A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

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