Free A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler

said.
    Thank goodness.
    A truck roared past, and we walked awhile without speaking before Sophia asked, “Is your ex-wife a Philadelphian?”
    “No,” I said, “but her husband is.”
    “Oh, so she’s remarried.”
    “Right.”
    “That must be difficult for you.”
    “Difficult? Why would you say that?” I asked.
    “Seeing her with someone else, I mean. I suppose inevitably there’s a bit of—”
    “I never give it a moment’s thought,” I said, and then I stopped short, at the corner of Twenty-second Street, and said, “Well, here’s where I’ll be—”
    But Sophia turned down Twenty-second and kept walking. I had hoped she would continue east. “It must have been an amicable divorce, then,” she called over her shoulder.
    I said, “Oh …,” and took a few extra steps to catch up. “It was sort of amicable,” I said. (No sense going into the gory details.)
    “Were you very young when you married?”
    “Lord, yes. I was way too young. And she was even younger. We got married on her twentieth birthday.”
    Then I happened to glance down the street, and who was walking toward us? Natalie. She was wearing a red coat and holding Opal’s hand. It was unsettling, because I’d just had a flash of how she had looked on our wedding day: all dressed up for the registry office, so pale and prim and solemn in a red coat that was not this same one, I guess, but close enough; close enough.
    She hadn’t seen me yet. She was speaking to Opal, turning to look down at her, and it was Opal (gazing straight ahead) who spotted me first. Opal wrenched her hand free and cried, “Barnaby!” and ran to meet me. There was enough of a breeze so she had lost that careful, prissy look. Her hair was tumbled, her cheeks were pink, and her jacket was flying behind her. She barreled into me and threw her arms around my waist, which she wouldn’t ordinarily have done. She wasn’t a very warm child, in my limited experience. But she said, “It’s not true you’re stopping your visits, is it?”
    “Who, me?” I asked, and I looked past her to Natalie. She approached more slowly, with a hair-thin line of puzzlement running across her forehead as she noticed Sophia. (Maybe she imagined we were together.) I said, “Hey there, Nat.”
    “Mom said you weren’t going to come anymore,” Opal told me. She grabbed hold of one of my thumbs and started tugging on it, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet in an edgy, agitated manner I’d never noticed in her till now. “She said you’d talked it over and you’d be stopping your visits. But I knew you wouldn’t do that. Would you? You’d want to keep on seeing me! Wouldn’t you?”
    “Well, sure I would,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would take this so personally. I felt kind of touched. In a funny way, I felt almost hurt. My throat got a hurtful, heavy feeling halfway down to my chest.
    And Natalie must have felt the same, because she said, “Oh, honey. Of course he would! I didn’t realize you would mind so much.”
    Then a hand arrived on my arm, so light it took a moment to register, and I turned and found Sophia smiling into my eyes. It was the most serene and radiant smile; the most seraphic smile. “Goodbye, Barnaby,” she said, and she dropped her hand and walked away.
    I never did explain her presence to Natalie. I honestly don’t know what I would have said.

M Y FAVORITE MOMENT of the day comes before the sun is up, but conditions have to be right for it. I have to be awake then, for one thing. And the weather has to be clear, and the lights lit in my room, and the sky outside still dark. Then I switch the lights off. If I’m lucky, the sky will suddenly change to something else—a deep, transparent blue. There’s almost a sound to it, a quiet sound like loom! as the blue swings into focus. But it lasts for only a second. And it doesn’t happen that often.
    It happened on my thirtieth birthday, though. I took that for a good omen.