A Patchwork Planet

4

MY FAVORITE MOMENT of the day comes before the sun is up, but conditions have to be right for it. I have to be awake then, for one thing. And the weather has to be clear, and the lights lit in my room, and the sky outside still dark. Then I switch the lights off. If I’m lucky, the sky will suddenly change to something else — a deep, transparent blue. There’s almost a sound to it, a quiet sound like loom! as the blue swings into focus. But it lasts for only a second. And it doesn’t happen that often.

It happened on my thirtieth birthday, though. I took that for a good omen. My thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday, which was garbage day for more than half our clients. I hadn’t gotten around to setting out their trash cans the night before, because I’d indulged in this private little one-man birthday bash, instead. So there I was, up before dawn in spite of myself, just opening my door, which is the only place in my apartment I can even see the sky from; and I switched my lights off, and loom!

I decided turning thirty might not be so bad, after all. I thought maybe I could handle it. I went off to work whistling, even though I had that balsa-mouth feeling that comes from too many beers.

It was a bitter-cold day, the kind that turns your feet to stone, and after I’d dealt with the trash cans I went home and wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to get back to sleep. Only trouble was, the telephone kept ringing. I let the machine answer for me. First call, Mrs. Dibble wanted me to take the Cartwrights grocery shopping. Second call, she needed a sack of sidewalk salt run over to Ditty Nolan. Third call was my grandparents. “Barnaby, hon,” my grandma said, “it’s me and Pop-Pop, just wanting to wish you a—”

I leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up the phone. “Gram?” I said.

“Well, hey there! Happy birthday!”

“Thanks. Is Pop-Pop on too?”

“I’m here,” he said. “Hope you got plans to celebrate.”

“Oh, yeah; well, yeah,” I said in this vague sort of way, because I couldn’t tell if they knew about the dinner Mom was fixing. I never could be certain. Some years she invited them, but other years she thought up reasons not to. (My grandpa had driven a laundry truck till poor vision forced his retirement, and Gram still clerked in a liquor store. “God gave” them — their wording — only one child, my mother, and they were very proud of her, but the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual.) I said, “Probably I’ll just, you know, drop by home for dinner or something.”

“That’s my boy!” Gram said. “That’s what I like to hear! A visit’ll mean the world to them, hon.”

“Yes, Gram,” I said.

Then Pop-Pop asked, “How’s the car doing?”

“Oh, chugging along just fine,” I said. “Had to take it in and get the steering linkage tightened, but no big deal.”

“Why, you could have done that yourself!” he said. “That’s what I always did, when she was mine!”

“Maybe next time,” I told him.

I’d given up trying to convince him I wasn’t a born mechanic.

The way the conversation ended was, I would stop by and see them later in the week. They had a little something for me. (A book of coupons good for six take-out pizzas, I already knew. It was their standard birthday gift, and one I counted on.) Then after I hung up I called Mrs. Dibble, because my conscience had started to bother me over the Cartwrights. They tended to feel rushed when somebody else took them shopping. “So,” I said. “Cartwrights’ groceries, Ditty Nolan’s salt. What: she’s expecting snow?”

“I have no idea,” Mrs. Dibble told me. “We’re just the …”

We’re just the muscles, not the brains. I said goodbye and stood up to unwind myself from my blanket.

The Cartwrights were a good example of why Rent-a-Back was so sought after. They weren’t all that old — early sixties, which in this business was nothing — but Mr. Cartwright had permanently ruined his right ankle several years before while stepping off a curb in Towson. So he couldn’t drive anymore, and Mrs. Cartwright had never known how and did not intend to learn, she said, at this late date. Nor could they afford a chauffeur. Rent-a-Back offered just what they needed: somebody (usually me) to drive their big old Impala to the grocery store, and unfold Mr. Cartwright’s walker from the trunk when we got there, and follow behind as the two of them inched down the aisles debating each and every purchase. I could have just waited at the front of the store, but I got a kick out of listening to their discussions. Today, for instance, Mr. Cartwright expressed a desire for sauerkraut, but Mrs. Cartwright didn’t feel he should have it. “You always think you want sauerkraut,” she told him, “and then you’re up half the night with indigestion and it’s me who has to bring you the Turns. You know how cabbage in any form gives you indigestion.”

Mr. Cartwright said he knew no such thing, but I knew it. And I knew green peppers repeated on him too, and I knew what their shoe sizes were and their grandchildren’s video game preferences, and I had advised on the very coat that Mrs. Cartwright was wearing today. (It was this navy one or a gray, almost white, which I had pointed out would show the dirt.)

In the window bays near the registers I noticed big sacks of sidewalk salt, and I thought of picking one up for Ditty Nolan. But the Cartwrights might feel slighted, seeing me attend to another customer on their time. So what I did was drive them home (Mr. Cartwright next to me, Mrs. Cartwright perched in the rear but leaning forward between us to advise on traffic conditions) and carry in their groceries, and then I got in my own car and drove back to the store for salt. Then I went to Ditty Nolan’s.

