A Patchwork Planet

9

THEN SOPHIA’S aunt accused me of theft.

She said I stole the cash she had been keeping in her flour bin.

“That flour bin’s famous!” I said. “Everyone and his brother knows she keeps her money there. Why is she picking on me?”

It was Mrs. Dibble I was talking to, because did Mrs. Glynn have the decency to accuse me to my face? Oh, no. No, she went behind my back. She telephoned the office on a Sunday night in mid-August, using the after-hours number that rang in Mrs. Dibble’s home. Announced right off that I had taken her money; no ifs or ands or buts. Not a question in her mind as to whether I was the culprit.

Mrs. Dibble asked her how she could be so sure. “There could be any number of explanations,” Mrs. Dibble told her — or at least she claimed she’d told her, when she reported the conversation to me. I wondered what she had really said. Maybe she’d said, “Yes, that particular worker does have a history of criminal behavior.”

Well, no, I decided; probably not. (It would reflect very poorly on Rent-a-Back, for one thing.)

Funny: when Mrs. Dibble broke the news to me, I felt this sudden thud of guilt, as if I might in fact have done it. I had to tell myself, Wait. Hold on. Why, from the first day I was hired, I had bent over backward not to meddle in our clients’ private belongings. It was almost an obsession. I would go out of my way; I would ostentatiously shut a desk drawer as I passed it, and had once, while delivering a lady’s diary to her hospital room, stuffed it into a grocery bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek.

Mrs. Dibble broke the news by phone, but that wasn’t her choice. First she asked if I would come see her in person. I said, “Why? What’s up?”

She said, “Oh, just this and that.”

“Spill it,” I said.

She sighed. She said, “Now, Barnaby, I don’t want you overreacting to what I’m about to tell you,” and then she said Mrs. Glynn believed I’d stolen her money.

I said, “I’ll go have a talk with her this minute.”

“You can’t. You have to promise you won’t. It would only complicate matters. I just thought I should warn you first, before the police get in touch.”

“The police!”

Something like a cold liquid trickled down the back of my neck.

“Do you think they’re going to arrest me?” I asked.

“No, no,” Mrs. Dibble said, giving a false laugh. “Arresting a person is not as easy as that! They’ll probably want to question you, though, to get your side of the story.”

“I hate that woman,” I said.

“Now, Barnaby.”

“What have I ever done to her? Why would she just up and decide it was me?”

Then I thought I knew why. I thought of how Sophia had presented me to her mother. “I guess you could call it a pickup,” she’d said, with that triumphant look on her face.

She was as proud of my sins as I was of her virtues.

Mrs. Dibble was calculating aloud how I could make up for those lost hours at Mrs. Glynn’s. An hour a week at Mrs. Alphonse’s, she said; an hour with a man in a wheelchair over in Govans … She knew how hard I’d been working to save more money, she told me. But I was only half listening. I had to get hold of Sophia.

First of all, her line was busy. I tried once, tried twice, and then slammed down the receiver. Drove to her house in record time and pounded on the front door. It was after eleven o’clock by now, on a Sunday night. Normally she’d have been in bed. But all the lights were on, even the one in her room, and the footsteps I heard approaching were hard-soled and wide awake, and when she opened the door she was wearing what she’d worn that afternoon.

“Barnaby,” she said.

Not surprised in the least; so I knew it must have been her aunt she was talking to on the phone.

“I didn’t take that money,” I said.

She pressed her cheek against the edge of the door and studied my face. She said, “Even if you did, it wouldn’t change how I feel about you.”

“I didn’t take it, Sophia. Do you really think I’d do such a thing?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Then she stepped forward and kissed me, and turned to lead me into the living room.

But after we had settled on the couch, she said, “I know you’ve been under some pressure, trying to pay off your debt.”

“So you figured I just waltzed into a little old lady’s kitchen and helped myself to eighty-seven hundred dollars.”

“Twenty-nine sixty,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Two thousand, nine hundred and sixty was what she told me she had in her flour bin.”

