!”

“Everett says I remind him of a ten-year-old boy.”

Everett had a point — one of the few times I’d agreed with him. I said, “Hogwash.”

“When I told him I wanted lingerie for Christmas, he asked if they made black lace training bras.”

I started to grin but stopped myself.

“Maybe we should both come up with some New Year’s resolutions,” Martine said. “Promise ourselves we won’t go on acting like such saps.”

“Well, maybe so,” I said.

But I guess she could tell from my voice that I didn’t have the heart for it. You get close to being thirty, and these resolutions start to seem kind of hopeless.

I wished Natalie hadn’t felt called upon to remind me of my birthday.

Mrs. Alford lived in Mount Washington, in a white clapboard Colonial that was fairly good-sized but shabby, like most of our clients’ houses. (Anybody rich would have hired full-time help, not just Rent-a-Back. And anybody poverty-stricken couldn’t afford even us.) She was watching from behind her storm door, with a cardigan clutched around her shoulders. A woman shaped like a pigeon: tidy little head and a deep, low-set pouch of a bosom. When we started up the steps she opened the door and called, “Good evening, Barnaby! Evening, Martine! Isn’t it nice you could come on such short notice!”

“Oh, for you, anytime, Mrs. A.,” I told her. I walked past her into the foyer and stood waiting for instructions. Her house smelled of steam heat and brothy foods and just, well, oldness. A Christmas tree wouldn’t fool her grandchildren for an instant. But she was so cheerful and determined, peering up at us half blind and smiling brightly, her hair smoothly combed, her lipstick neatly applied. “The tree is in the attic, in a white box with a red lid,” she said, “and the ornaments should be nearby, but I’m not sure exactly where. I haven’t used them lately, because last year I went to my daughter’s for Christmas, and the year before … Now, what did I do the year before?”

“Never fear, Mrs. A. We’ll track those suckers down no matter where they are,” I told her.

“Mind you don’t step through the ceiling, though.”

“Would we do a thing like that?”

The way Rent-a-Back operated was, we tried to send each client the same two or three workers again and again. So Martine and I already knew our way around Mrs. Alford’s house. We knew how to get upstairs, and we knew more or less where the pull-down ladder was, above the second-floor hall. But I don’t think either of us had ever been in her attic before. We clambered up — Martine on my heels, nimble as a monkey — into a hollow of cold air and darkness. I groped overhead till I connected with the lightbulb cord, and then all this junk sprang into view: trunks and suitcases and lamps, andirons, kitchen chairs with no seats, electric fans so outdated you could have fit a whole hand inside their metal grilles. None of it any surprise, believe me. I had toured a lot of attics in my time. I said, “Well, there’s flooring in the middle, at least,” and Martine said, “White box, red lid. White box, red lid,” meanwhile maneuvering past a console radio, a standing ashtray, an open carton full of doorknobs. “Here it is,” she said.

But I had caught sight of something else: a dress form, over by the chimney. It wasn’t an ordinary dress form; not a canvas torso plumped with padding. This was a life-size wooden cutout, head and all, flat as a paper doll. The face was oval and astonished — round blue eyes, two dots for nostrils, and a pink O of a mouth — with brown corkscrew curls painted in at the edges. The arms stuck out at a slant and ended above the elbows; the legs stood in a brace arrangement that kept the figure upright. “Why! It’s a Twinform,” I told Martine.

“Hmm?”

“It’s a Gaitlin Faithful Feminine Twinform! Invented by my great-grandfather.”

Martine glanced over. She said, “Well, how would that be useful, though?”

“Listen to this,” I told her. I read from the little brass plaque on the base. “ ‘Gaitlin Woodenworks, Baltimore, Maryland. Patent Applied For.’ ”

“How would you know how big around to sew your dresses?”

“It’s not for sewing dresses. It’s for putting together your outfit before you wear it. Like, if you’re planning to go to a party or something … Well, it does sound kind of dumb. But once upon a time, you could find a Twinform in every bedroom. Now they’ve disappeared. I’ve never seen one in person before.”

“Those old-time inventions slay me,” Martine said. “People used to try so hard, seems like. Used to aim for the most roundabout method of doing things. Could you come give me a hand here, Barn?”

I turned away from the Twinform, finally, and went to help her.

