A Patchwork Planet

7

“WHEN I WAS a young slip of a thing,” Sophia’s aunt said, “I used to have so much trouble adjusting to a new year. We’d change from, oh, 1929 to 1930, but I’d go on writing ‘1929’ at the tops of my letters for months, for literally months. Now, though, it’s no problem whatsoever. I suppose that’s because time has speeded up so, I’ve grown accustomed to making the switch: 1980, 1990 … You could tell me to date this check ‘2000’ and I wouldn’t bat an eye!”

She was sweeping the check through the air to dry it, although she’d filled it out with a ballpoint pen. I stood waiting beside her desk till she felt ready to hand it over. Apparently she was one of those clients who preferred not to pay their monthly bills by mail. (No sense wasting a stamp, they’d say, when a Rent-a-Back employee would be coming by the house.)

“You’ll find out for yourself one day,” she said. “Personal time works the opposite way from historical time. Historical time starts with a swoop — dinosaurs, cavemen, lickety-split! — and then slows and takes on more detail as it gets more recent: all those niggling little four-year presidential terms. But with personal time, you begin at a crawl — every leaf and bud, every cross-eyed look your mother ever gave you — and you gather speed as you go. To me, it’s a blurry streak by now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. It began to seem I would never get hold of this check. “I thought you mistrusted banks, though,” I said. “How come you’re not paying in cash?”

Mrs. Glynn lowered the check and peered at me over her eye pouches. All I’d done was delay things even further. “You haven’t heard a word I said,” she told me.

“Yes, I have! I promise! Change of dates, time speeding up, personal versus historical …”

“You’re still so young, you can’t imagine any of it will ever apply.”

“Believe me, I’m not that young,” I said.

She raised the check again, but only to blow on the signature. Then she said, “I do mistrust banks. I wouldn’t dream of using one if it were up to me. However, my monthly allowance comes from my lawyer, and he insists on sending it to an account. Any money left over, it’s my decision where I keep it.”

Now she was holding the check at arm’s length and studying her signature. She seemed to be having trouble placing the name. I shifted from my right foot to my left.

“The lawyer and my niece are in collusion, I believe,” she told me. “Sophia’s always nagging me: ‘What if the house should burn down? Or what if you were robbed? Half of Baltimore knows where you stash your money.’ ‘Fine, then, I’ll change the location,’ I say, and she says, ‘You are living in the past, Aunt Grace.’ ‘Indeed I am,’ I tell her. I tell her, and I tell that lawyer too, who’s young enough to be my grandson. ‘You-all don’t remember the Great Depression,’ I say, ‘when banks were falling like building blocks and grown, respectable men were sobbing in the streets.’ ”

If the lawyer was young enough to be her grandson, he could be Sophia’s age. Were they really in collusion? Did they meet to discuss her problem aunt over drinks, over dinner, in some candlelit restaurant where I myself couldn’t afford to buy her so much as a salad?

Nowadays it seemed to me that anyone in his right mind would have to want Sophia for his own.

“But here,” Mrs. Glynn said, all at once passing me the check. “Tatters, say bye-bye to Barnaby.”

I folded the check and slipped it into my rear jeans pocket. “Thanks, Mrs. Glynn. See you Monday,” I told her, and I was out the door before she could get started on a new topic.

Down Keswick, down University Parkway, to St. Paul, and then over to Calvert. It was only the middle of March, but there’d been a burst of unseasonably warm weather — highs near eighty, the last few days — and people were jogging or walking their dogs or just standing talking on street corners, looking aimless and carefree. I felt I was back in high school. In high school, when I went out with girls, it always seemed to be spring; the girls were always wearing spring dresses, and I was in short sleeves.

Sophia lived in a solid old brick row house with wide front steps and a porch. It was just a rental, but she had fixed up the little yard as if she owned it; you could tell even now, when things weren’t blooming yet. And last weekend she’d bought two window boxes and set them on the concrete railing, ready to be filled with petunias as soon as all danger of frost was past.

It was her roommate who answered the door. Wouldn’t you know Sophia would have a roommate? Roommates are so wholesome. I picture them in quilted white bathrobes, their faces scrubbed and their teeth freshly brushed, although whenever I’d seen Betty she was wearing one of those pink trouser outfits that’re trying not to look like a uniform. She worked in a hospital; she was some kind of pediatric health care person. A bony, spectacled woman with painfully short black hair and paper-white skin. “Sophia will be down in a minute,” she told me, and then she went off somewhere and left me to my own devices. She disapproved of me, I sensed. Well, never mind.

I liked Sophia’s living room — the staidness of it, the good, worn furniture handed down from relatives. When I sat in her grandfather’s big recliner, it gave out a weary wheeze. Through the arched doorway I could see the dining room (claw-footed table, antique breakfront), and I knew that the kitchen, too, was comfortably old-fashioned. The upstairs I had to guess at, but I was willing to bet that she slept in a four-poster bed.