I don’t know why Ditty Nolan was scared to go out. She hadn’t always been that way, if you could believe Ray Oakley. Ray Oakley said Ditty’s mother had fallen ill with some steadily downhill disease while Ditty was off in college, and Ditty came home to nurse her and never left. Even after the mother died, Ditty stayed on in the Roland Park house where she had grown up — must have had a little inheritance, or how else would she have managed? For sure, she didn’t go out to work. And when I rang her doorbell, she had to check through the front window first and then undo a whole fortress of locks and sliding bolts and chains before she could let me in. “Barnaby!” she said.

She was thin and pretty and unnaturally pale, with wispy tow hair that hung to her shoulders. Her dress was more a spring type of dress — flower-sprinkled and floaty — which wasn’t so unreasonable for someone who avoided all weather.

“I brought your salt,” I told her.

“Oh, good,” she said, stepping back. “Come on inside.”

I followed her in and dropped the sack to the floor. I said, “Has there been some kind of forecast I haven’t heard about?”

“Forecast?” she asked. She was wandering away to some other part of the house. Her voice came threading back to me.

“Is it supposed to snow or something?”

“Not that I know of,” she said.

She returned, holding an envelope. My name was on the front. “Happy birthday,” she said.

“Oh! Well, thanks.”

I should have guessed: the salt was just an excuse. She knew every birthday at Rent-a-Back and never let one pass without notice. I opened the envelope and looked at the card inside. “This was really nice of you,” I told her.

She waved my words away. Long, fragile hands, untouched by the sun. “What a pity you have to work today,” she said. “I hope you’re having a party later on.”

“Just supper at my folks’ house.”

“Is your little girl going to join you?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But look at what she sent.”

From my rear jeans pocket I pulled out Opal’s gift — a leather money clip, the kind you make from a kit. I hadn’t put any money in (if you thought about it, it was kind of an ironic gift), but I liked carrying it around. “The mailman brought this Saturday,” I said, “along with a handmade card with a drawing of me on the front that really did resemble me. You could even see the stitches on my blue jeans.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet!” Ditty said.

“I was so tickled that I called her up long distance,” I said. “Knocked her mother for a loop, as you might imagine. But I think Opal liked it that I bothered.”

“I’m sure she loved it,” Ditty said.

I put the money clip back in my pocket. “You want me to add the salt to your account?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” she said. “And then maybe when the weather gets bad, you could come sprinkle my walks. I can’t have the UPS man falling down and suing me.”

Ray Oakley always claimed, every year when she gave him his birthday card, that she had a little crush on him. But I knew better than that. She didn’t have a crush on any of us. It’s just that service people were the only human beings she saw anymore.

My parents lived in Guilford, in a half-timbered, Tudor-style house with leaded-glass windows. Out front beside the gas lantern was this really jarring piece of modern sculpture: a giant Lucite triangle balanced upside down on a pole. My mother went after Culture with a vengeance.

I showed up for dinner late, hoping my brother had gotten there first; but no such luck. Mine was the only car in the driveway. So I spent some time locking my doors and double-checking the locks, studying my keys to see which pocket they should go in. Eventually I was detected, though. My father called, “Barnaby?” and I turned to find him standing on the front steps. Against the light from the hall chandelier he looked like a stretched-out question mark, with his stooped, hunched, narrow shoulders. “What’s keeping you?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m just …”

“Come on in!”

I climbed the steps, and he stood back to let me by. He was taller than me and more graceful by far — had a Fred Astaire kind of elegance that my brother and I had totally missed out on. Nor did we get his soft fair hair or his long-chinned parchment face. My mother’s genes had won every round.

“Happy birthday, son,” he told me, giving my arm a squeeze just above the elbow.

“Well, thanks.”

That about wrapped it up. We had nothing further to talk about. As we crossed the hall, Dad sent a desperate glance toward the second-floor landing. “Margot?” he called. “Barnaby’s here! Aren’t you coming down?”

“In a minute.”

The living room had an expectant look, like a stage. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and somebody’s symphony poured from the armoire where the stereo was hidden. Over the mantel hung more of my mother’s Culture: a barn door, it could have been, taken off its hinges and framed in aluminum strips.

“Well, now,” my father said.

He seized the poker and started rearranging embers.

“Which birthday is this, anyway?” he asked, finally.

“Thirtieth,” I told him.

“Good grief.”

“Right.”

Then we heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. “Happy birthday!” she cried, hurrying in with her arms outstretched.

“Thanks,” I said, and I gave her a peck on the cheek.

She had dressed up, but in that offhand way that Guilford women do it — A-line skirt, tailored silk shirt, navy leather flats with acorns tied to the toes. Her one mistake was her hair. She dyed her hair dead black and wore it sleeked into a tight French roll. It made her look white-faced and witchy, but would I be the one to tell her? I enjoyed it. You see a woman who’s reinvented herself, who’s shown a kind of genius at picking up the social clues, it’s a real pleasure to catch her in a blunder. I watched as she bustled about — snatching my jacket, darting off to the closet, rushing back to settle me on the couch. “We haven’t seen you in ages,” she said when she’d sat down next to me. Then she jumped up: cushion tilted off-center in the armchair opposite. “You’re skin and bones!” she said over her shoulder. “Have you lost weight?”