The Christmas tree carton was a manageable size, with holes at each end to hang on by, but it turned out to be fairly heavy. I said, “Oof!” Martine, though, didn’t make a sound. (Both our girl employees behaved that way, I’d noticed — kept their breaths very even and quiet where a guy would have openly grunted.) “Better let me go first,” I said when we reached the ladder, but Martine said, “What: you think I can’t handle it?”

“Fine,” I told her. “After you.” And then had the satisfaction of watching her pretend it was no big deal when sixty pounds of Christmas tree hit her in the chest as she got halfway down.

Mrs. Alford was waiting for us in the living room — her cardigan thrown aside, her speckled hands twisting and pulling and itching to get started. “Oh, good,” she said. “But what about the ornaments, I wonder?”

I said, “Half a minute, Mrs. A.,” and we lowered the carton to the rug.

“You did see where they were, though,” she said. “You found the boxes.”

“We will; don’t worry,” Martine told her.

“I hope they’re not in the basement, instead.”

Martine and I looked at each other.

But no, they were in the attic. When we went back up, we spotted them on top of a disconnected radiator — two cardboard boxes marked Xmas in shaky crayon script. They weighed a lot less than the tree had. We could carry one apiece with no trouble.

As I was heading toward the ladder, I threw another glance at the Twinform. “Of course, it didn’t allow for Fat Days,” I told Martine, “or Short Days, or any of those other days when women take forever deciding what to wear.”

Martine said, “What?” Then she said, “I take about two minutes deciding.”

Which was abundantly obvious, I could have told her.

By the time we got back to the living room, Mrs. Alford had emptied the tree carton and heaped all the branches in a tangle on the rug. She said, “Over in that corner is where we always put it. We mustn’t let it block the window, though. My husband hates for the tree to block the window.”

I’d heard so much of that — the deceased coming back in present tense — I hardly noticed anymore.

Martine set up the stand, while I fanned out the branches to get them looking more lifelike. It wasn’t the first time I’d put one of these together (a lot of our clients had switched to artificial), but I’d never quite adjusted to how soft the needles were. Each time I plunged my hand in among them, I felt disappointed, almost — expecting to be prickled and then failing to have it happen.

Mrs. Alford was telling us about her grandchildren. “The oldest is sixteen,” she said, “and I’m sure she couldn’t care less whether I have a tree or not, but the little ones are at that dinky, darling, enthusiastic stage. And they’ll only be here for one night. I have to make my impression in a limited space of time, don’t you see.”

Then she laughed merrily so we wouldn’t think she was serious, but of course she didn’t fool either of us for a second. She was dead serious.

This one worker we had, Gene Rankin: he walked off the job after only three weeks. He said he couldn’t stand to get so tangled up in people’s lives. “Seems every time I turn around, I find myself munching cookies in some old lady’s parlor,” he said, “and from there it’s only a step or two to the ungrateful-daughter stories and the crying jags and the offers of a grown son’s empty bedroom.” Mrs. Dibble told him he would get used to it, but she just said that because she didn’t want to train another employee. You never get used to it.

The tree turned out to be so big that we had to pull it farther from the wall once we started hooking the lower branches on. Martine wriggled in behind it and called for what she needed. “Okay, now the red-tabbed branches. Now the yellow,” and I would hand them over. Mrs. Alford went on talking. She was seated on a footstool, hugging her knees. “When the sixteen-year-old was that age,” she said, “—that dinky, darling age, I mean — why, I set a sleigh and a whole team of reindeer up on top of our roof. I climbed out the attic window and strung them along the ridgepole. But I was quite a bit younger then.”

“Sheesh. I’ve never been that young,” I said.

I must have sounded gruffer than I’d meant to, because Martine told Mrs. Alford, “Pay no mind to Barnaby. He had a bad trip to Philly.”

“Oh, was this a Philadelphia week?” Mrs. Alford asked.

“Natalie says he can’t come visit anymore,” Martine told her.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Barnaby.”

Martine crawled out from behind the tree and shucked her jacket off. Beneath it she wore overalls and a long-sleeved thermal undershirt that looked orphanish and skimpy, with the cuffs all stretched and showing her little wrists, as thin as pencils. “See if you can find some lights in one of those boxes,” she told me.

