A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler Page A

with scrap lumber and rusty shovels and plastic wading pools propped on their sides, everything skimmed with snow. The conductor came through saying, “Tickets, please.” When Sophia handed him hers, I saw that she wore a Timex watch with a wide black leather wristband.
    She wouldn’t have any message for me. She was merely annoyed that I’d sat down beside her; and here I was, like a fool, waiting for her to inform me how to begin my life.
    Wouldn’t she laugh at me if she knew!
    When Great-Granddad saw his angel, she lit the air of the woodenworks. A golden dust, she dispersed, floating in the gloom , he reported. Lingering for an hour, at least, after she left the room. The rhyme was intentional. He wrote up his encounter in the form of an epic poem whose scheme was A, A, A … till he ran out of words to rhyme with A, evidently, and then B, B, B …, and so forth. Not what you would call a literary masterpiece. Even so, my family treasured it. They kept it in a glass-doored bookcase in my father’s study. A gray cloth ledger with maroon leather corners, containing three pages of penciled business accounts followed by seventeen pages of “A Providential Visitation, April 1898.” Since then, the tradition was for all the Gaitlins to file reports on their angels—though Great-Granddad’s was the only poem. Myself, I planned to stick to prose, when the time came. And right from paragraph one, I would stress my reliability, my solid and trustworthy nature. It’s a mistake to go all misty and poetic when you’re trying to convince your readers you’ve seen an angel.
    Sophia said, “Excuse me, please.”
    She had her bag in both hands now, and she was perched on the edge of her seat, knees angled toward me, getting ready to rise. I said, “Oh!” and stood up and stepped into the aisle. She sidled out, bulky and wide-hipped, and started toward the front of the car. Was she leaving me? What was she doing? I sat back down and watched her bypass first one empty seat and then another; so I was partly reassured. She didn’t stop at the rest room, either, but vanished through the end door. Maybe she was buying a snack. And her ticket stub was still in its overhead slot, her newspaper still in her seat. I was pretty sure she’d be returning.
    I checked to see what news items she’d been reading. Plans for a merger between two banks. A growing concern over Maryland’s bond rating.
    She was probably some kind of financial wheeler-dealer. And I was out of my mind; and this train trip had cost me a whole lot of money for nothing, not to mention the goodwill of my best-paying customer. Mrs. Morey had wanted me to take down all her curtains for laundering today. I’d told her at the very last minute that I would be out of town. “Out of town!” she said. “You can’t be out of town! This isn’t a Philadelphia week; it’s the first Saturday of the month!”
    Oh, my life was a wide-open book to half the old ladies in Baltimore.
    There was a sudden rise in the noise level, and I looked toward the front of the car and saw Sophia stepping through the door, gliding back in my direction at a stately, level pace. She hadn’t left me, after all. I felt so grateful that when I noticed something in her hands, I thought for a second she was bringing me a gift. But it was only a Styrofoam cup of coffee. She paused next to me, and I jumped up, and—oh, God.
    Jostled against her coffee. Spilled it all down her front.
    “Geez!” I said. “I’m so—geez! I’m such an oaf!”
    “That’s all right,” she murmured, but in a faint and reluctant tone that made it clear it was not all right. And who could blame her? Dark splotches stained the feather coat. Even her hands were wet. She shook one hand in the air, meanwhile hanging on to the cup with the other. “Allow me,” I said, and I took the cup away from her—both of us still standing, braced against the swaying of the train—so that she could get a tissue out of her