“No, Mom.”

“I’ll bet anything you’re not eating right.”

“I’m eating fine,” I said.

If I’d lost weight every time Mom claimed, I’d have been registering in the negative on the bathroom scale.

Now she was off to pull open a desk drawer. The woman could not sit still. Always something discontented about her, something glittery and overwrought that set my teeth on edge. “Where is it?” she asked, rummaging about. She came up with an envelope. “Here,” she said, and she sat back down and laid it in my hand. “Your birthday present,” she said.

“Well, thanks.”

“Maybe you can find yourself some decent clothes.”

“Maybe so,” I said, not troubling to argue. I folded the envelope in two and slid it into my jeans pocket. (I didn’t need to look to know it was a gift certificate from some menswear store or other, someplace Ivy League and expensive.) “Thanks to you too, Dad,” I said.

“You’re very welcome.”

He was propping the poker against the bricks, and the sight of his thin, sensitive fingers also set my nerves on edge, and so did the music diddling about as if it couldn’t decide where to go. I turned to my mother and said, “So. Are Gram and Pop-Pop coming?” Which was purely to annoy her, because I already knew the answer.

“No, they’re not,” she told me, brazening it out. “But your brother is, of course. And I invited Len Parrish too. He’s stopping by for birthday cake after; he couldn’t make it for dinner.”

No surprise to me. Len was one of those boyhood friends mothers always love, but he had gone on to big doings and left me far behind. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”

“He told me he’d come, Barnaby. I’m sure he’ll keep his word.”

The doorbell rang. “Oh! Jeff!” my mother said, and she jumped up and rushed to the hall, while Dad and I exchanged relieved grins. Things would proceed more smoothly now. Not only was my brother a better conversationalist, but he had a wife and baby who would help to dilute the atmosphere. Especially the baby.

Or actually, he wasn’t a baby. It shows how out of touch I was. When Jeff and Wicky entered the room, this little kid was toddling between them — a pudgy tyke in a suit like his dad’s and a polka-dot bow tie. “Look at that!” I said, getting to my feet. “Walking! At his age!”

“He’s been walking for months,” Mom said. “He’s nearly two, for heaven’s sake.”

“Happy birthday,” Wicky told me, kissing the air beside my left cheek. She smelled of toothpaste. She and Jeff made a model couple — Wicky an attractive blonde in clothes that were twins to my mother’s, Jeff dark and square-set and handsome in a stockbroker sort of way. He wasn’t really a stockbroker; he worked at the Foundation with Dad. But he had on one of those stockbroker shirts with the pinstripes and plain white collar.

“Where’d you park?” I asked him. “You didn’t park behind me, did you?”

“The birthday boy!” Jeff said, clapping me on the shoulder.

“Is your car blocking my car in?”

“Relax,” he told me. “I can move it at a moment’s notice.”

“Damn! You are blocking me in!”

But he was already heading toward the cocktail cart, where Dad had started rattling ice cubes. Wicky, meanwhile, bent to scoop up my nephew. “Give your Uncle Barnaby a birthday kiss, Jape,” she said, holding him out in my direction.

Jape? Oh, right: they called him J.P. Jeffrey Paul the Third. J.P. stole a peek at me and then buried his face in Wicky’s shirt-front. “Silly,” she said. “It’s your uncle! Uncle Barnaby! How does it feel to be thirty?” she asked me.

“Feels like hell,” I told her.

“Oh, it does not! Look at me: I’m thirty-three. I feel better than I did at twenty.”

“Well, you probably didn’t drink a case of beer last night,” I told her.

“True enough,” Wicky said.

“Oh, Barnaby!” Mom cried. “A whole case? You didn’t!”

These little rituals were so reassuring. I could always get a rise out of Mom.

Dad was taking drink orders. Jeff wanted Scotch, and the women wanted white wine. I said, “I’ll have whatever J.P. is having,” because I’d been only half kidding about last night. Then I was struck by the horrible thought that J.P. might still be breast-feeding. But no, he was having ginger ale, in a plastic cup with a bunny decal. Mine came in a glass, though. Dad handed it to me with a flourish.

“So! Barnaby! How’s it feel to turn thirty?” Jeff asked.

“What an original question,” I said. “Did you think it up all by yourself?”

“Oh, touchy, touchy,” he told me. “Don’t worry, it’s not a bad age. Twenty-seven was worse, as I recall.”

“Twenty-seven?”

“That’s when it first hit me that thirty was on the way. By the time it actually came, I’d adjusted.”

Count on Jeff: he plans ahead.

The whole bunch of us were standing, like people at a cocktail party. J.P. began spitting experimentally into his bunny cup. Wicky brought forth a sheaf of Christmas photos to show Mom. (She and Jeff and J.P. had spent Christmas in South Carolina with her folks, pretty much breaking Mom’s heart.) Dad and Jeff talked about, I don’t know, the Deserving Poor, I guess. “Exactly,” Jeff said heavily, rocking from heel to toe. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Exactly.”