But Mrs. Alford had beaten me to it. She was hauling them forth hand over hand — the old-fashioned kind of lights, with the big, dull bulbs. “It’s a terrible thing, divorce,” she said. “Especially when the child is caught in the middle.”

I said, “I don’t know that she’s in the middle, exactly.”

“He ought to talk to his lawyer,” Martine said.

“Of course he ought!” Mrs. Alford said. “When my nephew and his wife split up—”

“Or go to Legal Aid.”

“Oh, Legal Aid is a lovely organization!”

“Hmm,” I said, making no promises.

“Or another possibility: my brother is a lawyer,” Mrs. Alford told me. She hooked a scratched blue bulb onto the lowest branch. “Retired, needless to say, but still …”

I changed the subject. I said, “Mrs. Alford, you know that Twinform you have in your attic.”

“Twinform?” she asked. She moved to the branch on her right.

“I was wondering. Did you buy it yourself? Or was it handed down through your family?”

“I’m not entirely certain what you’re talking about,” she said.

“That wooden person standing near your chimney. Kind of like a dress form.”

“Oh, that. It was my mother’s.”

“Well, guess where it was manufactured,” I told her. “My great-grandfather’s woodenworks.”

“His woodenworks, dear?”

“His shop that made wooden shoe trees and artificial limbs.”

“Mercy,” Mrs. Alford said.

I could see she was only being polite. She moved away from the tree and started unpacking ornaments, most of them homemade: construction-paper chains gone faded and brittle with age, pine cones glopped with red poster paint. “Someday I should get that attic cleared out,” she said. “When would I use a dress form? I’ve never sewn a dress in my life. The most I’ve done is quilt a bit, and now that my eyes are going, I can barely manage that much. I’ve been working on a quilt of our planet for the past three years; isn’t that ridiculous?”

“Oh, well, what’s the hurry?” I asked. (No point explaining all over again that the Twinform wasn’t meant for sewing.)

“One little measly blue planet, and it’s taking me forever!”

“But here’s the weird part,” I said, reaching for one of the chains. It made a dry, chirpy sound, like crickets. “How the Twinform came into being was, an angel showed up and suggested it.”

“An angel!” Mrs. Alford said.

“Or so my family likes to claim. They say she walked into the shop one day: big, tall woman with golden hair coiled in a braid on top of her head. Said she wanted shoe trees, but when Great-Granddad showed her a pair, she barely glanced at them. ‘What women really need,’ she said — these are her very words; Great-Granddad left a written account—‘What women really need is a dress tree. A replica of their entire persons. How often have I put on a frock for some special occasion,’ she said—‘frock,’ you notice—‘only to find that it doesn’t suit and must be exchanged for another at the very last moment, with another hat to match, other jewelry, other gloves and footwear?’ And then she walked out.”

Martine was staring at me, with her mouth a little open. Mrs. Alford said, “Really!” and hooked a modeling-clay cow onto a lower branch.

“It was the walking out that convinced them she was an angel, I believe,” I said. “If she’d stayed awhile — if she’d haggled over prices, say, or bought a little something — she’d have been just another customer making chitchat. But delivering her pronouncement and then leaving, she came across as this kind of, like, oracle. She stayed in Great-Granddad’s mind. Before the week was over, he’d built himself a prototype Twin-form and paid a neighbor’s artistic daughter to paint the face and hair on. See, you got your very own features custom painted, was the clincher.”

Mrs. Alford handed me a bent cardboard star covered with aluminum foil, not one point matching any of the others. I stepped onto the footstool and propped the star against the top of the tree.

“That’s the reason,” I said, “after the Twinform made him rich, Great-Granddad started his Foundation for the Indigent. And that’s why the Foundation has an angel on its letterhead.”

Martine said, “Oh, I always thought that angel was just a general angel!”

“Nope, it’s a very specific angel, I’ll have you know,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Alford said. “Are you talking about the Gaitlin Foundation?”

“Right,” I said.

“Do you mean to say you’re one of those Gaitlins?”

“Well, when they claim me, I am.”

“I had no idea!”

“I’m the black sheep,” I told her.

“Oh, now,” Mrs. Alford said, “you could never be a black sheep.”

“Just try telling my family that,” I said. “My family would take it kindly if I changed my name to Smith.”

