A Patchwork Planet (24 page)

“Think how much better you’ll sleep, though, Daddy.”

“Ha,” he said, but he helped himself to a cup and stirred in several spoonsful of sugar, while she waited.

“Jeffrey?” my mother said next, heading toward Dad.

“Yes, thanks. I will have some.”

She bent to rest her tray on the lamp table beside him. “Barnaby won’t let me give him back his money,” she told him.

“Eh?” my father said.

“His eighty-seven hundred. He won’t take it.”

I felt Sophia glance over at me, but the others paid no attention. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a double run for twelve,” Opal announced, while Jeff set aside his poker and took another swig of wine.

“I tried to give it back to him,” my mother said, “but he tore up the check.”

“We’ll discuss this some other time, shall we?” my father said pleasantly.

“I want to get this settled, though.”

“Another time, I told you.”

“What other time? We hardly ever lay eyes on him!”

“Margot,” my father said. “Do you suppose we could make it through one holiday without your tiresome fishwife act?”

Wicky stopped humming. There was a pause, and then my mother lifted her tray and proceeded back to the kitchen at a dignified pace. A second later, we heard the tray slamming onto a counter. A faucet started running. Dishes started clattering. Wicky looked over at Jeff, but he minutely shook his head, and so she stayed seated.

Gram cleared her throat. “Sophia, dear!” she said. “Tell us! What
dots your
family do for Thanksgiving?”

Well, at least they didn’t publicly demolish each other, Sophia could have said; but she told Gram, “Oh, nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. Usually, Mother’s two cousins come for dinner, along with one cousin’s husband. And then this year she’s invited my Aunt Grace from Baltimore too.”

“She’s invited your Aunt Grace?” I asked.

But I don’t think Sophia heard, because Gram was saying, “Isn’t that lovely! And will they be serving a turkey?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, it’s kind of like you-all’s arrangement—a potluck—although Mother does assign specific dishes. For instance, Aunt Grace is bringing her chestnut dressing. She fixed it ahead of time, except for the baking, and I helped her onto the train with it, but Lord knows how she’ll manage at the other end of the trip.”

“You helped her onto the train?” I asked.

All this was news to me, I can tell you.

Sophia sent me an absentminded smile. “The cousins are in charge of the vegetables,” she said, “and Cousin Dotty’s husband makes the pies. He’s an excellent cook, although in all other respects he’s considered something of a—”

There was a crash in the kitchen, followed by the tinkling of glass. Sophia stopped short. The rest of us exchanged glances.

Gram said, “Yes, dear? Something of a …?”

“Oh! Something of a … ne’er-do-well, I suppose. But—”

A metal object clanged so loudly that it gave off an echo, like a gong.

“Maybe I should go out there,” Wicky said.

“Stay where you are, why don’t you,” my father told her blandly.

She sat back, drawing J.P.’s deadweight body closer against her.

Sophia looked from one of us to the other.

“Ne’er-do-well!” I said.

Sophia said, “What?”

“I haven’t heard that term in ages!”

“You haven’t heard … ‘ne’er-do-well’?”

“It’s almost Old English, don’t you think?” I asked the room at large. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the racket from the kitchen. “It’s almost something Robin Hood might have said! In fact, a lot of those bad-guy words are like that: so quaint and antiquey. ‘Ruffian.’ ‘Knave.’ ‘Wastrel.’ ‘Scoundrel.’ Ever noticed?”

No one had, apparently.

“ ‘Layabout.’ ‘Rapscallion,’ ” I said. “ ‘Scofflaw.’ ‘Scum of the earth.’ ”

“ ‘Beast of burden,’ ” Opal offered unexpectedly.

“Well, that’s a
little
off the subject … or maybe not, come to think of it. And ‘ill-gotten gains.’ ‘Misspent youth.’ Or, let’s see …”

“ ‘Besetting sins,’ ” my father said from his armchair.

“Right! Besetting sins. But it’s not the same for good-guy words, at least not as far as I’ve—”

The telephone rang. We were all so relieved that every last one of us stirred as if to go answer it, but Mom picked it up in the kitchen. We could hear her intonation, if not her exact words. “Mm? Mm? Hmm-hmm-hmm.”

Then she appeared in the doorway. “Barnaby,” she said—her voice noncommittal, her face composed, not a hair out of place—“that was that Martine person, and she says to tell you she has the truck but she’ll bring it by in the morning.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Pop-Pop asked, “What truck is that?”

I said, “Oh, just the, you know, work truck.”

“Fool kid sold off the Sting Ray,” my father told my grandpa.

