Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Patience, in fact, was what the Whitshanks imagined to be the theme of their two stories — patiently lying in wait for what they believed should come to them. “Biding their time,” as Junior had put it, and as Merrick might have put it too if she had been willing to talk about it. But somebody more critical might say that the theme was envy. And someone else, someone who had known the family intimately and forever (but there wasn’t any such person), might ask why no one seemed to realize that another, unspoken theme lay beneath the first two: in the long run, both stories had led to disappointment.

Junior got his house, but it didn’t seem to make him as happy as you might expect, and he had often been seen contemplating it with a puzzled, forlorn sort of look on his face. He spent the rest of his life fidgeting with it, altering it, adding closets, resetting flagstones, as if he hoped that achieving the perfect abode would finally open the hearts of those neighbors who never acknowledged him. Neighbors whom he didn’t even like, as it turned out.

Merrick got her husband, but he was a cold, aloof man unless he was drinking, in which case he grew argumentative and boorish. They never had children, and Merrick spent most of her time alone in the Sarasota place so as to avoid her mother-in-law, whom she detested.

The disappointments seemed to escape the family’s notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

ON THE VERY FIRST DAY OF 2012, Abby began disappearing.

She and Red had kept Stem’s three boys overnight so that Stem and Nora could go to a New Year’s Eve party, and Stem showed up to collect them around ten o’clock the next morning. Like everyone else in the family, he gave only a token knock before walking on into the house. “Hello?” he called. He stopped in the hall and stood listening, idly ruffling the dog’s ears. The only sounds came from his children in the sunroom. “Hello,” he said again. He walked toward their voices.

The boys sat on the rug around a Parcheesi board, three stair-step towheads dressed scruffily in jeans. “Dad,” Petey said, “tell Sammy he can’t play with us. He doesn’t add the dots up right!”

“Where’s your grandma?” Stem asked.

“I don’t know. Tell him, Dad! And he rolled the dice so hard, one went under the couch.”

“Grandma said I could play,” Sammy said.

Stem walked back into the living room. “Mom? Dad?” he called.

No answer.

He went to the kitchen, where he found his father sitting at the breakfast table reading the Baltimore Sun . Over the past few years Red had grown hard of hearing, and it wasn’t till Stem entered his line of vision that he looked up from his newspaper. “Hey!” he said. “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year to you.”

“How was the party?”

“It was good. Where’s Mom?”

“Oh, somewhere around. Want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“I just made it.”

“I’m okay.”

Stem walked over to the back door and looked out. A lone cardinal sat in the nearest dogwood, bright as a leftover leaf, but otherwise the yard was empty. He turned away. “I’m thinking we’ll have to fire Guillermo,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“ Guillermo . We should get rid of him. De’Ontay said he showed up hungover again on Friday.”

Red made a clucking sound and folded his newspaper. “Well, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of other guys out there nowadays,” he said.

“Kids behave okay?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Thanks for looking after them. I’ll go get their stuff together.”

Stem went back into the hall, climbed the stairs, and headed toward the bedroom that used to be his sisters’. It was full of bunk beds now, and the floor was a welter of tossed-off pajamas and comic books and backpacks. He began stuffing any clothing he found into the backpacks, taking no particular notice of what belonged to which child. Then, with the backpacks slung over one shoulder, he stepped into the hall again. He called, “Mom?”

He looked into his parents’ bedroom. No Abby. The bed was neatly made and the bathroom door stood open, as did the doors of all the rooms lining the U-shaped hall — Denny’s old room, which now served as Abby’s study, and the children’s bathroom and the room that used to be his. He hoisted the backpacks higher on his shoulder and went downstairs.

In the sunroom, he told the boys, “Okay, guys, get a move on. You need to find your jackets. Sammy, where are your shoes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, look for them,” he said.

He went back to the kitchen. Red was standing at the counter, pouring another cup of coffee. “We’re off, Dad,” Stem told him. His father gave no sign he had heard him. “Dad?” Stem said.

Red turned.

“We’re leaving now,” Stem said.

“Oh! Well, tell Nora Happy New Year.”

“And you thank Mom for us, okay? Do you think she’s running an errand?”

“Married?”

“ Errand . Could she be out running an errand?”

“Oh, no. She doesn’t drive anymore.”

“She doesn’t?” Stem stared at him. “But she was driving just last week,” he said.

“No, she wasn’t.”

“She drove Petey to his play date.”

“That was a month ago, at least. Now she doesn’t drive anymore.”

“Why not?” Stem asked.

Red shrugged.

“Did something happen?”

“I think something happened,” Red said.

Stem set the boys’ backpacks on the breakfast table. “Like what?” he asked.

“She wouldn’t say. Well, not like an accident or anything. The car looked fine. But she came home and said she’d given up driving.”

“Came home from where?” Stem asked.

“From driving Petey to his play date.”

“Jeez,” Stem said.

He and Red looked at each other for a moment.

“I was thinking we ought to sell her car,” Red said, “but that would leave us with just my pickup. Besides, what if she changes her mind, you know?”

“Better she doesn’t change her mind, if something happened,” Stem said.

“Well, it’s not as if she’s old. Just seventy-two next week! How’s she going to get around all the rest of her life?”

Stem crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. It was obvious no one was down there — the lights were off — but still he called, “Mom?”

Silence.

He closed the door and headed back to the sunroom, with Red following close behind. “Guys,” Stem said. “I need to know where your grandma is.”

The boys were just as he’d left them — sprawled around the Parcheesi board, jackets not on, Sammy still in his socks. They looked up at him blankly.

“She was here when you came downstairs, right?” Stem asked. “She fixed you breakfast.”

“We haven’t had any breakfast,” Tommy told him.

“She didn’t fix you breakfast?”

“She asked did we want cereal or toast and then she went away to the kitchen.”

Sammy said, “I never, ever get the Froot Loops. There is only two in the pack and Petey and Tommy always get them.”

“That’s because me and Tommy are the oldest,” Petey said.

“It’s not fair, Daddy.”

Stem turned to Red and found him staring at him intently, as if waiting for a translation. “She wasn’t here for breakfast,” Stem told him.

“Let’s check upstairs.”

“I did check upstairs.”

But they headed for the stairs anyway, like people hunting their keys in the same place over and over because they can’t believe that isn’t where they are. At the top of the stairs, they walked into the children’s bathroom — a chaotic scene of crumpled towels, toothpaste squiggles, plastic boats on their sides in the bottom of the tub. They walked out again and into Abby’s study. They found her sitting on the daybed, fully dressed and wearing an apron. She wasn’t visible from the hall, but she surely must have heard Stem calling. The dog was stretched out on the rug at her feet. When the men walked in, both Abby and the dog glanced up and Abby said, “Oh, hello there.”