“They wouldn’t!”

The tree was finished, by now — all the ornaments in place, not counting a paper snowflake that Mrs. Alford was hanging on to in an absentminded way. She looked distressed but also pleased, and alert for further tidbits. (People always imagine that our family must be loaded, although if they put two and two together, they would realize the Foundation had siphoned off most of the loot.)

“He’s exaggerating,” Martine said. Probably she was afraid I’d bring up my criminal past, which our clients, of course, had no notion of. “Barnaby’s very close to his family! Seems every time I talk to him, he’s just back from seeing his grandparents.”

“Those are my Kazmerow grandparents,” I said. “Not Gaitlins.”

“Plug in the lights, Barnaby.”

“The Gaitlins I see only on major holidays,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Thanksgiving. Christmas. Ever notice how closely Christmas follows Thanksgiving? Seems I’ve barely digested my turkey when I’m back for the Christmas goose, sitting in the same eternal chair, telling the same eternal relatives that yes, I’m still a manual laborer; still haven’t found my true calling; still haven’t heard from my angel yet; maybe next year.”

“You have an angel too?” Mrs. Alford asked.

“All the Gaitlins have angels,” I said. “They’re required. My brother Jeff saw his when he was younger than I am now.”

“What’d she tell him?” Martine wanted to know.

“She told him to get out of the stock market, just before Black Monday.”

“Isn’t that kind of … money-minded for an angel?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve always had my doubts about her. Besides which, she was a brunette. I maintain angels are blond.”

Mrs. Alford was giving me this dazed look. I said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. A.; I’m not serious,” and I took the snowflake from her and hung it. (It was pancake-sized, slightly crumpled, snipped from gift wrap so old that the Santas were smoking cigarettes.) “I don’t think my family’s serious, either, when you get right down to it,” I said. “Shoot, they don’t even go to church! My dad’s an outright atheist! The angels are just one of those, like, insider things that help them imagine they’re special. You know? I bet your family has some of those.”

“Well …,” she said dubiously.

I bent to plug in the lights, and when I straightened up, the tree was sending out this dusty, faded glow and Mrs. Alford had her hands clasped under her chin. “Oh! How pretty!” she said.

Some of the branches were drooping — the ones where the modeling-clay animals hung. Some of the paper chains’ links had sprung open. The pine cones had lost quite a few of their scales, so that they had a snaggle-toothed look. But Mrs. Alford said, “Isn’t it perfect?”

I said, “It certainly is.”

By the time we got back to the truck it was dark, and a chilly drizzle was falling. Martine had to switch her windshield wipers on. While she drove, I filled in the time sheets, one for her and one for me, and I tore the carbon copy off hers and stuck it in her overhead visor. Then I sat back and said, “Ah, me.”

The lights from the oncoming traffic kept swinging across Martine’s face, turning her skin even yellower than usual.

We passed a city bus, empty except for the driver, its windows glowing foggily like the bulbs on Mrs. Alford’s tree. We passed a little strip mall, all closed for the night and eerily fluorescent, with swags of frowsy tinsel swinging in the wind.

I said, “This weather will mess up a lot of New Year’s plans.”

“It won’t mess up mine,” Martine said.

“I thought you didn’t have any.”

“Who told you that?”

“Didn’t you say Everett was sick?”

“Yes, but I’m going to this party at my brother’s. Him and his wife are throwing a party, and I said I’d help with the kids.”

Martine had a whole slew of nephews that she was forever amusing — taking them to the zoo or the circus or letting them spend the night in her apartment. I don’t know where she got the energy. I could never be like that. I could barely recall what my own one nephew’s name was.

I said, “Ah, me,” again, and this time Martine glanced over.

I said, “In Penn Station today, this guy was going around asking people to carry something to Philadelphia for him.”

“Whoa! A mad bomber.”

“He claimed it was a passport for his daughter,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

And then … I don’t know why I said this next thing. I’d been planning to tell the story just the way it happened, I swear. But what I said was, “So when he asked me, I told him yes.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did too!” I said. (For a second, I thought she was doubting my word.) “He said I had an honest face,” I said. “How could I resist?”

“For all you knew, he was planning to blow up your train.”