At the rear of the house, I heard the refrigerator door latch shut with a muffled, furtive sound, and then something made of glass or china clinked but was instantly hushed. Betty, trying to be discreet. No doubt they’d been discussing me before I came. (“I said all along he seemed fishy, Sophia. Didn’t I have a bad feeling, way back at the beginning?”)

“Level with me,” I told Sophia. “Did you ever happen to mention to your aunt that I’d been in trouble with the law?”

She flushed and said nothing. She met my eyes very steadily.

“Did you?” I asked.

She said, “I might have, at some point. Maybe I did say, I don’t know, you’d had some problems in the past. But I didn’t mean any harm! I just wanted to show that you were an interesting person! I also said you came from a very good background. I said it was just your age or whatever, your age and circumstances, and you’d changed your ways completely and I had total faith in you.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

She studied me, maybe wondering how I meant that. In fact, I wasn’t sure myself. I groaned. I tipped my head back against the sofa cushions and closed my eyes.

“Barnaby,” she said. She was using a tactful, delicate tone that put me instantly on guard. I opened my eyes and rolled my head in her direction. “Is it some kind of loan shark?” she asked me.

“Huh?”

“The person you owe money to.”

I laughed.

“Because I know about these things, Barnaby. I see it in my business all the time: people in such deep debt they think they can’t ever get out from under. Exorbitant interest rates, fees on top of fees … I want to help you, Barnaby. I don’t have eighty-seven hundred, but I do have, let’s see … In my savings account—”

“It’s my parents,” I said.

“Your parents?”

“They’re the ones I owe it to.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Sophia said. “You owe eighty-seven hundred to your parents? And they’re making you pay it back?”

“Nothing odd about that,” I pointed out. “A debt’s a debt.”

“Yes, but your parents are so … affluent!”

This made me smile. It always tickles me, how people avoid the word “rich.”

“I just think that’s shocking,” Sophia said. She was sitting very straight on the edge of the couch, practically swaybacked. “When their own son has to work weekends, even, and live in somebody’s basement! That snoopy Mimi Hardesty always peeking out the window the minute I drive up, and calling down to ask if she can run a load of laundry as soon as you and I start getting intimate!”

I smiled again, but she didn’t notice.

“And your clothes are practically rags,” she said, “and your car is on its last legs…. What can your parents be thinking of?”

I could have calmed her down, I guess, if I’d told her about the Chinese statue and such. That would have made my parents look more reasonable. But it would have made me look shoddier. And besides, I enjoyed hearing somebody rail against my parents. I have to say, I took pleasure in it.

No, I was not at my best that night. I was spiteful and contrary, mean-spirited, malicious. When Sophia went out to the kitchen to get us a glass of wine, I pocketed a little porcelain bowl in the shape of a slipper that sat on her coffee table. And I didn’t even like that bowl! And certainly had no use for it.

Monday, I overslept. I was supposed to run errands for Mrs. Figg, because she couldn’t show her face again in half the stores in town. But I stood her up and wouldn’t answer the telephone when it rang. “Barnaby, are you there?” Mrs. Dibble asked my machine. “Mrs. Figg is fit to be tied!” I just turned over and went back to sleep.

What woke me, finally, was Mimi Hardesty calling from the top of the stairs. “Barnaby?” Her voice was oddly high and childish. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

You don’t often hear the word “gentleman” in everyday conversation. Especially not Mimi Hardesty’s conversation. I sat up. I said, “Who is it?”

“Um, an officer. Can he come down?”

“Why, sure,” I said.

Meanwhile scrambling out of bed, grabbing my jeans from the floor, and hopping into them one-legged. Heavy footsteps thudded toward me. I raked desperately at my blankets. It mattered a lot, for some reason, that I should get my bed folded back into a sofa. But I had left it opened out for so long that I’d forgotten how the thing worked, and anyway, it was too late. The cop arrived at the bottom of the stairs — an older man, gray-haired, surprisingly lean considering the weight of his tread. He already had his card out to show me. Does anyone really read those cards? Not me, I can tell you. I didn’t even hear his name, although he announced it in a loud, friendly voice. I looked past him to Mimi Hardesty, who was bending forward to peer at me from several steps above him. One small hand was clapped to her mouth, and her eyes were huge and perfectly round.

