Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Mom!” her children protested afterward, and she would say, “What? What’d I do wrong?”

“It’s none of your business, Mom! He was hoping you wouldn’t notice! He was probably imagining you couldn’t even guess he was foreign.”

“Nonsense. He should be proud to be foreign. I know I would be.”

In unison, her children would groan.

She was so intrusive, so sure of her welcome, so utterly lacking in self-consciousness. She assumed she had the right to ask them any questions she liked. She held the wrongheaded notion that if they didn’t want to discuss some intimate personal problem, maybe they would change their minds if she turned the tables on them. (Was this something she’d learned in social work?) “Let’s put this the other way around,” she would say, hunching forward cozily. “Let’s say you advise me . Say I have a boyfriend who’s acting too possessive.” She would give a little laugh. “I’m at my wit’s end!” she would cry. “Tell me what I should do!”

“Really, Mom.”

They had as little contact as possible with her orphans — the army veterans who were having trouble returning to normal life, the nuns who had left their orders, the homesick Chinese students at Hopkins — and they thought Thanksgiving was hell. They snuck white bread into the house, and hot dogs full of nitrites. They cowered when they heard she’d be in charge of their school picnic. And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. “Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children’s opinion.

Yet when she went back to work, after her last child started school, Jeannie told Amanda it wasn’t the relief that she had expected. “I thought I would be glad,” she said, “but then I catch myself wondering, ‘Where’s Mom? Why isn’t she breathing down my neck?’ ”

“You can notice a toothache’s gone too,” Amanda said. “It doesn’t mean you want it back again.”

In May, Red had a heart attack.

It wasn’t a very dramatic one. He experienced a few ambiguous symptoms on a job site, was all, and De’Ontay insisted on driving him to the emergency room. Still, it came as a shock to his family. He was only seventy-four! He had seemed so healthy; he climbed ladders the same as ever and carried heavy loads, and he didn’t weigh a pound more than he had when he’d gotten married. But now Abby wanted him to retire, and both the girls agreed with her. What if he lost consciousness while he was up on a roof? Red said he would go crazy if he retired. Stem said maybe he could keep on working but quit going up on roofs. Denny was not on hand for this discussion, but he most probably would have sided with Stem, for once.

Red prevailed, and he was back on the job shortly after being discharged from the hospital. He looked fine. He did say he felt a bit weak, and he admitted to getting tired earlier in the day. But maybe that was all in his head; he was observed several times taking his own pulse, or laying one palm in a testing way across the center of his chest. “Are you all right?” Abby would ask. He would say, “Of course I’m all right,” in an irritated tone that he had never used in the past.

He had hearing aids now, but he claimed they were no help. Often he just left them sitting on top of his bureau — two pink plastic nubbins the size and shape of chicken hearts. As a result, his conversations with his customers didn’t always go smoothly. More and more, he allowed Stem to deal with that part of the business, although you could tell it made him sad to give it up.

He was letting the house go, too. Stem was the first to notice that. While once upon a time the house was maintained to a fare-thee-well — not a loose nail anywhere, not a chink in the window putty — now there were signs of slippage. Amanda arrived with her daughter one evening and found Stem reinstalling the spline on the front screen door, and when she asked, offhandedly, “Problem?” Stem straightened and said, “He’d never have let this happen in the old days.”

“Let what happen?”

“This screen was bagging halfway out of its frame! And the powder-room faucet is dripping, have you noticed?”

“Oh, dear,” Amanda said, and she prepared to follow Elise on into the house.

But Stem said, “It’s like he’s lost interest,” which stopped her in her tracks.

“Like he doesn’t care, almost,” Stem said. “I said, ‘Dad, your front screen’s loose,’ and he said, ‘I can’t keep on top of every last little thing, goddammit!’ ”

This was huge: for Red to snap at Stem. Stem had always been his favorite.

Amanda said, “Maybe this place is getting to be too much for him.”

“Not only that, but Mom left a kettle on the stove the other day, and when Nora stopped by, the kettle was whistling full-blast and Dad was writing checks at the dining-room table, totally unaware.”

“He didn’t hear the kettle ?”

“Evidently not.”

“That kettle stabs my eardrums,” Amanda said. “It may have been what turned him deaf in the first place.”

“I’m beginning to think they shouldn’t be living alone,” Stem told her.

“Really. Shouldn’t they.”

And she walked past him into the house with a thoughtful look on her face.

The next evening, there was a family meeting. Stem, Jeannie, and Amanda just happened to drop in; no spouses and no children. Stem looked suspiciously spruced up, while Amanda was as perfectly coiffed and lipsticked as always in the tailored gray pantsuit she’d worn to the office. Only Jeannie had made no effort; she wore her usual T-shirt and rumpled khakis, and her horsetail of long black hair was straggling out of its scrunchie. Abby was thrilled. When she’d seated them all in the living room, she said, “Isn’t this nice? Just like the old days! Not that I don’t love to see your families too, of course—”

Red said, “What’s up?”

“Well,” Amanda said, “we’ve been thinking about the house.”

“What about it?”

“We’re thinking it’s a lot to look after, what with you and Mom getting older.”

“I could look after this house with one hand tied behind my back,” Red said.

You could tell from the pause that followed that his children were considering whether to take issue with this. Surprisingly, it was Abby who came to their aid. “Well, of course you can, sweetie,” she said, “but don’t you think it’s time you gave yourself a rest?”

“A dress!”

His children half laughed, half groaned.

“You see what I have to put up with,” Abby told them. “He will not wear his hearing aids! And then when he tries to fake it, he makes the most unlikely guesses. He’s just … perverse! I tell him I want to go to the farmers’ market and he says, ‘You’re joining the army ?’ ”

“It’s not my fault if you mumble,” Red said.

Abby gave an audible sigh.

“Let’s stick to the subject,” Amanda said briskly. “Mom, Dad: we’re thinking you might want to move.”

“Move!” Red and Abby cried together.

“What with Dad’s heart, and Mom not driving anymore … we’re thinking maybe a retirement community. Wouldn’t that be the answer?”

“Retirement community, huh,” Red said. “That’s for old people. That’s where all those snooty old ladies go when their husbands die. You think we’d be happy in a place like that? You think they’d be glad to see us?”

“Of course they’d be glad, Dad. You’ve probably remodeled all their houses for them.”