“Heard what?”
“That I needed backing up.”
“Oh,” Martine said. “I told them.”
“You did?”
I turned to look at her. She was standing in the doorway between the pantry and the kitchen, her plaid woolen jacket buttoned wrong and the earflaps sticking up from her cap at two different angles.
I said, “Well. I guess I ought to thank you.”
“What for?” she asked. “Jeepers! They’re the ones you should thank. Getting on the phone like they did and volleying around.”
Rallying around was what she meant, but I didn’t correct her. I had this vision of a crowd of old folks on a volleyball court, keeping me up, up, up and not letting me fall, stepping forward one after the other to boost me over the net. When one of them had to leave, another would take that one’s place. Even if the faces changed, the sea of upraised hands stayed constant.
So, no, I didn’t correct her.
Then Martine came over to the white wooden cabinet behind me. She opened the upper door, exposing what looked to be a huge tin funnel with a crank handle. She reached into the funnel and brought out a plastic sandwich bag full of money.
I said, “Whoa!”
She handed the bag to me. It had a dusty feel from the traces of old flour clinging to it.
“How did you do that?” I asked her.
“This tin thing is a sifter,” she explained.
“A what?”
She turned the crank, demonstrating. “You store your flour inside it,” she said, “and when you go to bake something, you crank the sifter and the flour falls into this box-looking place underneath. My grandmother has almost the same kind of cabinet.”
I peered into the plastic bag. I saw hundreds and a few twenties, fanning out slightly because no band or clip held them together.
Sometimes when you’ve been looking for an object and you find it, there’s a fraction of a second where you feel a kind of … letdown, although that’s too strong a word for it. It’s like you miss the suspense of the hunt. Or something of the sort.
Then I heard the front door open.
Tatters went skittering out of the kitchen, yap-yap-yapping, and Mrs. Glynn said, “Sweetums! Did you miss me?”
Martine and I stared at each other.
“Was he a lonely boy. Was he a lonesome boy,” Mrs. Glynn crooned, proceeding steadily closer. “Oh, oh, oh. I wonder what I—”
A purse or shopping bag was set down on a hard surface, but she continued moving toward us. “Maybe a cup of tea,” she said. “Or hot water with some lemon; that might be more … My, those cabdrivers talk and talk, don’t they? How he did go on! I’ve never understood what makes cabdrivers so …”
She entered the kitchen. I seemed to have run out of oxygen.
Martine said, in a normal tone, “Do you think she left a list in the parlor?”
My jaw dropped.
“Because no way would she go off and not tell us what she wanted done,” Martine said, and she took a step toward the kitchen, still talking. “I bet she left a list someplace and we just have to find it, or else we could call the office and see if—”
Her voice was louder now — loud enough even for someone hard of hearing, although it had started out soft. She was letting our presence dawn on Mrs. Glynn by degrees. “Maybe Ray Oakley would know. Do you think?” she asked.
I said, “Well …,” and followed after her. I had no choice. I stuffed the plastic bag in my jacket pocket as we emerged from the pantry.
Mrs. Glynn was standing beside the stove, wearing this kind of flown-open expression. Both hands were pressed to her chest. She said, “Oh!” And then, “How …?”
“Look! There she is!” Martine told me. “Mrs. Glynn! Great to see you!”
“Why, it’s … Barnaby,” Mrs. Glynn said. “Barnaby and young …”
“We’re just covering for Ray Oakley,” Martine said. “I hope we didn’t give you a scare. Ray couldn’t make it today, and so he sent us instead, and when nobody answered the door—”
“But … today? Was he coming today?” Mrs. Glynn asked.
She had a long, drapey coat on, and her hair was screwed into those bottle-cap curls that old-lady beauty shops favor. It made her face look naked and uncertain. She said, “I don’t think he was due to come today. Was he?”
“Well, maybe he wasn’t,” I said. I turned to Martine. “Do you think we made a mistake?”
“We must have,” she said promptly. “Okay! Better be running along!”
“Wrong?” Mrs. Glynn asked. She stared from one of us to the other.
“Sorry about the mix-up,” I said as we sidled past her. “See you, Mrs. Glynn! Bye-bye!”
And we escaped.
Before we went on to Mr. Shank’s, I had Martine drive past my apartment so I could stash Sophia’s money. No sense tempting fate. I ran in, leaving Martine in the truck, and hid the plastic bag behind the bar.
What had Sophia been thinking of, choosing a plastic bag? Had she wanted her aunt to know for sure that this money was a substitution?
It would serve her right if I kept it, I thought. Kept it and bought a car with it — say a used VW. One of those cute little Beetles.
No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that.
I smoothed a jumble of T-shirts over the money, and I left.
Mr. Shank, then Mrs. Portland, then Mrs. Figg. Wouldn’t you know Mrs. Figg was the toughest. She wanted eight strands of Christmas lights woven around the two boxwoods beside her front door — a job that just about froze our fingers off — and then when we got done she said it looked artificial. “Artificial!” I said. “Of course it looks artificial. These are red and green and blue lightbulbs; what occurrence in nature are they supposed to imitate?”
“I mean, they’re spaced artificially. I wanted them more random.”
So Martine and I did them over. When we’d finished, Mrs. Figg said that she had no intention of paying for the extra time it took. She said anybody with half a brain would have done it right the first time. I said, “Have it your way, Mrs. Figg. Merry Christmas.”
It was worth it just to see the look on her face. She hated it when someone deprived her of a good argument.
That was our last job of the day, luckily. (By now it was completely dark.) I dropped Martine at her brother’s, and just as she was hopping out, I said, “Thanks for the help with, you know. The money.”
“No problem,” she told me, and then she slammed the door, because her sister-in-law was on the front porch, itching to get to the hospital.
This was Sophia’s last night home before she left for the long Christmas weekend, and we had talked about having dinner at some not too expensive restaurant whenever I got off work. I figured that was my chance to return her money. It did occur to me, Oh, Lord, I hope now she won’t go out and buy me a Christmas present. But I didn’t want to wait till Christmas was over, because I worried about keeping that much cash around.
She was leaving a message on my machine when I walked into the apartment. “… and I would just like to know …,” she was saying.
I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Barnaby,” she said. “Would you please tell me what is going on?”
“Huh?”
“What were you doing at Aunt Grace’s house? Why did you and that Martine person go there when you surely must have known she would be out? I couldn’t believe my ears. I said to Aunt Grace, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘Who did you say was there?’ ”
I put the receiver back down.
Then I thought, Oops.
It was my body proceeding without me again. I didn’t hang up on purpose. I almost seemed to forget that I had to keep the receiver off the hook to continue talking.