“He did what?”

“Sold off the Corvette Sting Ray and bought a used Ford pickup.”

Pop-Pop leaned forward on the couch to peer at me. I could feel his stare, even though I had my back to him. I turned and told him, “I was planning to mention that.”

“You sold the Sting Ray?”

He was so amazed, the whites of his eyes showed all around the irises.

“Well, yes, I did,” I said.

“Why?”

I said, “I needed the money.”

“The money, son: you could have borrowed money from me! I’d have been glad to lend you money!”

“Well, see … the whole point was, not to be in debt anymore. Not to owe anybody.”

Pop-Pop’s jaw went slack.

“But, Barnaby,” he said finally. “That was the only year the Corvette had a split rear window.”

“Oh,
damn
that split rear window!” I said. Then I said, “Sorry.” I looked around at the others. They all wore the same accusing expression—even Opal. (Or maybe I was imagining things.) “I mean,” I said, “I do know what a big deal it was, Pop-Pop—”

“Shoot,” Jeff said suddenly. “It broke my heart when Pop-Pop gave the Corvette to you.”

“It did?” I asked.

“I would have killed for that car!”

“You would?”

I sat there a minute absorbing this, chewing the inside of my cheek. Dad, meanwhile, took over the conversation. “Of course, when I was Barnaby’s age,” he said, “I went out and
worked
if I needed money, but nowadays, it seems—”

“With all due respect, Dad,” I told him, “you were never my age.”

“Excuse me?”

“Times are different, Dad, okay? What I’ve experienced, you haven’t. And vice versa, no doubt. So you can’t compare us, is what I’m saying.” I turned back to my grandpa. “I’m sorry, Pop-Pop,” I told him. “Giving me that car was the best thing anyone’s ever done for me, and don’t think I don’t know that. But I’m trying really hard to grow up now, don’t you see? And I had to sell the car to get there. I hope you understand.”

I could hear the rustle of Mom’s apron as she wrapped her hands in it. Then Pop-Pop said, “Why, sure, son. It was yours to do what you liked with.”

After that we had a fairly normal evening, but that was just because all of us were exhausted.

Sophia and I had driven over in the Saab, and we’d both assumed that I would go back to her house for the night, since the roommate was out of town. But on Jeff’s front walk I said, “Why don’t
you
drive, and that way you can drop me off at my place.” Then I felt the need to invent too many excuses. “I have to get to work so early tomorrow, and Martine won’t know where to pick me up, and besides, Opal mentioned something about breakfast____”

Sophia just said, “All right,” and we set off toward her car. I got the impression she was glad, even. Probably she could use a night alone herself.

Earlier it had been raining, and now the air had a damp, chilly feel. The car windows misted over before we’d gone a block. I grew extremely conscious of how closed in we were. Our breaths were too loud, and the tinny sound of Sophia’s cake platter, sliding across the back seat at each turn, made our silence more noticeable.

Finally she said, “You didn’t tell me your mother offered to give you back that money.”

“How could I? It just now happened,” I said.

“I don’t see why you refused it.”

I stared at her. I said, “What: you too?”

“It’s eighty-seven hundred dollars, after all. Think what we could do with that.”

“Well, lots. Obviously. But that’s beside the point. I didn’t want to worry about that money anymore.”

“So you’d rather
I
worry about money.”

“You? How do you figure that?”

“Well, I’m the one who couldn’t buy a new outfit for Thanksgiving because my money’s in the flour bin.”

“So? Get it
out
of the flour bin. You said yourself you’ve been in touch with your aunt again.”

“Oh, I knew you’d hold that against me!” she cried, swinging the car onto Northern Parkway.

I said, “Huh? Hold what against you?”

“She’s my aunt, Barnaby. I don’t have so many relatives that I can afford to discard a perfectly good aunt.”

“Well, sure. I realize that,” I told her.

“And it made me feel just awful, being on the outs with her. So I called her on the phone one day last week. I meant to tell you about it; honestly I did, but somehow it slipped my mind. I asked her how she was, and she said she had a cold. Well, what could I do? Hang up on a sick old woman? I went by to see her at lunch hour. I brought her some soup and some nose drops. I couldn’t just let her fend for herself!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I said.

Did she think I didn’t know how these family messes operated? The most unforgivable things got … oh, not forgiven. Never forgiven. But swept beneath the rug, at least; brushed temporarily to one side; buried in a shallow grave. I knew all about it.

I rolled down my window a quarter of an inch, thinking it might help defog the windshield. I said, “But you still haven’t gotten your money out of the flour bin.”

