Sure enough, a big-boned, white-haired woman in a sweater set and matching skirt stood twisting her hands together on the curb. “Come and say hello,” Sophia told me.
I have never been the meet-the-parents type. I said, “Oh, I’d better not. I’m blocking traffic.”
But Sophia was calling, “Yoo-hoo! Mother!” as she slid out of the passenger seat, leaving her door wide open behind her.
Mrs. Maynard turned, blank-faced. Then she said, “Sophia? What on earth! You came by auto? You’re so late!”
While they were pressing their cheeks together, I made a lunge across the seat and tried to shut Sophia’s door without being seen. But no: “I’d like to introduce you to someone,” Sophia told her mother.
So I was forced to show myself. I left my engine running, though. I stepped out and rounded the front of the car and said, “How do you do. Sorry, but I’m double-parked; I really have to be going.”
“This is Barnaby Gaitlin,” Sophia told her mother. “My mother, Thelma Maynard.”
“I said to myself,” Mrs. Maynard told her, “ ‘Well, that’s it. Sophia’s met with some accident, I don’t know what accident, and the police will have no idea that I’m her next of kin. I’ll be sitting in my apartment Saturday, Sunday, Monday, without anyone to shop for me or fetch my prescriptions. I’ll run out of food, run out of pills; just get weaker and weaker, and they’ll find me who-can-say-how-long after, shriveled up like a prune and lying on my—’ ”
“Barnaby and I have been seeing quite a lot of each other,” Sophia said.
Mrs. Maynard stopped speaking and looked over at me. She had one of those rectangular faces, pulled downward at the corners by two strong cords in her neck.
“How do you do,” I said again. I would have shaken hands, except that she didn’t hold hers out.
See why I hate meeting parents? I don’t make a good first impression.
Mrs. Maynard turned back to Sophia and said, “You might at least have telephoned and warned me you’d be late. You know perfectly well what tension does to my blood pressure!”
We hadn’t been that late. Maybe half an hour or so. But Sophia didn’t bother arguing. She said, in this forthright manner, “Barnaby has become a very important part of my life.”
I froze. So did her mother. She gave me another look. “Oh?” she said. Then she said, “Mr….?”
“Gaitlin,” I said.
Someone honked in the street behind me, no doubt wanting me to move my car, but I didn’t turn around.
Sophia’s mother asked, “Just what is your line of business, Mr. Gaitlin?”
“I’m, ah, employed by a service organization,” I told her.
It came out sounding sort of smarmy, for some reason. Sophia must have thought so too, because she raised her eyebrows at me. Then she gave a sharp hitch to the shoulder strap of her bag. She said, “He works for a place called Rent-a-Back, Mother, lifting heavy objects.”
“Lifting?” Mrs. Maynard asked.
I said, “Well, there’s more to it than—”
“What kind of heavy objects?”
“Oh …,” I said. “In fact! I’ve been helping Mrs. Glynn some. Sophia’s aunt. I don’t know if you and she are in touch or—”
“I met him on the train a couple of months ago,” Sophia broke in. “I guess you could call it a pickup.”
“Pickup?” Mrs. Maynard asked faintly, at the same time that I said, “Pickup!” I stared at Sophia.
Sophia kept her gaze fixed levelly on her mother. She said, “He sat in the seat next to me, and before I knew it I had agreed to go out with him.”
“Really,” Mrs. Maynard said.
I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been that way at all; that things had happened a good deal more inch by inch than that. But I could see what Sophia was up to here. I recognized that triumphant tilt of her chin. And I couldn’t much blame her, either. With a mother like Mrs. Maynard, I’d have done the same.
Besides, the situation did work to my advantage. Because when Sophia said goodbye to me — walking me to my side of the car, ignoring the honking traffic — she kissed me on the lips and whispered, “When I get back to Baltimore, I want to come to your place.”
Then she gave me a deliberate, slow smile that turned my knees weak, and she went to rejoin her mother.
8
BY THE END of April I’d saved eight hundred and sixteen dollars. I had hoped to be farther along, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to meet my goal of a hundred extra per week. Well, at least it was a start. I got myself a savings account and a little cardboard booklet to record all further deposits.
For most of May I had this very lucrative short-term client — a young guy who’d broken his leg in four places while mountain biking. He lived alone in a two-story house, and I had to be there first thing every morning to help him down the stairs and drive him to his law office. Then I’d pick him up at quitting time, come back again at bedtime … Not to mention the groceries he needed bought, the shirts he needed taken to the cleaner’s, and so on. When his cast was shortened to shin length and he could get around on his own, he gave me a goodbye gift of a hundred dollars. Rent-a-Back employees are not supposed to accept tips ever, under any conditions, and I told him that, but he said I had no choice. He said, “It’s take it now or have it come to you in the mail, which would cost me the price of a stamp.” So I took it. I confess. It would let me hit eighty-seven hundred that much sooner.
Sophia knew I was in debt. She even knew the amount, but not the reason. (Why get into the particulars? The Chinese carving and all that.) She was very understanding about it. She never expected me to buy her presents or take her anywhere fancy. Instead she ferried her Crock-Pot meals to my place after work. (We’d given up on her place, now that we needed more privacy.) First we’d go to bed and then we’d have our supper, tangled in a welter of sheets, leaning against the propped pillows that bridged the gap between my mattress and the back of the couch. I’d be in my jeans again, but she would stay naked, like that painting I have never understood where the men are picnicking fully dressed but the woman doesn’t have a stitch on. Me, I tend to feel kind of undefended without my clothes, but Sophia seemed astoundingly at ease. She’d drape a napkin across her stomach and nibble on a stewed pork chop, then wipe her fingers on the napkin and toss back the loose coils of hair streaming over one shoulder. And meanwhile, I would be asking her questions. There was so much I needed to know about her. No piece of information was too smalclass="underline" her favorite color, favorite crab house, favorite television show … I guess really I was asking, What does it feel like, being you?
And maybe she was asking the same. She was interested in my parents. She was curious about my brother. She wondered if he and I were anything alike. (“Not a whit,” I told her.) And especially, she wanted to know about my marriage. Where had it gone wrong? Why had Natalie and I split up?
“Why’d we get together in the first place, is more to the point,” I said. “A weirder combination you can’t imagine. Natalie with her good-girl forehead and me fresh out of reform school.”
“Oh, now,” Sophia chided me. “It wasn’t a reform school.” But she was wearing her thrilled look, as if she hoped to be contradicted.
“Well, it was a rich-guy variation on the theme, at least,” I said. “Certainly my neighbors thought as much. They pretended not to know me that whole summer after I graduated — everyone but Natalie. Natalie’s family had moved in across the street while I was gone, and one afternoon I’m mowing the lawn and Natalie comes over with a pitcher and two glasses set just so on a tray. Says, ‘Could I interest you in some lemonade?’ Could I interest you: such a quaint way to put it. ‘Why not,’ I tell her, and I swig down a glass, and that might have been the end of it, except then my mother pokes her head out the door and invites us in for iced tea. As if Natalie weren’t already operating her own refreshment service in the middle of our yard! Well, poor Mom; I guess the sight of a respectable girl was a little too much excitement for her. I tell Natalie, ‘Cripes, let’s get out of here,’ and I leave the mower where it is and we walk off, just like that. So everything that happened after was my mother’s fault, you might say.”