“Just like to ask you a couple of questions,” the cop said, pocketing his card. Without glancing in Mimi’s direction, he said, “Okay, ma’am.”

Mimi said, “Oh! Okay,” and turned to scamper upstairs. She was wearing shorts, and although the fronts of her legs were hazed with freckles, the backs were a pure, flawless white.

You notice the most ridiculous trivia during moments of stress.

But I was saying, “Have a seat,” as if I weren’t concerned in the least. “I can guess what you want to ask,” I said. (I figured I’d be better off bringing it up before he did.) I scooped an armload of dirty laundry from the chair. “I know that one of our clients believes I stole from her.”

The cop sat down and opened a spiral notebook. “So did you?” he asked mildly.

I said, “No.”

He gazed at me a moment, his expression noncommittal. I wondered if that might possibly be the end of it. “Did you?” and “No,” and he’d leave. But nothing’s ever that easy. He had to follow protocol: take note of my name, my age, my years of employment at Rent-a-Back. Eventually I gave up and sat down on the edge of my bed. My feet were bare, which somehow put me at a disadvantage, but I worried he might think I was going for a gun if I stood up to fetch my sneakers.

I did tell him that I’d known where Mrs. Glynn kept her money. “Everybody knew,” I said.

He asked, “Did you ever see the money?”

“No,” I said. Then I said, “Hey! Do you think she could be delusional?”

But the cop just gave me a look, at that, and closed his notebook in this weary, disgusted way that made me feel about two inches tall.

When the alarm went off at the Amberlys’ place, the night I was arrested, the police sent one of their helicopters putt-putting overhead. I was a little bit high. We were all a little bit high — me and Len and the Muller boys. I told the others, “Let me deal with this,” and I dialed the Northern District police on the Amberlys’ bedroom phone. “I wish to register a complaint,” I said. “There’s an extremely noisy helicopter disturbing the peace here.”

The man asked what address I was at, and then he went off for a while. When he came back, he said, “Yes, sir. The helicopter is ours; we sent it out on a call.”

“Well, in that case,” I told him smartly, “you should know how to call it back in.”

And I hung up, all dignified and haughty. Then the four of us collapsed into giggles. Then a car pulled up out front, and a flashing light revolved across the ceiling.

It was the very last moment that the world in general thought well of me.

In midafternoon, Sophia phoned. I was back in bed but not asleep. Still, I let the machine answer for me. “Barnaby, it’s me,” she said. “I’ll try you again later. Just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” she wanted to say. “Pulled off any more grand thefts lately?”

I got up and went to pee. Ran water over my toothbrush but replaced it in the rack without brushing, as if I were still a kid trying to hoodwink my mother.

Mrs. Dibble phoned again. “Well, I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she started out. “You are seriously disappointing me, Barnaby. Call when you get this message. Mrs. Morey wants her grill tank filled. Martine says to remind you she’ll need a ride to the Alford job. Also, Mrs. Hatter would like to arrange for regular hours with you, starting tomorrow.”

I couldn’t even remember what Mrs. Hatter looked like, she used our services so seldom. Maybe she’d had a stroke or something. Well, tough luck. I started kicking through the clothes on the floor, trying to find my sneakers.

While I was drinking my coffee, two more people left messages. Mrs. Figg wanted me to know that I had ruined her entire morning, and Natalie asked if I could shift next weekend’s visit to Sunday. It seemed Opal had been invited to a birthday party on Saturday. “I wouldn’t bring it up,” she said, “except the birthday girl’s from the popular crowd, and it means a lot to Opal that she was included.”

Yeah, right; it meant more than a visit from her own father. Fine, I thought. I just won’t go at all.

By this time I was starting to feel I had died or something, listening to so many phone calls without picking up. So I grabbed my car keys and left the apartment. Went off to Mrs. Figg’s to face the music.

It was hot as blazes out. I practically needed oven mitts just to work my steering wheel. I drove badly, zipping through yellow lights and honking at any pedestrian dumb enough to assume I would give him the right-of-way.