I went over to the fireplace and considered the barn door awhile. Then I drifted into my father’s study. I stood sipping my drink in front of his bookcase, pretending to be absorbed by the titles. The Gaitlin Foundations First Quarter-Century, 1911–1936. The Gaitlin Foundation: Fifty Years of Compassion, 1911–1961. Dry as dust, I already knew, and dotted with black-and-white photos of Planning Council members in stiff dark suits.

On the shelf below was the ledger containing Great-Granddad’s epic poem and, next to that, his son’s contribution, done up by some obliging printer to look like a ledger too. Same gray cloth, same maroon leather corners, the title trimmed with spires and dangles of lace. Light of Heaven was the title. Grandfather must have fantasized that someone besides Gaitlins would read what he had to say, because he explained things the family already knew. My wife, Abigail McKane Gaitlin, was exceedingly devout, he wrote. From the sound of it, he had been visited by one of Creation’s dullest angels — a sweet-faced young secretary who arrived for a job interview at a “perilous moment” in his personal life and instructed him to appreciate his wife and children, after which she vanished. Reading between the lines, I always assumed that what we had here was an instance of attempted sexual harassment in the workplace, but that could have been wishful thinking; I was so eager for some sign of colorfulness in my family. The nearest thing to a renegade that we could claim was my great-aunt Eunice, who left her husband for a stage magician fifteen years her junior. But she came home within a month, because she’d had no idea, she said, what to cook for the magician’s dinners. And anyhow, Great-Aunt Eunice was a Gaitlin only by marriage.

Just look at Dad’s ledger; look at Jeff’s. A Possible Paranormal Experience, my father’s contribution, described the woman who stopped him on Howard Street and asked him for a match. While he was explaining that he didn’t smoke, the police arrested the gunman who’d been lurking around the next corner. (But the gunman was only Charles Murfree, the unbalanced grandson of those selfsame Murfrees who’d gone bankrupt after purchasing our Twinform patent, and he’d been stalking my family for decades, off and on. Wouldn’t you say, therefore, that if not for Angel Number One, Dad never would have been endangered in the first place?) My brother called his report A Tradition Repeated, which was appropriate in view of its many redundancies. I guess he was just doing his utmost to stretch a one-sentence encounter into a respectable length. (And a fragmentary sentence, at that. “Looking mighty spooky,” his angel had announced, briskly refolding the stock market page before she stepped off the elevator.)

Close behind me, Wicky said, “Stop right where you are!” I practically jumped out of my skin, till I realized she was talking to J.P. He had padded in without my noticing; he was reaching for the crystal paperweight on the desk. “Don’t touch, Jape,” Wicky said. “What are you up to?” she asked me.

“Oh, just browsing,” I said.

She came over to stand next to me, carrying J.P. in her arms. “A Tradition Repeated” I told her, gesturing toward Jeff’s ledger.

I was hoping to get her reaction — her private, unvarnished views on Our Lady of the Stock Market — but she must have thought I was commenting on the whole shelf-load, because she said, “Yes, they’re very inspirational, aren’t they?”

Diplomatically, I took a sip of my drink. Except that the glass was empty and the ice cubes crashed into my nose.

“I feel so bad for your mom,” Wicky said. “Now that angels are the latest thing, she worries you-all’s will look faddish.”

“You feel bad for my mom?” I asked. I was trying to find the connection.

“She was telling me, just the other day: ‘It used to be that angels were unusual, but now they’re in every bookstore; they’re on every calendar and wall motto and needlepointed cushion; they’re little gold pins on every lapel. Ours will be lumped right in with all those tacky newcomer angels,’ she told me.”

“They aren’t hers,” I said. “Mom is not even a Gaitlin! What’s she all het up about?”

“Well, you know how she is.”

I certainly did. If Mom had had her way, she wouldn’t have merely married a Gaitlin; she’d have arranged to have a Gaitlin blood transfusion.

We went back out to the living room, where Dad and Jeff were discussing the new software they’d bought for the office. Mom headed off to the kitchen to see about dinner. J.P. wanted more ginger ale, but Wicky told him no. “It’s the learning curve that worries me,” Dad said, and Jeff said, “Yes, I’m very concerned about the learning curve.”

The symphony on the stereo was building louder and louder, ending and ending forever. It reminded me of some huge, frantic animal crashing around the bars of its cage.

How come I always got the feeling that somebody was missing from our family table? I had thought so from the time I was little, toting up the faces at dinner every night: Mom, Dad, Jeff, me … It was such a pitiful showing. We didn’t make enough noise; we didn’t seem busy enough, embroiled enough. In the old days, I had thought we needed more kids. Two was a pretty lame amount, it seemed to me. Maybe we should have had a girl besides. I’d have liked that. It might have helped me understand women a little better. But my parents never obliged me.

