A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler

am I supposed to do?”
    “Can’t you get his legs out from under? I shouldn’t have to manage all on my own.”
    “You need to slide the tray off first, for God’s sake,” Jeff told her.
    “Well, you could slide it off yourself instead of just sitting there, dammit!”
    I set down my fork and turned to my mother. “I’ll tell you what’s really bothering you,” I said. (Oh, I always did get sucked in sooner or later.) “You think a thing is worthwhile only if it makes the headlines. Prominent Philanthropist Donates Five Hundred Thousand. You think it’s a waste of time just to carry some lady’s trash out for her.”
    “Yes, I do,” Mom said. “And it’s a waste of money too. Our money.”
    “Well, I knew we’d get around to that sooner or later.”
    “Our eighty-seven hundred dollars,” she said, “that you have never paid us back a cent of because you earn barely a subsistence wage at that so-called job of yours.”
    “Margot,” my father said. “He doesn’t have to pay us back.”
    “Of course he has to pay us back! It isn’t your average household expense: buying off your son’s burglary victims!”
    “He is not required to pay us back, and you are behaving abominably.!” my father said.
    The silence was that sharp-edged kind that follows gunshots or shattering claps of thunder. J.P. stopped whimpering. Jeff and Wicky froze on either side of him. My mother sat very straight-backed in her seat. It was a lot more obvious now that she was just a Polish girl from Canton, scared to death Jeffrey Gaitlin might find her common.
    Strange how always, at moments like these, the table finally felt full enough.
    I had my brother come out with me and move his car so I could make my getaway. At first he tried to stall, saying they were about to leave themselves if I would just hold my horses. But I said, “I need to go now” and so he came, muttering and complaining.
    “Geez, Barn,” he said as he trailed me down the steps. “You take everything so personally. Mom was just being Mom; it’s no big deal.”
    “I knew she’d bring up that money,” I told him.
    “If you knew, why let it bother you?”
    We stopped beside my car, and I zipped my jacket. “What’s our next occasion? Easter?” I asked. “Remind me to be out of town.”
    “You should lighten up,” Jeff said. “They don’t ask all that much of you.”
    “Only that I change into some totally other person,” I told him.
    “That’s not true. If you made the least bit of effort; showed you cared. If you dressed a little better when you came to see them, for instance—”
    “I’m dressed fine!” I glanced down at myself. “Well, so maybe the tie doesn’t go. But the tie wasn’t my idea, was it.”
    “Barnaby. You’re wearing a pajama top.”
    “Oh,” I said. “You noticed?”
    I had thought it didn’t look much different from a regular plaid flannel shirt.
    “And both knees are poking through your jeans, and you haven’t shaved in a week, I bet—”
    “I did have a haircut, though,” I said, hoping he would assume that meant a barber had done it.
    He squinted at me and said, “When?”
    “Look, pal,” I said. “Could we just get a move on here? I’m freezing!”
    And I strode off toward my car, which forced him to go to his car, sighing a big cloud of fog to show how I tried his patience. His car was one of those macho four-by-fours. You’d think he rode the range all day, herding cattle or something.
    A four-by-four, and a Princeton degree, and a desk half the size of a tennis court on the top floor of the Gaitlin Foundation. None of which I wanted for myself, Lord knows. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, as I unlocked my car door, how comfortable it must be to be Jeff. Things just seemed to come easier for him. Me, I’d been in trouble from adolescence on. I’d been messing up and breaking things and disappointing everyone around me, while Jeff just coolly went about his business. It’s as if he were