“If I’d wanted a worker who didn’t show up,” Mrs. Figg said when she opened the door, “someone I needed to nag about every little task, why, I could rely on my own son, for heaven’s sake.” She scowled into my face, pursing her raisin mouth — not an old woman, but a dried-up, drained-out one with a grudge against the universe. She went ahead and gave me her list, though, because who else could she get to do it? Most of our employees refused to deal with her anymore.

I went to the cleaner’s first and picked up her husband’s shirts. Ordinarily I’d have held my breath the whole time I was inside (the cancer is just swarming at you in those places), but today I took big, deep gulps of the chemical-smelling air while I waited. I wondered what Mrs. Figg had done that made her permanently unwelcome there.

At Ed’s Electronics (where she had hit a salesman with her pocketbook, I happened to know), I collected her tape recorder from Repairs. Then I went to the pharmacy and the hardware, and I was done. But when I got back to Mrs. Figg’s, what did she point out? The tape recorder’s earphone pads were still in need of replacement. “If I’d wanted the kind of worker who did things any which way—” she began, but I was already wheeling around and stomping off. Went to Ed’s Electronics again and raised such a stink, Mrs. Figg looked like a model customer by comparison. Then I drove back to her house and all but threw the pads in her face.

At Mrs. Morey’s, I headed straight for the patio and unhooked the propane tank from her grill. “Wouldn’t you like to see what I just persuaded to bloom?” she asked, trailing behind me, but I said only, “Mmf,” and set off for my car as if I hadn’t quite heard her. Got the tank filled at the gas station, reached into my pocket for my billfold, and came up with two earphone pads in a little plastic pouch. I guess they’d been clipped to the receipt and somehow worked themselves loose. Well, too late now. I tossed them in the trash bin.

At home, I found three more messages on my machine. Sophia said, “Hello, sweetie. Call me at the office, will you?” Mrs. Dibble said, “I wish you’d get in touch. Where are you?” And then Sophia again: “Barnaby, why haven’t you phoned? Do you want me to bring supper tonight? Or not. I’ll wait to hear.”

I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the bar. Then I polished off the last of the milk, drinking straight from the jug, and threw the jug in the wastebasket, even though it was the kind you were supposed to recycle. After that, I switched on the TV and watched a talk show, the outrageous type of show where everybody tries to confess to more unpleasantness than the next person. I had to sit on the bed to watch, since my chair had turned to glue in the humidity. Even my sheets felt sticky. Overhead, the Hardesty kids were carrying on a thin, shrill squabble, and their mother must have been tuned to her soaps, because at every pause in my own program, I could hear hers murmuring away.

This was the first weekday afternoon in months that I wouldn’t be going to Mrs. Glynn’s. The thought gave me a sort of wincing sensation. I fell back against the pillows and covered my eyes with one forearm.

I might have slept a little. When the phone rang again, the evening news was on. “Hey Gaitlin,” my machine said. (Mar-tine’s little raspy crow voice.) “Pick up, will you?”

I rolled over and reached for the receiver. I said, “What.”

“Why aren’t you here? It’s ten till seven! You promised you’d give me a ride!”

“I did?” I said. “Where’re we going?”

“Sheesh! Mrs. Alford’s. We’re clearing out her kitchen for the painters.”

I said, “Can’t you do it alone?”

“Duh, Barnaby. I don’t have any wheels, remember? What’s with you? I hope you’re not hung up on that Mrs. Glynn crap.”

“Oh,” I said. “You heard. Great. It must be all over town.”

“She’s crazy; don’t you think everyone knows that? Now get yourself on down here. We’re running behind.”

I said, “Well, okay.”

It might not be a bad idea, I decided. Sophia wasn’t going to wait by her phone forever. She’d come by in person, sooner or later, and I just didn’t feel like facing her right at that moment.

Martine was standing out front when I pulled up — leaning against a parked car and eating pork rinds from a cellophane packet. She had on her usual overalls and what looked to be a man’s sleeveless undershirt, so worn it was translucent. “At this rate, we won’t finish work till midnight,” she said as she got in.

I said, “You’re welcome,” and she said, “Oh. Thanks.”

Then she slouched down in her seat and braced her boots against the dashboard and went back to eating her pork rinds. She held the packet toward me, at one point, but I shook my head.

