Free A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler Page B

listening to their discussions. Today, for instance, Mr. Cartwright expressed a desire for sauerkraut, but Mrs. Cartwright didn’t feel he should have it. “You always think you want sauerkraut,” she told him, “and then you’re up half the night with indigestion and it’s me who has to bring you the Turns. You know how cabbage in any form gives you indigestion.”
    Mr. Cartwright said he knew no such thing, but I knew it. And I knew green peppers repeated on him too, and I knew what their shoe sizes were and their grandchildren’s video game preferences, and I had advised on the very coat that Mrs. Cartwright was wearing today. (It was this navy one or a gray, almost white, which I had pointed out would show the dirt.)
    In the window bays near the registers I noticed big sacks of sidewalk salt, and I thought of picking one up for Ditty Nolan. But the Cartwrights might feel slighted, seeing me attend to another customer on their time. So what I did was drive them home (Mr. Cartwright next to me, Mrs. Cartwright perched in the rear but leaning forward between us to advise on traffic conditions) and carry in their groceries, and then I got in my own car and drove back to the store for salt. Then I went to Ditty Nolan’s.
    I don’t know why Ditty Nolan was scared to go out. She hadn’t always been that way, if you could believe Ray Oakley. Ray Oakley said Ditty’s mother had fallen ill with some steadily downhill disease while Ditty was off in college, and Ditty came home to nurse her and never left. Even after the mother died, Ditty stayed on in the Roland Park house where she had grown up—must have had a little inheritance, or how else would she have managed? For sure, she didn’t go out to work. And when I rang her doorbell, she had to check through the front window first and then undo a whole fortress of locks and sliding bolts and chains before she could let me in. “Barnaby!” she said.
    She was thin and pretty and unnaturally pale, with wispy tow hair that hung to her shoulders. Her dress was more a spring type of dress—flower-sprinkled and floaty—which wasn’t so unreasonable for someone who avoided all weather.
    “I brought your salt,” I told her.
    “Oh, good,” she said, stepping back. “Come on inside.”
    I followed her in and dropped the sack to the floor. I said, “Has there been some kind of forecast I haven’t heard about?”
    “Forecast?” she asked. She was wandering away to some other part of the house. Her voice came threading back to me.
    “Is it supposed to snow or something?”
    “Not that I know of,” she said.
    She returned, holding an envelope. My name was on the front. “Happy birthday,” she said.
    “Oh! Well, thanks.”
    I should have guessed: the salt was just an excuse. She knew every birthday at Rent-a-Back and never let one pass without notice. I opened the envelope and looked at the card inside. “This was really nice of you,” I told her.
    She waved my words away. Long, fragile hands, untouched by the sun. “What a pity you have to work today,” she said. “I hope you’re having a party later on.”
    “Just supper at my folks’ house.”
    “Is your little girl going to join you?”
    “Well, no,” I said. “But look at what she sent.”
    From my rear jeans pocket I pulled out Opal’s gift—a leather money clip, the kind you make from a kit. I hadn’t put any money in (if you thought about it, it was kind of an ironic gift), but I liked carrying it around. “The mailman brought this Saturday,” I said, “along with a handmade card with a drawing of me on the front that really did resemble me. You could even see the stitches on my blue jeans.”
    “Oh, isn’t that sweet!” Ditty said.
    “I was so tickled that I called her up long distance,” I said. “Knocked her mother for a loop, as you might imagine. But I think Opal liked it that I bothered.”
    “I’m sure she loved it,” Ditty said.
    I put the money clip back in my pocket.