Then later, when I got married, I figured Natalie would liven things up — I mean, at holiday meals and such. She didn’t, though. For one thing, she was too quiet. Too demure, too well mannered; spine never touched the back of her chair. Also, she didn’t last all that long. Eighteen months from wedding to bust-up. Opal was out of the picture before she got her own place setting, even. As for my sister-in-law, by the time she appeared I’d quit hoping. It’s not that I had anything against her, but I had come to realize we would never be the kind of family I’d envisioned.

So there I sat at my birthday dinner, just going through the motions. “Great, you made the potato dish.” That sort of thing. “Please pass the rolls.” Mom had to tell her story about the New Year’s Baby That Wasn’t: how I had all but promised to be the very first birth of the year (name in the papers, free diaper service, six-month supply of strained spinach), but then, of course — of course! — had loafed about and procrastinated and shown up three weeks late. And that got Wicky started on Punctual-to-the-Minute J.P. We all turned, synchronized, to beam at J.P. in his high chair. “Not to imply that he was a speedy birth,” she said. Wonderful: the Difficult Delivery Story. The rest of us were excused from inventing another topic for a good quarter hour. We fixed our eyes on her gratefully and nodded and tut-tutted.

Then I started having this problem that afflicts me every so often. I’m listening to someone talk, I’m the picture of attentiveness, and all at once I just know I’m about to burst out with something rude or disgustingly self-centered. I might say, for instance, “You think your labor pains are so interesting? Let me describe this tight feeling that’s seizing up my temples.” Because I did have a tight feeling. I felt overly aware of the art piece above the sideboard — actual knives and forks and spoons, bent into angular shapes and leaning out from the canvas in a threatening manner. “You wouldn’t believe how my nerves are just … jangling!” I might have said. But apparently I didn’t say it, because everyone was still nodding at Wicky.

At the end of the meal, Mom rose to clear the table, shooing away all offers of help. “I won’t serve the cake just yet,” she said as she set out the cream and sugar. “We’ll wait for Len.”

“Or go ahead without him, why don’t we,” I suggested.

“Oh, he’ll be here by the time I get the coffee poured.”

Dreamer.

While Mom was matching cups to saucers, Wicky remembered my birthday present and took it from her purse: a red silk paisley tie wrapped in red tissue. I hadn’t worn a tie since Grandmother Gaitlin’s funeral, but I put it on right away — knotting it around my bare neck, since my shirt didn’t have a collar. “Thanks, Wicky. Thanks, Jeff,” I said. “Thank you very much, J.P.” Then I said, “Want to see what Opal gave me?” I dug the money clip from my pocket and passed it around. Everyone admired it. I said, “You should have seen the card that came with it. There was a really good drawing of me on the front.”

“Oh,” my mother said, “that child is just growing up without us! It’s not fair.”

“I was thinking she might come stay with me for a week or two this summer,” I said. “She’s getting old enough, I figure. I ought to be taking part in her life a little more.”

“Stay in that basement room of yours?” Mom asked.

“Well, yes.”

“I hardly think so, Barnaby. Maybe here, instead.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my place!”

Mom just pursed her lips and poured me a cup of coffee.

I’d been planning to mention my angel next. I mean, just jokingly. Tell how I’d half imagined she had instructed me to be more of a father. But somehow the moment had passed. A silence fell. The only sound was the clinking of spoons against cups. Finally Wicky started a story about one of her famous cooking disasters, but she interrupted herself to mop up J.P.’s spilled milk; or maybe she just lost heart. I said, “Mom? Do I get cake, or don’t I?”

“Well, but what about Len?”

“Whose birthday is this, anyhow?” I asked.

“I hate to just go ahead,” she said, but she stood up and went out to the kitchen. She came back with the cake held high in front of her: chocolate icing and a blaze of candles. We’re not much for singing in my family, but Wicky started “Happy Birthday,” and so the others raggedly joined in. “Make a wish! Make a wish!” Wicky chanted at the end. Poor Wicky; she was carrying more than her share of the burden here. Although J.P., banging his spoon on his tray, might be willing to help in a couple more years.

I blew out all the candles in one breath. (I said I’d made a wish, but I hadn’t.) Then I grabbed the knife. “There’s an extra plate for Len,” Mom told me. “Just set a piece aside, and he can eat it when he gets here.”

She was watching the path of my knife, sitting on the front two inches of her chair and coiled to spring the instant I flubbed up; but I disappointed her and cut the first slice perfectly. I sent it across to Wicky and said, “Haven’t we been through this before?”

“Through what before?” Mom asked.

“Waiting for Wonder Boy and he never showed up? I seem to remember we did the same thing last year.”

“I don’t know why you always take that tone about him,” Mom said. She waved a slice of cake on to Jeff. “You used to be inseparable, once upon a time.”

“Once upon a time,” I agreed.

“I believe you’re jealous of his success.”

“Success?” I asked. I stopped slicing the cake and looked over at her. “You call it a success, selling off fake plantation houses on streets called Foxhound Footway and Stirrup Cup Circle?”

“At least he wears a suit to work. At least he makes a decent living. At least he has a college degree.”

“Well, if that’s what turns you on,” I told her.

