Read Online A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online Page B

looked around me. Faster? People? Move? What was the deeper significance of that? But all I saw was the usual crowd, churning toward the stairs in the usual hobbling manner. “It always takes me by surprise, what a different atmosphere Philadelphia has from Baltimore,” she said, and I said, “Atmosphere. Ah,” and stumbled as I started up the steps, I was so intent on analyzing the atmosphere.
    In the terminal, I stopped and faced her, wondering if her goodbye, at least, might be instructive. “Well,” I said, “I enjoyed our conversation.”
    “Yes! Me too!” she told me. But she continued walking, and so I was forced to follow. She said, “I thought that was so fascinating about your company. Where are you headed?”
    “Where am I headed,” I repeated, sounding like a moron.
    “Does your daughter live nearby?”
    “Oh. Yes, she’s off Rittenhouse Square.”
    “So’s my mother. Shall we share a cab?”
    “Well …”
    It hadn’t occurred to me that my actions would be observed at the other end of my trip. I said, “No, thanks; I—”
    “Though it is a nice day to walk,” she said.
    A nice day?
    We followed a group of teenagers through the Twenty-ninth Street exit, but I was dragging my heels, pondering how to get out of this. Suppose, by some horrible coincidence, Sophia’s mother lived in Natalie’s building! What then?
    The weather did seem to have improved, I found when we reached the sidewalk. The temperature had risen some, and the sun was trying to shine. I said, “It’s still kind of damp underfoot, though.” I was looking toward the line of taxicabs, hoping she would change her mind and take one. But she walked right past them, and it was true she had those boots on.
    On Market Street, she asked, “Are you bringing your daughter a present?”
    “No,” I said. I flipped my jacket collar up. (Tweed was not half as warm as leather.) “This was such a sudden decision,” I said. “She’s probably not even home! I should just cut my losses and grab the next train back.”
    “Darn,” Sophia said, not appearing to hear me. “If I’d thought, we could have picked up something in the station. They have all those boutiques there.”
    “Well, no great loss,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what to get her, anyhow.”
    “You could have bought a stuffed animal. Something of that sort. All little girls like stuffed animals.”
    We veered around a man pushing a grocery cart full of rags. Sophia’s pace had grown leisurely and wafting. I had a sense of being dragged backward. “When I was nine,” she said, “my favorite toy was a stuffed raccoon named Ariadne.”
    “Ariadne!”
    “Well, I was extremely fanciful. I liked the Greek myths and all that. It’s because I was an only child. I was quite the little reader, as you might imagine.”
    She had the only child’s elderly way of speaking too, I noticed. But I didn’t point that out to her.
    “My father kept forgetting Ariadne’s name,” she was saying. “Most often he called her Rodney. ‘Sophia! Come and get Rodney! She’s out here on the porch, and there’s supposed to be a storm!’”
    She laughed.
    I looked at her then and knew, for a fact, that she was not my angel. She was an ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged bank employee with no particular life of her own, and it showed what a sorry state my life had come to that I could have imagined otherwise even for an instant.
    If I’d had the nerve, I would have turned around then and there. Already half my Saturday had gone to waste. But it would have seemed peculiar, just wheeling and racing off with no good reason. So I dug my hands in my pockets and kept going.
    I really hated this city, come to think of it—these wide, pale, bleak sidewalks littered with blowing rubbish, and the bombed-out-looking buildings.
    I said, “Where does your mother live, exactly?”
    “On Walnut Street,” Sophia said. “How about your daughter?”
    “Locust,” I