Now I heard her footsteps descending the stairs. When she walked in, I jumped up and said, “Oh! Hi!” as if she’d taken me by surprise. I don’t know why I behave like such an idiot, sometimes.

“Hi,” she said.

We kissed, and she stepped back.

She was wearing a navy skirt and a flowered blouse. She had this way of looking into my eyes and then quickly glancing down at her own bosom and smiling.

“Come into the kitchen,” she told me. “Supper’s almost ready.”

The kitchen table was set for two, and the Crock-Pot on the counter gave off the smell of tomato sauce. In the mornings before she went to work, Sophia would put supper in the Crock-Pot. Then when she got home all she had to do was fix a vegetable. I don’t know when the roommate ate. She never joined us, although if she happened to walk through the kitchen Sophia always offered to lay a place for her.

“How was your day?” Sophia asked, emptying a box of frozen peas into a saucepan.

“Oh, pretty good.” I sat in a chrome-and-vinyl chair that must have dated from the forties. “Your Aunt Grace had me take down her storm windows,” I said. “I told her it was too early, but she insisted. ‘Mark my words,’ I told her, ‘winter will be back before next week is out,’ but you know how she is. Monday, I’m putting her screens in.”

“I can’t imagine why she bothers,” Sophia said. “She never opens her windows anyway.”

“No; most of that age group doesn’t. Scared of burglars.”

“With her, it’s she’s eternally cold. You’ll see: she’ll be wearing a sweater in July.”

I liked the thought that I’d be seeing Mrs. Glynn in July. That meant I’d be seeing Sophia too. I studied the back of her neck as she worked, and her smooth, netted bun. I hadn’t seen a hair net on a bun in years, and now I wondered why; this one was so seductive. All I could think of was slipping it off, letting her hair tumble out of it.

She filled our two plates and then sat down across from me, smoothing her skirt beneath her. Her thighs, I thought, would be very pale and soft and fleshy. I stared at her like someone in a trance, till she asked me, “How’s the stew?”

“Oh! Delicious,” I said, although I hadn’t yet tasted it.

She raised her wineglass. “To us,” she said.

“To us,” I repeated.

The way she served wine tickled me: one glass for each of us with each dinner, already poured beforehand. Me, I was used to drinking either not at all or far too much. This moderation business was a whole new approach.

Upstairs, the roommate’s shoes were creaking back and forth. I heard a door slam, then a drawer bang shut. “Is she mad about something?” I asked Sophia.

Sophia shrugged, which was answer enough.

“She thinks I’m a loser, doesn’t she.”

“Heavens, no! Why do you say that?”

I sliced into a chunk of potato and said, “She’s pointed out to you that I’m basically no more than a manual laborer. That I have the fashion sense of a Hell’s Angel, and my prospects for advancement are flat zero. Right?”

Sophia flushed and looked down at her bosom again.

“Not to mention I hold the title of World’s Oldest Living Undergraduate,” I said. Then I said, “Hey. You didn’t tell her about the Renascence School and all that, did you?”

“Certainly not,” Sophia said.

Even Sophia didn’t know everything; just the more dashing highlights. We were in that stage where we were formally presenting each other with our pasts: Sophia’s prim, Mary-Janed childhood, my nefarious adolescence. I liked the fondly nostalgic way she said, “When I was a little girl…,” and she liked the fact that I’d have struck her as slightly scary if she had met me in my teens. “You were one of those boys who hung around the corner in packs,” she’d surmised. “Who piled twelve deep in a car and hooted out the windows. Who smelled of cigarettes when they brushed by me on the sidewalk.”

“Oh, I never cared much for cigarettes,” I’d told her. “I preferred to smoke the harder stuff.”

Just to see her expression of thrilled horror.

Now she said, “Betty’s merely a roommate. I got her name off a bulletin board. What do I care what she thinks?”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s not true that I have no prospects — I mean, if I wanted prospects. I could always get a job at Dad’s foundation. Does Betty know about the Foundation?”

“I believe I did happen to mention it,” Sophia said.

“Also, I’ve held the same one job for almost eleven years,” I said. “That’s more than you can say for a lot of other guys.”

Sophia reached across the table and laid a hand over mine. “Barnaby,” she said. “It’s fine. Whatever you do. Really.”

I squeezed her fingers.

Granted, Sophia wasn’t the type I’d fallen for in the past. She was luxuriously padded, and she carried herself from the hips in a settled and matronly manner. She probably weighed more than I did, in fact, but I found this sexy. It made me conscious of my own wiriness, and the springy, electric energy in the muscles of my legs. Sitting on that vinyl chair, I had all I could do not to leap up and fling myself across the table. But I stayed where I was and just smiled at her, and then I speared a cube of beef.

