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

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.
    On TV, they were asking pedestrians for their New Year’s resolutions. People said they had resolved to lose ten pounds, or stop smoking, or stop drinking. They’d resolved to join a gym or take up jogging. Seemed it was always something body-related. Except for this one guy—slouchy black guy in a hooded parka. He said, “Well, I just can’t decide. Could be I’ll start going to church again. Could be I’ll apply to truckdriving school. I just can’t make up my mind.”
    As if he were allowed no more than one resolution within a given year.
    I finished my beer and set the can on the floor beside the phone. My answering machine was blinking, but I didn’t expect any great messages at this hour. Unless some acquaintance was throwing a party and suddenly recollected my name. I leaned over and pressed the button.
    “Barnaby,” my mother said, “this is your mom and dad.”
    What a thrill.
    “We just wanted to say Happy New Year, sweetie. Hope it’s the start of good things for you—good news, good plans, a whole new beginning! Call us sometime, why don’t you? Bye.”
    Click.
    I flopped back on my bed and looked up at the ceiling. Hope it’s the end of all the trouble you’ve caused us , was what she was really saying. Hope at long, long last you’re planning to mend your ways; hope you’ll meet a decent girl this year and find a job we’re not embarrassed to tell the neighbors about. Hope you get your instructions from your angel, finally.
    Now, why did this next thought occur to me?
    I don’t know, but it did.
    Sophia Whatsit. Maynard. The woman on the train. Suppose Sophia Maynard was my angel.
    Silly, of course. I’d been snickering at that angel stuff since I was old enough to think straight. If that was not the Gaitlins in a nutshell, I always told them: imagining they had connections even in heaven!
    But still.
    I saw her gold hair, her feather coat, her bun that was not so unlike (it occurred to me now) a coiled braid.
    The trouble was, I seemed to be the first Gaitlin in history who didn’t have a clue what my angel had wanted to tell me.

S HE WAS WEARING the feather coat again, and boots this time instead of last week’s pumps. (Overnight a light snow had fallen—that considerate kind of snow that sticks to lawns but melts on streets and sidewalks.) Would an angel wear quilted black nylon boots with white fluff around the tops? Well, sure; no reason she couldn’t. And she could sit on a bench in Penn Station reading a Baltimore Sun too, while she was at it.
    I