A Patchwork Planet Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Or go to Legal Aid.”

  “Oh, Legal Aid is a lovely organization!”

  “Hmm,” I said, making no promises.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, that. It was my mother’s.”

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

  “His woodenworks, dear?”

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

  “Mercy,” Mrs. Alford said.

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

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

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

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

  “An angel!” Mrs. Alford said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Right,” I said.

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

  “Well, when they claim me, I am.”

  “I had no idea!”

  “I’m the black sheep,” I told her.

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

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

  “They wouldn’t!”

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

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

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

  “Plug in the lights, Barnaby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I said, “It certainly is.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “I thought you didn’t have any.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Didn’t you say Everett was sick?”

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

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

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

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

  “Whoa! A mad bomber.”

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

  “Yeah, right.”

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

  “You didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

  “So anyway,” I said.

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

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

  “Who, me?”

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

  “Oh,” I said. “Nah. Thanks anyway.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  That was the way to do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Aw,” I said. “Mrs.—um—”

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

  “Ma’am—” Mr. Vickers said.

  And I said, “Mrs. Dibble—”

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

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

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

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

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