After supper, we moved to the living room. We settled on her sofa, surrounded by dried flower arrangements and frilled glass candy dishes, and started kissing. Once we drew apart when we heard footsteps crossing the upstairs hall, but it was a false alarm and we resumed where we’d left off. I stroked her creamy skin and I cupped her lush, heavy breasts in the circle-stitched cotton bra that I could feel through the silk of her blouse. When Betty’s footsteps crossed the hall again, we had to separate in a hurry and straighten our clothes.

I told Sophia she should come to my place. She turned pink; she knew what I was asking. She said, “Well, maybe soon. Give me a little more time.” I didn’t push it. I almost preferred it this way for now. I left her house whistling. I imagined she’d be slipping into a quilted bathrobe exactly like her roommate’s, and scrubbing her face, and brushing her teeth, and settling down for the night in her four-poster bed.

It always seemed to happen that we lost a lot of our older folks at the tail end of winter. Just when the worst of the weather was behind us, when you’d think a person would be gathering strength and looking forward to spring, why, we’d get a sudden call from a relative, or we’d find a week’s worth of newspapers littering a client’s lawn. During the first half of March, Mrs. Gordoni went into the hospital and didn’t come out again; Mr. Quentin succumbed to whatever illness he’d been battling for the past six years (he’d never named it, and we weren’t supposed to ask); and Mr. Cartwright died of a heart attack. Now I took Mrs. Cartwright shopping all on her own, and she was very different — wavery and bewildered. Funny: I had thought he was the dependent one in that couple. But you never know. I took her to the grocery store and she walked the aisles with this testing sort of posture, placing the balls of her feet just so, as if she were wading a creek. “Isn’t it ridiculous,” she told me, “how even in the face of death it still matters that the price of oranges has gone up, and an impolite produce boy can still hurt your feelings.” I didn’t know what to say to that. I steered her toward the dairy case.

I thought about one time when I’d driven the Cartwrights to a pharmacy and Mr. Cartwright had paused in the doorway to announce, “This used to be a pharmacy!” in his loud, impervious, hard-of-hearing voice, and the other shoppers had all raised their heads and looked around them for a second, plainly wondering what it was now, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he was objecting to the heaps of extraneous merchandise, the beach chairs and electric blenders pharmacies seemed to stock these days. Maybe he was just confused. At any rate, remembering the slight jolt that had rippled through the store made me smile, and Mrs. Cartwright glanced up at me just then and happened to notice. I worried she’d be offended, but instead she smiled too. “You’re a good boy, Barnaby,” she said.

None of my customers had the least inkling of my true nature.

Then Mrs. Beeton died — that nice black lady whose children always fussed so. First I knew of it, I telephoned to see if I should pick up any groceries on my way to her house, and her daughter was the one who answered. Said, “Hello, Barnaby!” and chatted awhile, cheery as you please. Not a clue about her mother. Finally I said, “Could I talk to Mrs. Beeton a minute?” A silence. Then she said, “Let me give you to my husband, okay?” And her husband got on the line — a man I’d never met. “My mother-in-law has passed as of yesterday morning,” he told me. I guess her daughter just couldn’t say the words.

I’d always admired Mrs. Beeton. She had such a sweet, chuckly face, and this attractive darker outline to her upper lip. Dirt was her personal enemy. Let her catch sight of a cobweb and she would not rest until she’d killed it dead.

And then Maud May broke her hip and had to go to a nursing home. Maud May! My Tallulah client, with her movie-star cigarette holder and her pitchers of martinis and her drawling, leathery voice. I visited her to get instructions — which plants needed watering and so forth — because she swore this was not a permanent state of affairs. “No Vegetable Villa for me,” she said; that was what she called nursing homes. “I’m getting out of here if I have to crawl on my hands and knees.” Then she dropped to a whisper and asked me to bring her a carton of Marlboros. “Sure thing, Ms. May,” I told her. (We’re the muscles, not the brains.) But I sounded cockier than I felt. She’d given me a start, lying there so helpless. Why, Maud May was my foreign correspondent, you might call it, from the country of old age. She had this way of reporting on it in a distant, amused tone. “I used to think old age would make me more patient,” she’d told me once, “but instead I find, oh, Gawd, it’s turned me into a grouch.” And another time: “Everybody claims to venerate older women, but when I ask what for, they all mention things like herbal medicine, and I can’t tell an herb from a mule’s ass.”

Now she said, “Know what this feels like, Barnaby? Feels like I’m living someone else’s life. This is not the real me, I want to say.”

“Well, of course it’s not,” I told her.