“No.”

The whistling sound from my window helped to fill the silence.

“Why not?” I asked her finally.

“Hmm?” she said. She leaned forward to swab the windshield with her palm—a mistake, but I didn’t point that out.

“Why
haven’t
you gotten your money?”

“Oh, it’s … never been the right time,” she said.

“Now would be a good time,” I told her. “While your aunt’s in Philadelphia.”

“Barnaby! I can’t just sneak in like a thief!”

She kept her eyes on the road while she said that. It made her indignation sound fake. All at once I found her irritating beyond endurance. I noticed how the streetlights lit the fuzz along her jawline—fur, it almost was—and how large and square and bossy her hands looked on the steering wheel. Managerial: that was the word. Wasn’t that why her other romances had ended, if you read between the lines? “I’m probably too … definite,” I seemed to remember her saying. “Too definite for men to feel comfortable with.” Darn right she was too definite!

And then that lingering, doting voice she used when she spoke of herself as a child—“When I was a little girl …”—as if she had been more special than other little girls. And her eternal Crock-Pot dinners; oh, Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-colored one-dish meal, I’d croak!

And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos and panty-hose washing, her total lack of adventurousness. (Wasn’t it a flaw, rather than a virtue, that she’d been so incurious when the passport man gave her that envelope?) Her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I had stolen from her aunt. Here I’d been hoping she would bring me up to her level, infuse me with her goodness! Instead she had fallen all over herself rushing to protect my badness.

I said, “Sophia. Let’s go get that money.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and she was so prompt about it, she practically overlapped my words.

“Why
not? If it belongs to you, why can’t you?”

She said, “Don’t badger me, please. It’s really none of your concern what I do with my own private funds.”

“In fact, it is, though,” I said. “In fact, every time I turn around, you’re telling me how hard your life is now that you’ve lost your money. You’re going on and on about all the things you can’t afford because your money’s in the flour bin, and you know what I think, Sophia? I think you
like
to have it in the flour bin. I think you feel that as long as it’s in the flour bin, I owe you something. I’m starting to suspect you have no intention of getting it back. You prefer it that I’m beholden to you for your sacrifice.”

“Well, that’s just simply not true,” Sophia told me.

You would think she’d have raised her voice, at least, but she didn’t. Her tone was low and reasonable, and she went on staring straight ahead, and she remembered to signal before she pulled into my driveway. Even that I found irritating. She was just as angry as I was; I knew it for a fact, but she’d already lost two boyfriends, and she’d promised herself she would hang on to this one no matter what a … ne’er-do-well he might turn out to be. Oh, I could read her like a book!

I remembered what I’d told Mrs. Alford when I was describing Great-Grandpa’s visit from his angel. Angels leave a better impression, I’d said, if they don’t hang around too long. Or something to that effect. If they don’t hang around making chitchat and letting you get to know them.

Here is how my Pop-Pop happened to give me the Sting Ray:

I was just about to graduate from the Renascence School, and I’d been accepted at Towson State, and Dad had promised to find a summer job for me. So far he hadn’t succeeded, but that’s a whole other story. The point is, I was doing okay for once. My life was looking up. There was a lot of talk about clean slates and new beginnings, et cetera, et cetera.

Then, at Easter, I came home for the long weekend and got into a little trouble. Well, I’ll just go ahead and say it: I locked my parents out of the house and set fire to the dining room.

I can’t explain exactly how it started. How do these things
ever
start? It was your average Saturday-night supper; nothing special. My brother had brought a girlfriend. He was living on his own by then, in an apartment down on Chase Street, and he wanted us to meet this Joanna, or Joanne, or whatever her name was. But that was not the problem. The girl was innocuous enough. And my parents were putting on their happycouple act, telling how they themselves had met and so on—my father describing Mom as lively and vivacious and “spunky” (his favorite word for her); my mother turning her eyes up to him in this adoring, First Lady manner. No problem there, either. I’d seen them do that plenty of times. Oh, I’ve never claimed my parents were to blame for my mistakes. My mother might lay it on a little thick—working so hard at her Guilford Matron act, wearing her carefully casual outfits and frantically dragging the furniture around before all major parties—but I realize there are far worse crimes. So, I don’t know. I was just in a mood, I guess. All through supper I kept fighting off my old fear that I might burst out with some scandalous remark. It was more pronounced than usual, even. (Do you think I might have Tourette’s syndrome—a mild, borderline version? I’ve often wondered.) But I made it through the evening. Bade Jeff and What’s-her-name a civil goodbye in the front hall, watched Mom and Dad walk them to the street.