Clearing a kitchen for painters wasn’t that big a job. I could easily have done it alone. But we were dealing, I guess, with Mrs. Alford’s private little affirmative action program, because her first words when she opened her door were, “Oh, I just love to see what young women can get up to nowadays!”

This evening she wore a mint-green housedress that bore an unfortunate resemblance to a mental patient’s uniform. She was having one of her good spells, though, and got both our names right. “What I’d like, Martine,” she said, “is, you take the small things, the pots and pans and things, and stack them in the far corner of the dining room. Barnaby, you can take the furniture and the microwave.”

But Martine had to show off and grab the microwave herself. She staggered away with it, her arms straining out of her undershirt like two brown wires. I followed, with a chair in each hand, and Mrs. Alford came last, clasping a single skillet to her bosom. “You leave this to us,” I told her. Already she was sounding out of breath. She said, “Oh, well, I suppose …” She laid the skillet on the buffet and retreated to the living room. We could hear her footsteps padding across the carpet, and a moment later, the creak, pause, creak of her rocking chair.

Before we moved the step stool, Martine climbed onto it and took down all the curtains. It was starting to get dark out, and the naked, blue-black windowpanes made the kitchen look depressing. Shadows loomed in the corners. Bare spots showed where the clock had been, and the spice rack, and the calendar. I stole a glance through the calendar after I took it down. I saw all the medical appointments — doctor this, doctor that, mammogram, podiatrist. Anything to do with her family had an exclamation mark after it. Grandkids coming! Ernie spending night! Edward here for Labor Day! Then I checked the times I had come, but she didn’t refer to me by name. Rent-a-Back 7 p.m., she wrote. And no exclamation mark.

“What’re you looking at?” Martine asked. She was standing so close behind me that I jumped. I laid the calendar aside without answering.

When everything had been moved, Martine ran a dust mop around the tops of the walls, while I swept the floor. I found a dime, a red button, and a furry white pill. The pill didn’t look all that intriguing, so I set it in a saucer with the dime and the button. Then we went out to the living room. Mrs. Alford was sitting in her rocker, with her hands folded — not reading, not sewing or watching TV — her face exhausted and empty. But when I cleared my throat, she instantly put on this animated expression and said, “Oh! All done? My, wasn’t that speedy!” And she asked if we’d like a soft drink or something, but we told her we had to be going.

In the car, Martine got started on her favorite subject: Everett. How glad she was to be shed of him; how she couldn’t imagine now what she’d ever seen in him. I wanted to discuss my own troubles, but she was rattling on so, I couldn’t get a word in. She said Everett had given her every Willie Nelson tape that ever existed, given them as gifts, and now was demanding them back; and it was true she no longer listened to them, but still he shouldn’t expect them returned just because she had dumped him.

“Mm-hmm,” I said, and drove on.

I didn’t want to see Sophia tonight. I just didn’t; I wasn’t sure why. I thought of her wide, gentle face and her kind smile, the way her blue eyes seemed lit from within whenever she stood in sunshine, and I got this wormy, shriveled feeling. I couldn’t explain it.

“Here’s an example,” Martine was saying. Example of what? She’d lost me. “Say he’s walking down the street and a man jumps off a roof,” she said. Everett, she probably meant. “Know what he would say? He’d say, ‘Hey! Why is this happening to me? Hey, isn’t it amazing that someone should jump off a roof just as I’m passing by!’ That’s Everett for you. He thinks the world exists purely for his benefit. If he’s not there, then nothing else is, either.”

“Solipsistic,” I said. I remembered the word from philosophy class.

“Right,” she said, digging through her packet of pork rinds.

“Green light, now: figure it out,” I told the car ahead of me. “What do we do when a light turns green? Ah. Very good.”

Martine crumpled her packet and stuffed it in my ashtray. “So,” she said. “Did you decide yet?”

“Huh?”

“About the truck. Yes, or no?”

“What truck?” I asked.

“Everett’s truck; what else. It’s a pretty good piece of machinery, you have to admit.”

I didn’t have the remotest opinion of Everett’s truck, and I couldn’t imagine why she thought I would. I put our conversation on Rewind. Came up empty. “Well, um,” I said. “It’s always looked fine to me. But face it: I’m no Mr. Goodwrench.”