But I must have spoken too quickly, or too easily or something, because she jerked her head on her pillow and said, “Don’t be so goddamn patronizing!”

“Ms. May,” I said, “I promise you’ll be out of here before you know it. What this other client was telling me just a few days ago: the older you get, the faster the time goes. By now it’s all a blur, she says.”

“Wrong,” Maud May said firmly.

“Wrong?”

“Time has stopped dead still,” she said.

Then she gave a snort and said, “No pun intended.”

I took Sophia down to Canton to visit my grandparents one evening, because they’d been complaining they never saw me anymore. We sat in their tiny living room (twelve feet wide, the width of the house) and watched TV while Gram shot sideways glances at Sophia. I hadn’t warned them I’d be bringing her. I didn’t want to answer any questions. So Gram was having to work things out for herself, calculating Sophia’s age, gauging how close together we sat. Sweetheart? Friend? Mere acquaintance? Sophia faced the TV, pretending not to notice.

We were watching a game show on what had to have been the world’s largest residential television set. The only place it could fit was against the long side wall of the living room. This meant we had to line the couch on the other side wall, with our noses practically touching the screen. Pop-Pop sat at one end, so he had someplace to put his beer can. I sat next to him, Sophia next to me, and Gram on the other end. The rest of the room was filled with plaster statues of the Virgin Mary, and ceramic planters shaped like wheelbarrows and donkeys, and praying hands molded from some kind of resin, and dolls dressed like Scarlett O’Hara. Oh, and I should mention that Pop-Pop wore a V-necked undershirt that showed his scrawny white-haired chest; and Gram was in a tight tank top and baggy army-green shorts. (The thermostat was set at about eighty-five degrees, although outdoors it was winter again.) I was interested in Sophia’s reaction to all this, but I couldn’t tell from her profile, which was edged with blue light from the game show.

Gram said, “Sophia. Would that be an Italian name?”

“It came from a great-aunt,” Sophia told her, turning briefly in her direction.

“Was your great-aunt Italian?”

“No, Scottish.”

“Oh.”

I knew what Gram was aiming at here. She wanted to find out whether Sophia was Catholic. She poked her headful of pink curlers forward for a moment and looked at me.

“Presbyterian,” I told her.

“Oh.”

She sat back again. She sighed. Oh, well, you could see her thinking, her own daughter had married Episcopal and the sky hadn’t fallen in. “It’s a pretty name, anyhow,” she told Sophia.

“Thank you.”

“I like names that end with an a, don’t you? Or other vowels. Well, what other vowels? Most often it seems to be a. But wait: Margo’s name ends with an 0, for mercy’s sake! Barnaby’s mother. Or it used to be 0. Then she met Barnaby’s father and added a t.”

Sophia looked at me. I told her, “Mom thought Margot with at was higher-class.”

“First time I saw it written that way was on the wedding invitations,” Gram said. “She brought them home from the printer’s and I said, ‘Who’s this?’ She said, ‘That’s me.’ Well, I did try to accommodate. Her daddy said it was stuff and nonsense, but I told Jeffrey the next time he came to call, ‘Mar-gott will be down in a minute.’ He laughed because he thought I was joking, but I was serious. I honestly assumed people pronounced the t”

“Watch this next contestant,” Pop-Pop told me. “She knows every fact there is to know about Elvis.”

“She always was a go-getter,” Gram said. “Very energetic. Very brainy. She won so many prizes when she was in school! I can’t imagine where that came from.”

“Margot, we’re talking about,” I explained to Sophia. She was looking puzzled.

“Folks would ask, ‘Is she a changeling?’ Because Frank didn’t even graduate high school, and the only reason I did was to fill in the time till we married. But there must be a smarty gene somewhere in our family. Look at Barnaby! He’s practically an Einstein. Learned to read so young, he used to check in the child development books to see how he ought to be acting.”

“I had a very promising past,” I told Sophia.

She smiled and turned her eyes back to Gram. On the TV, somebody flubbed a question. The audience gave a groan, and Pop-Pop said, “Why, I could’ve answered that one!”

Gram heaved herself from the couch to fetch us a snack, and Sophia rose and followed, asking, “Can I help?” She was doing everything right. Gram ought to love her.

Now it was just me and Pop-Pop, two skinny, puny males taking up the much smaller half of the sofa. We got started on one of those man-to-man talks that are all numerals — which cable channels he was subscribing to these days, how many quarts of oil my car was burning — while in the kitchen, above the clatter of dishes, I heard Gram doing her best to figure out who Sophia was, exactly. If I cocked an ear in their direction, I could keep tabs on them while listening to Pop-Pop reel off last week’s bowling scores. No, she came from Philadelphia. And yes, she had a job; she worked at Chesapeake Bank. And she rented a place on Calvert Street; shared it with a roommate. (Gram would find the fact of the roommate reassuring — less chance we were living in sin.) And it probably did seem odd that a girl like her hadn’t been snapped up yet by some man, but she wanted to be sure she didn’t make any mistakes, because marriage was for life, she’d always felt; and in fact, she had once been engaged and another time almost engaged, but it hadn’t panned out, which now she realized must have been all for the best.