She said, “Did you sign up for that course?”

“What course?”

“That night course at the college, remember? I suggested you might sign up for it and earn a few more credits.”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“Well, did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Just never got around to it, I guess.”

I handed a piece of cake to Dad. He accepted it with a pinched and disapproving expression, his gray eyes pronounced in their sockets; but it would be Mom he disapproved of, not me. He couldn’t abide for people to act upset. And Mom was obviously upset. She was stripping all her rings off, a very bad sign. Setting them at the head of her place in little jingling stacks with trembling fingers: her wedding and engagement rings, Grandmother Gaitlin’s dinner ring, her Mother’s Day ring with its two winking red and blue birthstones. She said, “But the semester must have started already!”

I gave her a plate and said, “Probably has.”

She pushed the plate away.

“Cakies, Jape-Jape!” Wicky caroled, aiming a forkful of crumbs at J.P. But J.P. was staring openmouthed at Mom, a thread of dribble spinning from his gleaming lower lip.

I cut the last slice, my own. A big one. I told my brother, “Not to be piggish or anything …,” and my brother rolled his eyes.

“Twelve, credits,” my mother said, too distinctly. “Twelve, little, college, credits, and you could kiss Roll-a-Bat goodbye.”

“Rent-a-Back,” I said. I licked the frosting off a candle.

“You could buy yourself a decent suit and go to work for your father.”

“Now, Margot,” my father said. “If college were all that stood in his way, I’d dream up something for him to do tomorrow. Maybe he’d rather work elsewhere; have you considered that?”

“Of course he’d rather work elsewhere!” my mother cried. “Are you blind? He’s spitting in your face! He’s spitting in the Foundation’s face! He has deliberately chosen employment that has no lasting point to it, no reputation, no future, in preference to work that’s of permanent significance. And he’s doing it purely for spite.”

I had been steadily chewing, but I couldn’t let that pass. I swallowed twice (the cake might as well have been sand) and turned to my father. “It isn’t spite,” I told him. “It’s only that I feel uneasy around do-gooders. You know? When somebody tells me he, oh, say, spent his Christmas Day volunteering in a soup kitchen, I feel this kind of inner shriveling away from him. You know what I mean?”

“Barnaby!” my mother cried. “Your own father’s a do-gooder! Think what you’ve just said to him!”

“And who cares if my job has no future?” I asked him. He was at one end of the table and she was at the other. I could speak to him directly and shut Mom out. “I need to pay my rent and grocery bill, is all. I’m not looking to get rich.”

He seemed to find this idea startling; or at any rate, he blinked. But before he could comment, I said, “Besides. I wouldn’t call Rent-a-Back pointless. It serves a very useful purpose.”

“Well, certainly, for a fee!” my mother said triumphantly. “For people who can pay you a fee and then die, and that’s the end of it!”

J.P was starting to make cranky, whimpering noises. Wicky rose and tried to lift: him from his high chair, but he was fussing and squirming. She said, “Jeff, could you give me a hand here?”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Can’t you get his legs out from under? I shouldn’t have to manage all on my own.”

“You need to slide the tray off first, for God’s sake,” Jeff told her.

“Well, you could slide it off yourself instead of just sitting there, dammit!”

I set down my fork and turned to my mother. “I’ll tell you what’s really bothering you,” I said. (Oh, I always did get sucked in sooner or later.) “You think a thing is worthwhile only if it makes the headlines. Prominent Philanthropist Donates Five Hundred Thousand. You think it’s a waste of time just to carry some lady’s trash out for her.”

“Yes, I do,” Mom said. “And it’s a waste of money too. Our money.”

“Well, I knew we’d get around to that sooner or later.”

“Our eighty-seven hundred dollars,” she said, “that you have never paid us back a cent of because you earn barely a subsistence wage at that so-called job of yours.”

“Margot,” my father said. “He doesn’t have to pay us back.”

“Of course he has to pay us back! It isn’t your average household expense: buying off your son’s burglary victims!”

“He is not required to pay us back, and you are behaving abominably.!” my father said.

The silence was that sharp-edged kind that follows gunshots or shattering claps of thunder. J.P. stopped whimpering. Jeff and Wicky froze on either side of him. My mother sat very straight-backed in her seat. It was a lot more obvious now that she was just a Polish girl from Canton, scared to death Jeffrey Gaitlin might find her common.

Strange how always, at moments like these, the table finally felt full enough.

I had my brother come out with me and move his car so I could make my getaway. At first he tried to stall, saying they were about to leave themselves if I would just hold my horses. But I said, “I need to go now” and so he came, muttering and complaining.

“Geez, Barn,” he said as he trailed me down the steps. “You take everything so personally. Mom was just being Mom; it’s no big deal.”

“I knew she’d bring up that money,” I told him.

“If you knew, why let it bother you?”

We stopped beside my car, and I zipped my jacket. “What’s our next occasion? Easter?” I asked. “Remind me to be out of town.”

“You should lighten up,” Jeff said. “They don’t ask all that much of you.”

“Only that I change into some totally other person,” I told him.