“You don’t think it’s a stupid idea, though.”

“What idea is that?” I asked her.

“You and me going in on it.”

“Going in on it?” I asked. “You mean, as in buying it? You and me? Buying a truck?”

“Jesus! Where have you been?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I must have missed something.”

We were on her block now, and I had been planning just to let her out in the street. Instead I pulled into a parking space. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I told her. “Maybe it’s nothing to you that I’m a victim of rank injustice, but—”

“What was the point! What have I wasted my breath for?”

She could have chosen a better moment for this. On the other hand, she was just about the last friend I had left in the world, and so I turned to face her and said, “Martine, I sincerely apologize. Run it by me again.”

She sighed. “See, Everett bought that truck off a lady in Howard County—” she said.

“Howard County; yes.” I tried to look as knowing as possible.

“—and he was supposed to pay for it in thirty-six monthly installments. Only he kept falling behind and his mom had to do it for him. And now he wants to move to New York, he says, where a truck wouldn’t be any use to him; so he says to his mom, ‘You take the truck; I can’t keep up the payments.’ She says, ‘When did you ever, I’d like to know? And what would I do with a truck?’ And that’s why she phoned me and asked if I wanted to buy it.”

In the dusk, Martine was all black-and-white, like a photo. Black eyes slitted with purpose, black hair sticking out at drastic angles around her high white cheekbones.

“And you’re suggesting the two of us should go in on it together,” I said.

“Well, for sure I can’t swing it on my own. But I can manage the installments, just barely, if you’d give his mom what she’s already paid: twenty-four hundred dollars.”

“Twenty-four hundred!” I said. “Martine. My total assets come to exactly half of that. And I’m still in debt to my parents, don’t forget.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “but not if you sold off your car.”

“Pardon?”

“Your car’s worth thirty thousand, did you know that? I looked it up in a book.”

I started laughing. I said, “My car’s worth what?”

“They’ve got these books that give you the price of every used car ever made. So I went to the bookstore and, like, flipped through one, and there it was: a ‘63 Corvette Sting Ray coupe in excellent condition is worth thirty thousand dollars.”

I was stunned. But I did think to say, “We could hardly claim my car is in excellent condition.”

“Okay; so knock off a few thousand. You’d still be rolling in money. Haven’t you always told me your car was a collector’s item?”

“Theoretically, I suppose it is,” I said. “But it was pretty well worn out way back when my Pop-Pop bought it, and you may have noticed I haven’t exactly cosseted the poor thing.”

“Oh! You’re so negative!”

She bopped me on the kneecap with one of her fists. I said, “Hey, now.” I took hold of her fist and set it back in her lap. Then I laid an arm across her shoulders. “I’m not trying to be a spoilsport here—”

“Well, you are one,” she said, but a sort of grudging amusement had crept into her voice. She snuggled in closer under my arm and said, “Just listen a minute, okay? Let me tell you how I’ve got it figured.”

“Go ahead,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had any pressing engagements.

“You would sell your car and, first off, pay back your folks. Quit your nickel-and-diming and just pay them back; be done with it. Get that Chinese statue off of your conscience once and for all. Wouldn’t that feel good? Then take some more of the money and go in with me on the truck. It works out just about fifty-fifty — slightly in your favor, even — between what you’d give Everett’s mom and what I would pay monthly.”

“But meanwhile, I’d have no car,” I told her.

“You’ll have the truck then, idiot!”

“We’ll have the truck,” I reminded her. “And you’ll be wanting to take it one place when I want to take it another.”

“Don’t we just about always go out on the same jobs together? And aren’t you tired to death of trying to get your work done in a little, toy, baby-sized car that doesn’t even have a rear seat?”

As she spoke, she was tracing a rip that ran across the knee of my jeans. Her fingertips hit bare skin and started coaxing at it. She said, “You could keep it at your place, if you like. And besides: we’ve been sharing it all along, more or less, when you stop to think.”

“Well, shoot, with thirty thousand dollars, maybe I should just go on and buy each one of us a truck or two apiece,” I said.