Then she said, “I met Barnaby on the train to Philly a few months back”—volunteering it, without any prodding from Gram. Evidently it told Gram what she wanted to know, because when they emerged with the food, she was treating us like a couple. It was “you two” this and “you two” that, and, “Next time, the two of you will have to come for a meal.”

The snack she’d fixed was a recipe she’d read about in a magazine — Bill Clinton’s favorite, corn chips with a dip made of bottled salsa and Velveeta cheese melted in the microwave. She served it on a tray that showed a head-and-shoulders portrait of John F. Kennedy. “I see we’re going with a presidential theme tonight,” I said, and Gram jabbed an elbow into Sophia’s ribs and asked, “Isn’t he a cutup?”—rolling her eyes and giggling as if they shared a secret.

In the car as we were driving home, Sophia said she had liked my grandparents very much. “They liked you too,” I said. I was partly proud and partly taken aback. I hadn’t expected Sophia to get so into it, somehow. After a moment, I said, “You never told me you had been engaged.”

She shrugged and said, “It didn’t last long.”

“Who was the guy?” I asked her.

“Oh, someone at the bank.”

“And another time almost engaged? What happened?”

“It just didn’t work out,” she told me. “I’m probably too set in my ways. Too, you know. Definite. Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.”

She was wearing the dressy black coat that made her hair look blonder, and the carriage of her head struck me as queenly. I said, “Well, I think definite women are great.” She looked over at me and smiled. “If there’s anything I’m crazy about, it’s definiteness,” I said.

She laughed. I got a little carried away; I said, “In fact, I’ve always dreamed of a having a military wife.”

“Oh?” she said. “You mean a soldier?”

“No, someone whose husband’s a soldier,” I said. “I’ve seen them in the movies. They know how to do everything that needs doing. They could probably build their own houses, if they had to, and deliver their own babies. If that’s not definite!”

“So … would this mean that you’re planning to enlist?” she asked.

“Enlist! God forbid,” I told her.

“Then how …?”

“I only meant …,” I said. “Shoot, I’m just talking out loud.” Which was an expression Mrs. Beeton used to use: Don’t mind me; I’m just talking out loud.

Dummy.

News of all the deaths spread magically among our other clients. I’ve never figured out how that happens. It’s not as if our people know each other, for the most part. But I could sense the agitation in just about every house I went to. Mrs. Rodney got the notion to update her will; so did Miss Simmons. Mr. Shank called on us even more often than he normally did, on even more trumped-up excuses, and one time insisted that I drive him to the emergency room, when as far as I could see there was not one thing the matter with him. I said, “What is it? Are you short of breath? Chest pains? Weak? Dizzy?” All he would say was, he felt “unusual.” For the sake of his unusualness I spent three and a half hours in the Sinai Hospital waiting room, watching homemaking shows on TV. “What I like to do,” this lady on one program said, “I like to place a lead crystal bowl on the credenza in my entrance hall. I fill it with tinted water and I float scented votive candles on the surface, to lend a sense of graciousness when I’m entertaining.” A roomful of sick people — bleak-faced, bleary-eyed, most in threadbare clothes — stared up at her in astonishment. Mr. Shank turned out to be suffering from stress and was sent home with a prescription for some pills.

Then Mrs. Alford started sorting her belongings. That’s always a worrisome sign. For a solid week she had three of us come in daily — me, Ray Oakley, and Martine. (“Two men for the real lifting,” was how she put it, “and a girl so as to encourage the hiring of women.”) She wanted her basement sorted, then her garage, then her attic. This was in mid-April — a busy time for us anyhow, plus it was near Easter and lots of grown children were expected home and our clients were overexcited and crabby and demanding. But Mrs. Alford couldn’t wait, couldn’t put it off. Each morning she met us on her front porch, or even halfway down the walk. “There you are! What kept you?” Martine didn’t have the truck that week; so I had to pick her up, which once or twice made us late, and Ray Oakley was late by nature. But we’re only talking minutes here. Still, Mrs. Alford would be fretting and pacing. Half the time she called Martine “Celeste,” which was the name of our other female employee, and I was “Terry.”

“It’s Barnaby, Mrs. Alford,” I said as gently as possible.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I thought your name was Terry and you played in that musical group.”

Martine snickered — picturing me, I guess, at the harpsichord or something. “No, ma’am,” I told Mrs. Alford. “Must be somebody else.”