“That’s not true. If you made the least bit of effort; showed you cared. If you dressed a little better when you came to see them, for instance—”

“I’m dressed fine!” I glanced down at myself. “Well, so maybe the tie doesn’t go. But the tie wasn’t my idea, was it.”

“Barnaby. You’re wearing a pajama top.”

“Oh,” I said. “You noticed?”

I had thought it didn’t look much different from a regular plaid flannel shirt.

“And both knees are poking through your jeans, and you haven’t shaved in a week, I bet—”

“I did have a haircut, though,” I said, hoping he would assume that meant a barber had done it.

He squinted at me and said, “When?”

“Look, pal,” I said. “Could we just get a move on here? I’m freezing!”

And I strode off toward my car, which forced him to go to his car, sighing a big cloud of fog to show how I tried his patience. His car was one of those macho four-by-fours. You’d think he rode the range all day, herding cattle or something.

A four-by-four, and a Princeton degree, and a desk half the size of a tennis court on the top floor of the Gaitlin Foundation. None of which I wanted for myself, Lord knows. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, as I unlocked my car door, how comfortable it must be to be Jeff. Things just seemed to come easier for him. Me, I’d been in trouble from adolescence on. I’d been messing up and breaking things and disappointing everyone around me, while Jeff just coolly went about his business. It’s as if he were an entirely different race, a different species, more at home in the world. More blessed.

What I sometimes told myself: I’ll be that way too, as soon as my real life begins.

But I can’t explain exactly what I meant by “real life.”

I slid behind the wheel, slammed my door shut, watched in my rearview mirror as Jeff backed toward the street. When I moved to start my engine, though, I heard a honk behind me. I checked in the mirror and found a sleek black Lexus just turning into the driveway and blocking Jeff’s exit.

Len Parrish, after all.

I opened my door and climbed out. Jeff was rolling forward again with the Lexus following, barely tucking its tail in off the street before it had to stop short behind our two cars. “Hold it!” I called, waving both arms, but Len went ahead and doused his lights. I walked over to the Lexus. “Don’t park! I have to leave!”

He lowered his window. “Nice to see you too, Gaitlin.”

“You’re blocking me in! I’m going. You’ll have to let me by.”

Instead he got out of his car. A good-looking guy, wide-shouldered and athletic, in a fitted black overcoat. He wore a broad, lazy grin, and he asked me, “How’s the birthday boy?”

“Fine, but—”

“Jeff!” he said, because my brother had come to join us.

“Hello, Len,” Jeff said. The two of them shook hands. (I just stood there.)

“Guess I’m a little late,” Len said.

“Well, Mom’s saved a piece of cake for you,” Jeff told him.

“Come back inside and help me eat it, Barnaby,” Len said.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be going.”

“Aw, now. What’s the rush?”

Here’s what’s funny: Len Parrish went along with me on every teenage stunt I ever pulled. He was with me the night I got caught, in fact, but he wasn’t caught himself, and I never breathed a word to the police. After the helicopter buzzed us, I tried to jump from the Amberlys’ sunporch roof to the limb of a maple tree. Made a little error in judgment; I’d had a puff or two of pot. Landed in the pyracantha bush below. No injuries but a few scratches, thanks again to the pot, which kept me loose-limbed as a trained paratrooper all the way down. The police got so diverted, they failed to notice Len and the Muller boys slipping out the Amberlys’ back door.

I didn’t blame Len in the least. I’d have done the same, in his place. But it irked me that my mother thought he was such a winner. Him in his expensive coat and velvety suede gloves. He pulled off one of the gloves now to stroke the hood of my car. In the dark, my car looked black, although it was a shade called Riverside Red. “Grit,” he said. He withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers together.

“You want to move your vehicle, Len?”

“What you need is a garage,” he said. “Rent one or something. Take better care of this baby.”

“I’ll go see to it this instant,” I told him. “Just let me out of the driveway.”

“At least you ought to wash her every now and then.”

I slid in behind the wheel and shut the door. Jeff returned to his car, and Len at last ambled toward the Lexus, while I watched in my mirror. The minute the driveway was clear, I shifted into reverse and backed out.

Len should try this himself, if he thought Corvettes were that great. It just so happened mine was made in 1963, the year they had a split rear window. Stupidest idea in automotive history.

I was happy enough to be leaving that I returned Len’s wave very cheerfully, before I took off toward home. Now he and Mom could have their little love feast together. Shake their heads about I-don’t-know-what-Barnaby-will-come-to. Cut themselves another slice of cake.

I thought of my rooftop fall again. It was possible I could have escaped, if the tippy toe of my sneaker hadn’t caught on some kind of metal bracket that was sticking up from the gutter. I remembered exactly how it felt — the barely perceptible hitch as my toe and the bracket connected. I recalled the physical sensation of something happening that couldn’t be reversed: that feeling, all the way down, of longing to take back my one single, simple misstep. But it was already too late, and I knew that, absolutely, even before I hit the pyracantha bush.

