“I can’t think of anyone better, son,” he said.
I have no idea what Jeff’s face looked like at that moment. Did he, in fact, envy me? I never even glanced at him. I was staring down at the checkered flags and blinking back the tears.
14
THIS YEAR, Mrs. Alford was planning ahead for Christmas, she told us; not waiting till the last minute to get that tree of hers trimmed. So Martine dropped me off one morning in mid-December — a cold day, but sunny enough to start melting the film of snow that had fallen overnight. I climbed the front steps and pressed the buzzer before I wiped my feet, since Mrs. Alford always took some time answering. But it was her brother who opened the door. I recognized the two clouds of white hair puffing above his ears. Had I ever known his name? I’d only met him the once.
He knew mine, though. “Why,” he said. “It’s Barnaby. Oh, Barnaby. How very, very kind of you to call.” And he held out his hand.
I hadn’t been prepared to shake hands, but I did, and then I scraped my feet on the mat a few more times to show that I was ready to head on in and get to work. But it seemed he wanted the two of us to stand talking a while longer. “I can’t tell you how much this means,” he said. “My sister would have been extremely touched that you stopped by.”
Would have been?
Oh-oh.
“But come in! Come in! What am I thinking? Please,” he said. “May I take your jacket?”
“Well … ah, no, thanks. I’ll keep it,” I said.
But I did come in. I couldn’t see any way out of it, really.
“Valerie will want to meet you,” the brother said, leading me through the foyer. I guessed Valerie was Mrs. Alford’s daughter. We passed the dining room, where a bearded man in a bathrobe sat reading a newspaper. Next to him, a baby was pounding her high-chair tray, but the bearded man paid no attention, and when he caught sight of me he just nodded and turned a page. “Richard,” the brother told me. “Valerie’s husband. They left the older kids at home for now; it was such short notice. And school is still in session, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. We were climbing the stairs to the second floor. I hoped Valerie wasn’t in her bathrobe. I said, “It’s kind of early yet. Maybe I should—”
“Nonsense. We’ve been up for hours,” the brother said. “None of us slept very well, as you might imagine.” We reached the upstairs hall, and he called, “Valerie? Val! Look who’s here.”
In Mrs. Alford’s bedroom, a woman in baggy slacks was kneeling beside a cedar chest. She didn’t resemble Mrs. Alford. She was big-boned and gawky, with tortoiseshell glasses and lank brown hair, and you could see she had been crying. She stared at me blankly, which was understandable since we had never met.
“It’s Barnaby,” the brother told her.
“Barnaby!” she said, and she got to her feet and came over to hug me. She smelled of cedar. “Oh, Barnaby,” she said, “what’ll we do without her?” When she drew away, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. She seemed more like an overgrown girl than a wife and mother.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” I said. “Mrs. Alford was a super-nice lady.”
“She thought the world of you, Barnaby. Nearly every time I phoned her, she would mention something you’d done for her or some conversation you’d had.”
“I didn’t even know she was sick,” I said.
“Well, she wasn’t, so far as anyone could tell. It was a heart attack. But I think she had some inkling, maybe. I worried all this fall, because why else did she suddenly send me those things from the attic? And her quilt: just look. She seems to have finished her quilt in a rush, after months and months of claiming she would never get it finished.”
The quilt was draped over the edge of the chest. Valerie bent to pick it up and unfold it — a dark-blue cotton rectangle with a gaudy, multicolored circle appliquéd to the center. “Planet Earth,” she said, and the brother made a clucking sound.
I’d heard about that planet quilt often, but I’d never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map — a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford’s version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment.
“Pretty,” I said. Because it was sort of pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way.
Valerie folded it up again and smoothed it gently before she laid it in the chest.
“We’re having a very small service,” she said. “I’m not sure exactly when. Then afterwards, I suppose we’ll need your help getting the house in shape to sell it.”
“I’ll be glad to help,” I told her. “Just call Rent-a-Back anytime you’re ready for me.”
When I left, Valerie hugged me again, and the brother shook hands again at the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said.
I said, “Well, I’ll miss her.”
It was nothing but the truth.
Of course, I had no way to get home, since Martine had driven off to mail Ditty Nolan’s Christmas parcels. So I sat on the curb out front and waited for her, hugging my knees and digging my chin into my folded arms. The curb was still damp from the melted snow, and I could feel a thin line of cold seeping through the seat of my jeans.
“Oh, my! All done?” Mrs. Alford used to say when I’d finished with a job. “Doesn’t that look lovely!” Her chirpy, cheery, determined voice. “Weren’t you quick about it!”
And then other clients’ voices — some cheery and some not, some sad, some downright cranky.
“Pasta? What’s this pasta business? In my day we called it spaghetti.”
“You’ll find out soon enough, young man, it is not especially unselfish to wish on your birthday candles that your children will be happy.”
“Back in Baltimore’s golden age, when the streetcars were still running and downtown was still the place to go and we had four top-notch department stores all on the same one block: Hutzler’s, Hochschild’s, Stewart’s, and Hecht’s …”
“… and at noon or so the phone rings, and my niece says, ‘I’m waiting for Dad but he hasn’t come and he said he’d be here at ten.’ I say, ‘Oh, now, you know how he is.’ About one o’clock, she calls again; two, she calls again. ‘Where can he be?’ she asks me. I say, ‘He’ll show up; don’t you worry.’ Though I’m fairly worried myself, to tell the truth. Along about three-thirty, I think, Oh! I think, Oh, my stars above! Because all at once it comes to me — I can’t say what brought it to mind — it comes to me that her dad had phoned me at eight o’clock that morning. ‘Sis,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve been trying to reach Sue but her line is busy and I want to hit the road so you call her later on, will you, please? And tell her I’ve decided not to stop at her place,’ he said.”
Martine tapped the truck horn. I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Don’t do that, okay?” I said, as I opened the passenger door. “A simple ‘Hey, you’ will suffice.”
“What’s up?” she asked me. She had already cut the engine. “I thought we were trimming a tree.”
“Mrs. Alford died,” I said.
“No!”
I hadn’t meant to be so blunt about it. I settled in my seat and shut my door. “She had a heart attack,” I said.
“Well, damn,” Martine said. Then she started the engine again. But she drove very slowly, as if in respect. “She was one of my favorite clients,” she said when we reached Falls Road.