In my early days at Rent-a-Back, I’d have feared she was losing her marbles. But I knew, by now, that it was just anxiety. I’ve had an anxious client mistake me for her firstborn son; then next day, she’d be bright as a tack. I didn’t let it faze me.

Sorting the basement was easy, because that was mostly stuff to be thrown out. Paint tins that no longer sloshed; mildewed rolls of leftover wallpaper; galvanized buckets so old they’d been patched with metal disks by some long-dead tin-kef. We crammed them all into garbage cans and hoped the city would collect them. It took us less than a day. I had time to drop Martine off and check my messages before I headed to Mrs. Glynn’s.

The garage was where it got harder. Mrs. Alford’s husband had left a fully stocked workbench there — the lovingly tended kind, with each tool hung on the backboard within its own painted silhouette. Mrs. Alford must have dreaded to face it, because when we showed up the next morning, she managed to get our names one hundred percent wrong. “Hello, Celeste. Hello, Roy. Hello, Terry.” None of us corrected her. On her way up the back steps to the garage, she asked me, “How’s the music?” and I said, “Oh, fine,” because it seemed easier.

But then she wouldn’t let go of it. She said, “Now, what is it you play, again?”

“The … tuba,” I decided.

“Tuba!” She paused at the top of the steps and looked at me. One hand pitty-patting the speckled flesh at the base of her throat. “Funny,” she said. “I had thought it was something stringed.”

“No, it’s the tuba, all right,” I said, wishing I’d never begun this.

“Fancy that! A tuba in a chamber group! I hadn’t heard of such a thing.”

“Oh,” I said. “Ah. Chamber. You hadn’t?”

“But what do I know?” she asked me. “I’m such a babe in the woods when it comes to music.”

“Well, that’s all right, Mrs. Alford.”

We walked through her backyard, where daffodils were blooming in clumps. “I haven’t been to the garage in years,” Mrs. Alford said. “I never go! I don’t like to go.” She stopped at the door, inserted a key in the lock, and turned the knob. Nothing happened. “Oh, well. I guess we can’t get in, after all,” she said.

“Allow me,” Ray Oakley told her. He set his shoulder to the door — he was a big guy, with a giant beer belly — and gave it a shove and fell into the garage.

“Why, thank you, Roy,” Mrs. Alford said, sounding not the least bit grateful.

Mr. Alford’s workbench was one of those objects that seem to go on living after their owner dies. And clearly he had been a hoarder. The rows of baby-food jars on the shelves were filled with various sizes of screws in generally poor condition — some bent, some dulled, some rusted. You just knew he’d saved them for decades, even though his wife had probably begged him to get rid of them. I said, “Tell you what, Mrs. A. You go on back to the house and we’ll see to this without you.”

“But how will you know what to do with it all?” Mrs. Alford asked. A reasonable question. She wandered the length of the workbench, reaching up to touch a coping saw here, a claw hammer there. “My nephew, Ernie: he’s very good with his hands,” she told us. “I should probably give these to him.”

“And the screws and things?”

“Well …,” she said.

“Chuck them?”

She went over to the baby-food jars. She picked one up and looked at it.

“We’ll settle that,” I told her. “You go on back to the house.”

This time she didn’t argue.

So the garage took us slightly longer, what with locating empty cartons and packing them with tools and writing Ernie across the top, and stuffing all the discards into trash bags. “How do people end up with so many things?” I asked Martine. “Look here: a bamboo rake with three prongs left to it, total.”

“A rotary telephone,” Martine said, “labeled Does Not Work” She held it up.

“I hope she’s not fixing to die on us,” I said.

“Why would you think that?”

“I’ve seen it before. It’s something like when pregnant cats start hunting drawer space: old people start sorting their possessions.”

“Oh, don’t say that! Mrs. Alford’s one of my favorites.”

I had never given Mrs. Alford much thought one way or another. She didn’t have the zing that, say, Maud May had. But I wouldn’t want to see her die.

“Sounds to me,” Ray Oakley said, “like you two are in the wrong business.”

“Listen to him: Mr. Tough Guy,” I told Martine.

Then on Wednesday, Ray called in sick, and we had to start the attic on our own. What Mrs. Alford wanted was, we would carry everything down to the glassed-in porch off her bedroom, where she sat in a skirted armchair, waiting to tell us what pile to put it in: Ernie’s, or her daughter’s, or Goodwill. “How about the Twinform?” I asked her right off.

“Pardon?”

“That mannequin-type thing,” I said, because I’d already made up my mind to offer money for it if she put it in the Goodwill pile.

But she said, “Oh, I’ll keep that. It reminds me of my mother.”