Eighty-seven hundred dollars. It never failed to come up at some point. Mom might say, for instance, that they planned to remodel the kitchen as soon as they could afford it; and while a stranger would find that an innocent remark, I knew better. Of course they could afford it — if they couldn’t, who could? — but she wanted to make it plain that they still felt the effects of that unforeseen drain on their finances. The waste of it, the fruitlessness. The niggling dribs and drabs handed out to neighbors. Sixty dollars for a ballerina music box, which I’d thrown down a storm drain in a moment of panic. Ninety-four fifty to mend the lock on a cabinet door. The most expensive item was an ivory carving of a tiny, naked Chinese man and woman getting extremely familiar with each other. I broke it when I stuffed it between my mattress and box spring. Mr. McLeod said it was priceless but settled for six hundred, grumbling. You’d have thought he’d be embarrassed to claim ownership.

I was heading up Charles Street now, slightly above the speed limit. Racing a traffic light that turned red before I reached it, but I hooked a right onto Northern Parkway without touching the brakes.

And it wasn’t only the reparation money. Get Mom wound up and she would toss in the tuition at Renascence, besides. A little harder to figure the precise amount, there. As Dad pointed out, they’d have paid for my schooling in any case. But Mom said, “Not a school like Renascence, though, with its four-to-one student-teacher ratio and its trained psychologists.”

I didn’t count the tuition myself; I reasoned that Renascence was their idea, not mine. First inkling I had of it was, Mom said to pack my clothes because the next day I was leaving for a special school that was perfect for me: roomy accommodations out in the country and a supervised environment. Except I heard “roomy” as “loony.” (“It’s perfect for you: loony accommodations.”) I flipped and said I wouldn’t go. Never did want to go, even after they cleared up the misunderstanding. So I couldn’t be held responsible for the Renascence bill, right?

Unfortunate name, Renascence. People were always correcting my pronunciation. “Uh, don’t you mean Renaissance?” And nobody got reborn there, believe me — nobody I ever heard of. The aim stated on the school’s letterhead was “Guiding the Gifted Young Tester of Limits,” but what they should have said was “Stashing Away Your Rich Juvenile Delinquent.” The only thing “special” about the place was, they kept us twelve months a year. No awkward summer vacations to inconvenience our families. Also, we had to wear suits to class. (Which explains why I favor pajama tops now.) And every time we cursed, we had to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet. Boy, that’ll clean up your language in a hurry! Not to mention instilling a permanent dislike of Shakespeare.

I remember this one sonnet I learned, the first week I was at Renascence. It started out, When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes … I thought it was me he was talking about. I swear it just about tore me apart the moment I saw those words on the page.

Well. As I said, it was my first week. And anyhow, the guy went on to say, Haply I think on thee, which was certainly not about me. I didn’t have any “thee” in my life; no way. The girls I hung out with in those days were more body mates than soul mates, and you couldn’t claim that anyone in my family was my “thee.”

I wondered how my family would react if I ever paid that eighty-seven hundred back. How my mother would react, to be specific. She’d probably fall over in a faint.

Sometimes I thought if I could just show her, just once and for all show her, I would be free of her.

I reached my apartment, finally. Switched on the lights, unzipped my jacket, punched the button on my answering machine. Mrs. Dibble needed an errand run for Miss Simmons, provided I got home before six. Too late now; so I took off my jacket and started emptying my jeans pockets. Mimi Hardesty, upstairs, left a message about an eentsy bit of laundry she wanted to do in the morning even though it wasn’t a Saturday. Then Mrs. Dibble again. Never mind about Miss Simmons — she’d sent Celeste, instead — but tomorrow I should meet with a brand-new client. A Mrs. Glynn. “It was her niece who made the request,” she said. “She told me you two had talked on the train. Good work, Barnaby! You must be quite a salesman. The niece says her aunt will need hours and hours; that was her exact phrase. She inquired about our weekly rates. She wants you to come to her aunt’s house tomorrow evening.”

Mom’s envelope was made of paper so thick that it unfolded by itself as I set it on the counter. I lifted the flap and peered inside. Whoa! Not a gift certificate, but cash — a hundred dollars. Five twenties new enough to stick together slightly when I fanned them out. Well, good; I didn’t need clothes, anyhow. I hadn’t yet redeemed my certificate from Christmas.

I restacked the bills and fitted them into Opal’s money clip. Then I stood weighing the clip in my hand, looking down at it and thinking.

Let’s say I made a hundred dollars extra every week. Say I lined up this aunt of Sophia’s with her hours and hours of chores; say I stopped dodging the clients I didn’t care for, the assignments I didn’t find convenient, and added a clear hundred dollars to my weekly income. Eighty-seven weeks, that meant. Eighty-six with the birthday money; eighty-five and eighty-four if we could count next birthday and next Christmas too.

I would hand it to Mom in cold cash: eighty-seven crisp new hundred-dollar bills. I’d slide them out of the money clip and slap them smartly on her palm.

Everybody else’s angel had delivered a single message and let it go at that. Wouldn’t you know, though, my angel seemed to be more of the nagging kind.