“Well, obviously he didn’t succeed,” I said, “since I’m here to tell the tale. No, I’m pretty sure it was a genuine passport. Of course, I didn’t actually check it out. This lady next to me, blond lady, she kept saying, ‘Oh, just take a peek, why don’t you? Just take a little peek!’ But I wouldn’t do it.”

We slowed and turned into my driveway. Our headlamps lit the patio with two long spindles of mist.

“So anyway,” I said.

I felt this inward kind of slumping, all at once, like, What’s the point? What’s the point? “I carried his package to Philly and gave it to his daughter,” I said, “and that was that.”

Martine had put the truck in neutral now, and she was facing me. For someone so small, she had an awfully large nose — an imposing nose, casting a shadow — and her eyebrows were large, too, and fiercely black, above her sharp black eyes. She said, “Hey. Barn. You want to come to my brother’s?”

“Who, me?”

“You know they’d love to have you. You could help me with the treasure hunt.”

“Oh,” I said. “Nah. Thanks anyway.”

Then I clapped her on the shoulder (little blade of bone under yards of slippery black nylon) and hopped out of the truck.

This time when the patio lamps lit up, they just annoyed me. I crossed the flagstones and went down the basement steps without stopping; unlocked my door and walked in, peeling off my jacket and dropping it to the floor, flipping on the wall switch as I headed toward the kitchen. Actually, it was more of a wet bar than a kitchen. But it did have a little under-counter fridge, and I reached inside for a beer and popped the lid. Then I turned on the TV that was sitting on top of the bar. Perky guy in a bow tie was wondering what this rain would do to the New Year’s Eve fireworks. I settled on the couch to watch.

The couch was a sleeper couch, still folded out from last night, the blankets all twisted and strangled. The only other furniture was a platform rocker upholstered in slick red vinyl that stuck to me in the summer and turned clammy in the winter. I didn’t even have a bureau — just stored my clothes on the shelves beneath the bar. My stove was a two-burner hot plate, and my bathroom was a rust-stained sink and toilet partitioned off in one corner; shower privileges upstairs. Every Saturday morning, Mimi Hardesty came tiptoeing down to do the family’s laundry in the washing machine to the right of the furnace. Every evening, the Hardesty children roughhoused overhead, thumping and bumping around till the light fixture on my ceiling gave off little tingly whispers like a seashell.

Well, I make it sound worse than it was. It wasn’t so bad. I think I was just at a low point that night. Here I am, I thought, close to thirty years old and all but homeless, doing my own daughter more harm than good. Living in a world where everybody’s old or sick or handicapped. Where my only friend, just about, is a girl — and even her I lie to.

Not a useful lie, either. Just a boastful, geeky, unnecessary lie.

I think it was Mrs. Alford’s fault. Or not her fault, exactly, but this job could get me down sometimes. People’s pathetic fake trees and fake cheer; their muffled-sounding, overheated-smelling houses; their grandchildren whizzing through on their way to someplace better.

That employee who quit on us: Gene Rankin. He had a smart idea. He carried a kitchen timer dangling from his belt. He would set it to beeping at burdensome moments and, “Oops!” he would say to the client. “Emergency. Gotta go.”

That was the way to do it.

How I started working for Mrs. Dibble: I was nineteen years old, fresh out of high school, looking for a summer job before I entered college. Only nobody wanted to hire me because, let’s be honest, the high school I had attended was sort of more of a reform school. Not to mention that a lot of folks in the immediate area were mad at me for breaking into their houses and reading their mail. So my father asked around among his Planning Council members. (By then my father was head of the Foundation.) Eventually he persuaded this one guy, Brandon Pearson, to put me to work in his hardware chain. But I could tell Mr. Pearson had warned his staff about my evil nature. They watched my every move and they wouldn’t let me near any money, even though money had never been my weakness. They gave me the most noncrucial assignments, and the manager nearly had a stroke once when he found me duplicating a house key for a customer. I guess he thought I might cut an extra copy for myself.

My second week on the job, a lady in a flowered dress came in to buy a board. Mrs. Dibble, she was, although of course I didn’t know it at the time. She said she wanted this board to be two feet, two and a half inches long. So I told her I would cut it for her. I wasn’t aware that a customer had to buy the whole plank. (Besides, she had these nice smile wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.) I grabbed a saw from a wall display and set to work. Made kind of a racket. Manager came running. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”

“Oh, he’s just cutting me a teeny piece of shelving!” Mrs. Dibble sang out.