I was talking down into the top of her head, into her hair. It smelled of sweat. This got me interested, for some reason. Maybe she could tell, because she turned her face up, and next thing I knew, we were kissing. She had this very thin, hard mouth. I was surprised at how stirring that was. I wrapped both arms around her (not easy with the steering wheel in front of me), and she pressed against me, and I felt the little points of her breasts poking into my chest.

Then she drew back, and so I did too. I was relieved to see we were coming to our senses. (Or at least, partly relieved.) But what she was doing was shutting off the ignition. She dropped my keys in the cup of my hand, and her little face closed in on me again.

“You want to?” she asked me.

Her eyes had a stretched look, and she wore a peaky, excited expression that made me feel sad for her. I’d never really thought of Martine as a woman. Well, she wasn’t a woman; she was just this scrappy, sharp-edged little person. So I said, “Oh — um—”

And yet at the same time I was reaching for her once more, as if my body had decided to go ahead without me. I had her between my palms (every rib countable inside the baggy denim), but she was leaning across me to douse the headlights. Then she tore free and climbed out of the car, all in one rough motion. I got out, too, and followed her toward the house. The porch floorboards made a mournful sound under our feet. The first flight of stairs was carpeted, but the second flight was bare, and so steep that I had to tag a couple steps below her so as not to be nicked by her boot heels as we climbed.

The instant we had reached the third floor — one large attic room fall of a tweedy, dusty darkness — we were hugging again and kissing and stumbling toward her bed. Her bed had a headboard like a metal gate, white or some pale color, so tall it had to sit out a ways from the slant of the ceiling. It jangled when we landed on it. Martine breathed small, hot, bacon-smelling puffs of air into my neck while I fumbled with her overall clasps. They were the kind where you slide a brass button up through a brass figure eight. I don’t think I’d worked one of those since nursery school, but it all came back to me.

“Martine,” I said (whispering, though no one could have heard), “I’m sorry to say I don’t have, ah, anything with me,” but she said, “Never mind; I do,” and she rolled away from me to rummage through her overall pockets. Then she pushed something smooth and warm and warped into my palm: her billfold. That made me even sadder, somehow. But still my body went hurtling forward on its own, and it didn’t give my mind a chance to say a thing.

Not till later, at least, when everything was over.

And then it said, What was that all about?

Which Martine was probably wondering too, because already she was twisting away from me, rustling among the sheets and then rising to cross the room. A light flickered on — just the dim fluorescent light on the back of her ancient cook-stove. It showed her facing me, head tilted, clutching a bedspread around her with thin bare arms. She still had her socks on. Crumpled black ankle socks. Little white pipe-cleaner shins.

“Oh, Lord,” I said.

Her head came out of its tilt, and she said, “Well. I guess you want to get going.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, and I reached for my clothes. Martine turned and went off toward what must have been the bathroom, with the bedspread making a hoarse sound as it followed her across the floor planks.

I did call out a goodbye when I left, but she didn’t answer.

Back when Natalie and I were still married — at the very tail end of our marriage, when things had started falling apart — I happened to be knocked down by a car after an evening class. Ended up spending several hours in the emergency room while they checked me out, but all I had was a few scrapes and bruises.

When I finally got home, about midnight, there was Natalie in her bathrobe, walking the baby. The apartment was dark except for one shaded lamp, and Natalie reminded me of some pious old painting — her robe a long, flowing bell, her head bent low, her face in shadows. She didn’t speak until I was standing squarely in front of her, and then she raised her eyes to mine and said, “It’s nothing to me anymore if you choose to stay out carousing. But how about your daughter, wondering all this time where you are? Didn’t you at least give any thought to your daughter?”

Except my daughter was sound asleep and obviously hadn’t noticed my absence.

I looked, into Natalie’s eyes — reproachful black ovals, absorbing the glow from the lamp without sending back one gleam. I said, “No, I didn’t, since you ask. I was having too good a time.” Then I went off to bed. I fell into bed, still wearing my clothes, like someone exhausted by drink and fast women.

Every now and then, I think I might have an inkling why Ditty Nolan stopped leaving her house. It may have had something to do with those years spent tending her mother. “If you make me stay home for so long, just watch: I’ll stay at home forever,” she said.