She kept a lot. A humidor that used to be her father’s, a pipe rack of her husband’s, a cradle that dozens of Alfords had slept in when they were small. Each object we hauled down, she’d make us stand there holding while she told us the story that went with it. And it seemed that the more she remembered of the past, the more she forgot of the present. “Should you be lifting that, Celeste?” she asked Martine, and she mentioned twice again that Ernie was good with his hands. But when I wondered aloud how a big rolltop desk had managed to go up the attic steps in one piece, she was able to recall that it hadn’t gone up in one piece. Her husband had dismantled it first. “The top half’s attached to the bottom half with four brass screws under the corners,” she said, and she went on to recollect that her husband and her brother-in-law had carried the two parts up in the summer of ‘59. “You’ll find a screwdriver on my husband’s workbench,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, no! His tools are gone now!” and her eyes glazed over with tears.

I said, “Never mind, Mrs. A. I can dig that screwdriver out in half a second. I know just which box I put it in.”

She rearranged her face into an appreciative, bright expression. “Why, thank you, Terry,” she said. “Aren’t you clever!” And she kept her eyes very wide so that the tears wouldn’t spill over.

When we were back in the attic, Martine said, “Ray had better not be sick tomorrow, I tell you.” We were struggling at the time with the top half of the desk — Martine’s hair sticking out in spikes around her face — but I knew it wasn’t the lifting that concerned her. We needed someone more hardhearted here, was what.

Thursday, Ray returned, greenish under the eyes and still not good for much, and we stationed him downstairs with Mrs. Alford. While he shoved items from pile to pile and listened to her stories, we did the hauling. Even then, we got waylaid a time or two. We brought down a piano bench, and Mrs. Alford wanted it placed in front of her so that she could sort the sheet music stored inside. When she lifted the lid, the smell of mice floated out. “ Tm Always Chasing Rainbows,’ ” she said. She spoke so wistfully, so regretfully, that it took me a second to realize she was only quoting a song title. “ ‘Don’t Bring Lulu.’ ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.’ ” Once, the house key Martine wore around her wrist clinked against a metal foot-locker we were carrying, and the sound must have touched off a memory in Mrs. Alford’s head. Out of the blue, she said, “I used to have a wind chime made of copper circles, but then my neighbor came and told me, ‘Please take down your wind chime; please. A wind chime was tinkling the whole entire time I tended my daughter’s last illness, and now I can’t bear to hear it.’”

We set the footlocker on the floor. “Well, of course I took it down,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ray said. “Ernie’s pile, or your daughter’s?”

Martine and I scooted back upstairs.

Friday, we found Mrs. Alford’s brother eating breakfast with her — a tufty-haired, plump old man in a business suit. He’d arrived the night before for the Easter weekend. And Mrs. Alford was her merry self again, graciously introducing us all, ticking off our names perfectly. The three of us went up to the attic and finished clearing it out in no time, after which Mrs. Alford came to the glassed-in porch and said, “This goes to Ernie, this to Valerie, this to Goodwill,” zip-zip-zip. She didn’t even bother sitting in her armchair. We were done by midafternoon.

I gave Martine a lift home, because she still didn’t have the truck. Neither one of us talked much. I was calculating the time, wondering if I could fit some other assignment in before I went to Mrs. Glynn’s. Martine was hanging her head out the window and humming to herself. Then all at once she pulled in her head and said, “Know what happened the other day? I was playing catch with my nephews in their backyard. And they were having this discussion — about my brother, I thought it was. ‘He says this, he says that.’ So I ask, ‘What time’s he due home tonight?’ and they get quiet and sort of embarrassed and they look at each other and I’m thinking, What? What’d I say? And one of them tells me, ‘Uh …’ And the other says, ‘Uh, actually, we were talking about our baseball coach.’ I said, ‘Oh. Sorry. I thought you meant your dad.’ But it gave me this sudden picture of what it must feel like to be old. I mean, so old that people imagine you’ve gone dotty. I wanted to say, ‘Wait! I just heard you wrong, is all. It was a natural, normal mistake to make, okay?’”

Then she hung her head out the window again, and we went back to our separate lines of thought.

Sophia and I drove up to Philadelphia on the last Saturday in April. This was my second trip to Philly since we’d started dating, but she hadn’t come with me before because her mother had spent the past six weeks at a cousin’s condominium in Miami. So here we were, taking our first long car ride together on a sunny blue-and-yellow morning with a little bit of a breeze, and I felt like a million dollars. Sophia did too; I could tell. She said, “I should always go by car! You get to see so much more countryside than you do when you take the train.”

I hadn’t told Sophia about watching her on the train that day. I guess I thought it would make me look sort of, I don’t know, sly, the way I’d engineered our meeting afterward. And besides, I was curious to see if she would bring it up on her own. In her place, I’d have bragged about it straight off. (“Want to hear how a total stranger singled me out and approached me and entrusted me with a mission?”) But she never did. Either she considered it not worth mentioning or she’d forgotten it altogether. Probably things like that happened to her all the time. She must have just taken them for granted.