“What on earth! You weren’t hired to do that,” Mr. Vickers told me. “What do you think you’re up to?”

That’s when I should have stopped, I know. But I didn’t like the tone he was using. I pretended not to hear him. Kept on sawing. When I’d finished, there was this enormous, ringing silence, and then Mr. Vickers said, clearly, “You are fired, boy.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Dibble said. “Oh, no, don’t fire him! It was all because I asked him to! I begged him and implored him; I pleaded on bended knee!”

But Mr. Vickers had his mind made up, I could tell. No doubt he was glad of the excuse.

I wasn’t too devastated. I couldn’t have stood the place much longer, anyhow. So I told Mrs. Dibble, “It’s all right.”

But Mrs. Dibble started burrowing in her purse. She came up with a cream-colored business card, and, “Here,” she said, and she handed it to me.

RENT-A-BACK, INC., the card read, “WHEN YOUR OWN MUSCLES AREN’T QUITE ENOUGH.” VIRGINIA DIBBLE, PRES.

“Your new place of employment,” she told me.

“Aw,” I said. “Mrs. — um—”

“All our clients are aged, or infirm, or just somehow or other in need, and what they’re in need of is precisely your kind of good-heartedness.”

“Ma’am—” Mr. Vickers said.

And I said, “Mrs. Dibble—”

I guess Mr. Vickers was going to say, “Ma’am, I think you should know that this boy is a convicted felon, or would have been convicted if his folks hadn’t bought his way out of it.”

And I was going to say, “Mrs. Dibble, I don’t have a muscle to my name, if you’re talking about heavy lifting.”

But she didn’t give either one of us the chance. “Nine a.m. tomorrow,” she said, tapping the card with her index finger. “Come to this address.”

Later, when she got to know me better, she told me it was my philosophical attitude that had won her. “It was the way you didn’t protest at what happened,” she told me. “You didn’t put up any fuss. You seemed to be saying, ‘Oh, all right, if that’s how life works out.’ I admired that. I thought it was very Zen of you.” And she patted me on the arm and sent me one of her warm, wrinkly smiles.

She had no idea how she had just disappointed me. Till then, I had been telling everybody I saw — I’d told practically total strangers — that I’d been given my new job on account of my good-heartedness.

On TV, they were asking pedestrians for their New Year’s resolutions. People said they had resolved to lose ten pounds, or stop smoking, or stop drinking. They’d resolved to join a gym or take up jogging. Seemed it was always something body-related. Except for this one guy — slouchy black guy in a hooded parka. He said, “Well, I just can’t decide. Could be I’ll start going to church again. Could be I’ll apply to truckdriving school. I just can’t make up my mind.”

As if he were allowed no more than one resolution within a given year.

I finished my beer and set the can on the floor beside the phone. My answering machine was blinking, but I didn’t expect any great messages at this hour. Unless some acquaintance was throwing a party and suddenly recollected my name. I leaned over and pressed the button.

“Barnaby,” my mother said, “this is your mom and dad.”

What a thrill.

“We just wanted to say Happy New Year, sweetie. Hope it’s the start of good things for you — good news, good plans, a whole new beginning! Call us sometime, why don’t you? Bye.”

Click.

I flopped back on my bed and looked up at the ceiling. Hope it’s the end of all the trouble you’ve caused us, was what she was really saying. Hope at long, long last you’re planning to mend your ways; hope you’ll meet a decent girl this year and find a job we’re not embarrassed to tell the neighbors about. Hope you get your instructions from your angel, finally.

Now, why did this next thought occur to me?

I don’t know, but it did.

Sophia Whatsit. Maynard. The woman on the train. Suppose Sophia Maynard was my angel.

Silly, of course. I’d been snickering at that angel stuff since I was old enough to think straight. If that was not the Gaitlins in a nutshell, I always told them: imagining they had connections even in heaven!

But still.

I saw her gold hair, her feather coat, her bun that was not so unlike (it occurred to me now) a coiled braid.

The trouble was, I seemed to be the first Gaitlin in history who didn’t have a clue what my angel had wanted to tell me.