A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler

“You want me to add the salt to your account?” I asked.
    “Yes, please,” she said. “And then maybe when the weather gets bad, you could come sprinkle my walks. I can’t have the UPS man falling down and suing me.”
    Ray Oakley always claimed, every year when she gave him his birthday card, that she had a little crush on him. But I knew better than that. She didn’t have a crush on any of us. It’s just that service people were the only human beings she saw anymore.
    My parents lived in Guilford, in a half-timbered, Tudor-style house with leaded-glass windows. Out front beside the gas lantern was this really jarring piece of modern sculpture: a giant Lucite triangle balanced upside down on a pole. My mother went after Culture with a vengeance.
    I showed up for dinner late, hoping my brother had gotten there first; but no such luck. Mine was the only car in the driveway. So I spent some time locking my doors and double-checking the locks, studying my keys to see which pocket they should go in. Eventually I was detected, though. My father called, “Barnaby?” and I turned to find him standing on the front steps. Against the light from the hall chandelier he looked like a stretched-out question mark, with his stooped, hunched, narrow shoulders. “What’s keeping you?” he asked.
    “Oh, I’m just …”
    “Come on in!”
    I climbed the steps, and he stood back to let me by. He was taller than me and more graceful by far—had a Fred Astaire kind of elegance that my brother and I had totally missed out on. Nor did we get his soft fair hair or his long-chinned parchment face. My mother’s genes had won every round.
    “Happy birthday, son,” he told me, giving my arm a squeeze just above the elbow.
    “Well, thanks.”
    That about wrapped it up. We had nothing further to talk about. As we crossed the hall, Dad sent a desperate glance toward the second-floor landing. “Margot?” he called. “Barnaby’s here! Aren’t you coming down?”
    “In a minute.”
    The living room had an expectant look, like a stage. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and somebody’s symphony poured from the armoire where the stereo was hidden. Over the mantel hung more of my mother’s Culture: a barn door, it could have been, taken off its hinges and framed in aluminum strips.
    “Well, now,” my father said.
    He seized the poker and started rearranging embers.
    “Which birthday is this, anyway?” he asked, finally.
    “Thirtieth,” I told him.
    “Good grief.”
    “Right.”
    Then we heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. “Happy birthday!” she cried, hurrying in with her arms outstretched.
    “Thanks,” I said, and I gave her a peck on the cheek.
    She had dressed up, but in that offhand way that Guilford women do it—A-line skirt, tailored silk shirt, navy leather flats with acorns tied to the toes. Her one mistake was her hair. She dyed her hair dead black and wore it sleeked into a tight French roll. It made her look white-faced and witchy, but would I be the one to tell her? I enjoyed it. You see a woman who’s reinvented herself, who’s shown a kind of genius at picking up the social clues, it’s a real pleasure to catch her in a blunder. I watched as she bustled about—snatching my jacket, darting off to the closet, rushing back to settle me on the couch. “We haven’t seen you in ages,” she said when she’d sat down next to me. Then she jumped up: cushion tilted off-center in the armchair opposite. “You’re skin and bones!” she said over her shoulder. “Have you lost weight?”
    “No, Mom.”
    “I’ll bet anything you’re not eating right.”
    “I’m eating fine,” I said.
    If I’d lost weight every time Mom claimed, I’d have been registering in the negative on the bathroom scale.
    Now she was off to pull open a desk drawer. The woman could not sit still. Always something discontented about her, something glittery and overwrought that set my teeth on edge. “Where is it?” she