A lot of our trip was spent discussing her mother, who didn’t sound very likable. “Every weekend of my life,” Sophia said, “she expects me to stay with her, unless of course she has plans, in which case she lets me know at the very last minute: ‘Oh, by the way, don’t bother coming this week,’ when I’ve practically bought my ticket already….”

She was listing her mother’s physical ailments when we entered the city limits. Don’t I know that kind of old lady! I drove up Broad Street and turned onto Walnut, while Sophia cataloged aches and pains and palpitations, doctor appointments, midnight phone calls … She interrupted herself to point out her mother’s apartment building, which had a green-striped awning. I double-parked in front of it. “Oh!” she said. “There’s Mother now!”

Sure enough, a big-boned, white-haired woman in a sweater set and matching skirt stood twisting her hands together on the curb. “Come and say hello,” Sophia told me.

I have never been the meet-the-parents type. I said, “Oh, I’d better not. I’m blocking traffic.”

But Sophia was calling, “Yoo-hoo! Mother!” as she slid out of the passenger seat, leaving her door wide open behind her.

Mrs. Maynard turned, blank-faced. Then she said, “Sophia? What on earth! You came by auto? You’re so late!”

While they were pressing their cheeks together, I made a lunge across the seat and tried to shut Sophia’s door without being seen. But no: “I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Sophia told her mother.

So I was forced to show myself. I left my engine running, though. I stepped out and rounded the front of the car and said, “How do you do. Sorry, but I’m double-parked; I really have to be going.”

“This is Barnaby Gaitlin,” Sophia told her mother. “My mother, Thelma Maynard.”

“I said to myself,” Mrs. Maynard told her, “ ‘Well, that’s it. Sophia’s met with some accident, I don’t know what accident, and the police will have no idea that I’m her next of kin. I’ll be sitting in my apartment Saturday, Sunday, Monday, without anyone to shop for me or fetch my prescriptions. I’ll run out of food, run out of pills; just get weaker and weaker, and they’ll find me who-can-say-how-long after, shriveled up like a prune and lying on my—’ ”

“Barnaby and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other,” Sophia said.

Mrs. Maynard stopped speaking and looked over at me. She had one of those rectangular faces, pulled downward at the corners by two strong cords in her neck.

“How do you do,” I said again. I would have shaken hands, except that she didn’t hold hers out.

See why I hate meeting parents? I don’t make a good first impression.

Mrs. Maynard turned back to Sophia and said, “You might at least have telephoned and warned me you’d be late. You know perfectly well what tension does to my blood pressure!”

We hadn’t been that late. Maybe half an hour or so. But Sophia didn’t bother arguing. She said, in this forthright manner, “Barnaby has become a very important part of my life.”

I froze. So did her mother. She gave me another look. “Oh?” she said. Then she said, “Mr….?”

“Gaitlin,” I said.

Someone honked in the street behind me, no doubt wanting me to move my car, but I didn’t turn around.

Sophia’s mother asked, “Just what is your line of business, Mr. Gaitlin?”

“I’m, ah, employed by a service organization,” I told her.

It came out sounding sort of smarmy, for some reason. Sophia must have thought so too, because she raised her eyebrows at me. Then she gave a sharp hitch to the shoulder strap of her bag. She said, “He works for a place called Rent-a-Back, Mother, lifting heavy objects.”

“Lifting?” Mrs. Maynard asked.

I said, “Well, there’s more to it than—”

“What kind of heavy objects?”

“Oh …,” I said. “In fact! I’ve been helping Mrs. Glynn some. Sophia’s aunt. I don’t know if you and she are in touch or—”

“I met him on the train a couple of months ago,” Sophia broke in. “I guess you could call it a pickup.”

“Pickup?” Mrs. Maynard asked faintly, at the same time that I said, “Pickup!” I stared at Sophia.

Sophia kept her gaze fixed levelly on her mother. She said, “He sat in the seat next to me, and before I knew it I had agreed to go out with him.”

“Really,” Mrs. Maynard said.

I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been that way at all; that things had happened a good deal more inch by inch than that. But I could see what Sophia was up to here. I recognized that triumphant tilt of her chin. And I couldn’t much blame her, either. With a mother like Mrs. Maynard, I’d have done the same.

Besides, the situation did work to my advantage. Because when Sophia said goodbye to me — walking me to my side of the car, ignoring the honking traffic — she kissed me on the lips and whispered, “When I get back to Baltimore, I want to come to your place.”

Then she gave me a deliberate, slow smile that turned my knees weak, and she went to rejoin her mother.