“If you think I’m such a villain, just watch: I’ll act worse than you ever dreamed of,” I said. I said it during my teens. I said it toward the end of my marriage. And I said it that whole nasty Monday, which seemed, now that I looked back, to have lasted about a month.

Back at my place, I found two more messages from Sophia and another from Mrs. Dibble. Sophia’s voice was patient, without the least hint of annoyance, which made me feel terrible. Mrs. Dibble was all business. “I want you to call, Barnaby, as soon as you get in. I don’t care how late it is. Use my home number.”

So I called. What the hell. If she wanted to fire me, let’s get it over with.

It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but she must have been in bed, because she answered so immediately, in that super-alert tone people use when they don’t want to let on you’ve wakened them. “Yes!” she said.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Barnaby.”

A pause, a kind of shuffling noise. She must be sitting up and rearranging her pillows. “Here are your assignments for tomorrow,” she said. “Mrs. Cartwright wants you to help her buy a birthday present for her niece. Mrs. Rodney needs her mower taken in for maintenance. Miss Simmons would like a window shade hung. Mr. Shank has asked for—”

“Wait,” I told her. “Is this all in one day?”

“Yes,” she said, and there was something unsteady in her voice — a bubble of laughter. “Package mailed for Mr. Shank, fireplace cleaned at the Brents’—”

“Fireplace?” I said. It was August. We were going through a heat wave.

The laughter grew more noticeable. “Plants moved for Mrs. Binney from the dining room to the living room—”

Mrs. Binney raised African violets, none of them over six inches tall. There was no reason on earth she should need my help to move them.

“Mrs. Portland wants you daily all next week,” Mrs. Dibble said. “She’s thinking of rearranging every stick of furniture she owns. The Winstons have requested—”

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

“I believe they must be trying to make a point, dear heart.”

I was quiet a moment. Then I said, “How did they find out?”

“How do they find out anything? Not from me, I promise.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“They love you, Barnaby,” Mrs. Dibble told me, and now the laughter had faded. She was using a solemn, treasuring tone that embarrassed me. “It hasn’t escaped their notice how you’ve cared for them all these years.”

“So,” I said. “You’re not firing me?”

“Firing you!”

“Well, I know I didn’t return a few of your phone calls—”

“Barnaby. I would never fire you. Did you really think I would? You’re my very best worker! I tell everybody that! ‘Barnaby’s going to end up owning this company,’ I say. ‘You just watch: when I’m old and decrepit, it’s Barnaby who’ll buy me out.’”

“Who’ll what?” I said.

“Oh, well, just on the installment plan or something. If only I could afford it, I’d give it to you for free! It means a lot to me to see a good man take it over.”

I swallowed.

“But why are we discussing this now?” Mrs. Dibble asked. “For now, we have to think how you’re going to manage all these assignments.”

I said, “I’ll find a way, Mrs. Dibble. You just leave it to me.”

After I hung up, I sat there a minute, pressing my hands very tightly between my knees.

Then I phoned Sophia. I told her I was sorry. “I should have called before,” I said. “I did get your messages. I’ve just … been in this mood, you know? I didn’t feel all that sociable.”

She said, “I understand. I understand perfectly. You don’t have to explain.”

“But I owe you an apology,” I said. “Really. I ask your forgiveness.”

“Of course I forgive you!”

Did it count if she didn’t realize what she was forgiving me for?

Then she wanted to know if she should come over. But I thought if she came she would realize for certain, and so I said no. I said I was tired; I said I needed a shower. She didn’t push it. She just said, “All right, sweetie. You get a good night’s rest,” and we arranged to meet the next day. I told her I was taking her out to dinner — someplace romantic.

I’d meant it when I said I was tired, but even so, I had trouble sleeping once I went to bed. I felt filled with determination. I was just about vibrating with all my plans for tomorrow.

I had to get hold of that price book. I had to sell my car and pay off my debt to my parents. And this was in addition to all those jobs for Rent-a-Back, because I couldn’t let my clients down. They trusted me.

It began to seem that I really might have moved on in life.