Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

She allowed both boys to watch the afternoon kiddie shows on TV, although ordinarily she would not have. Meanwhile, she let Clarence in from the yard — he was just a puppy at the time, not to be trusted alone in the house — and he raced to the sunroom and scrabbled up onto the couch to lick the boys’ faces. First Douglas shrank back, but he was clearly interested, in a guarded sort of way, and so Abby didn’t intervene.

When the girls came home from school, they made a big fuss over him. They dragged him upstairs to look through the toy chest, competing for his attention and asking him questions in honeyed voices. Douglas remained silent, eyes lowered. The puppy came along with them, and Douglas spent most of his time delivering small, awkward pats to the top of the puppy’s head.

Around suppertime, Red arrived with a paper grocery bag. “Some clothes and things for Douglas,” he told Abby, setting the bag on the kitchen counter. “I borrowed Lonesome’s apartment keys.”

“How is he?”

“Mighty uncomfortable when I saw him. Turns out it’s his appendix. While I was there they took him to surgery. He’ll need to stay over one night, they said; he can come home late tomorrow. I did ask about the sitter, but it seems she’s got some kind of leg trouble. Lonesome said he felt bad about saddling us with the boy.”

“Well, it’s not as if he’s a bother,” Abby said. “He might as well not be here.”

At supper, Douglas sat on an unabridged dictionary Red had placed on a chair. He ate seven peas, total, which he picked up one by one with his fingers. The table conversation went on around him and above him, but there was a sense among all of them that they had a watchful audience, that they were speaking for his benefit.

Abby got him ready for bed, making him pee and brush his teeth before she put him in a pair of many-times-washed seersucker pajamas that she found in the grocery bag. Seersucker seemed too lightweight for the season, but that was her only choice. She settled him in the other twin bed in Denny’s room, and after she’d drawn up the blankets she hesitated a moment and then planted a kiss on his forehead. His skin was warm and slightly sweaty, as if he’d just expended some great effort. “Now, you have a good, good sleep,” she told him, “and when you wake up it’ll be tomorrow and you can see your daddy.”

Douglas still didn’t speak, he didn’t even change expression, but his face all at once seemed to open up and grow softer and less pinched. At that instant he was not so homely after all.

The next morning Abby had a neighbor drive carpool, because even back in those days, before the child-seat laws, she didn’t feel right letting such a small boy bounce around loose with the others. Once they were on their own, she settled Douglas on the floor in the sunroom with a jigsaw puzzle from Denny’s room. He didn’t put it together, even though it consisted of only eight or ten pieces, but he spent a good hour quietly moving the pieces about, picking up first one and then another and examining it intently, while the puppy sat beside him alert to every movement. Then after she finished her morning chores Abby sat with him on the couch and read him picture books. He liked the ones with animals in them, she could tell, because sometimes when she was about to turn a page he would reach out a hand to hold it down so he could study it a while longer.

When she heard a car at the rear of the house, she thought it was Peg Brown delivering Denny from nursery school. By the time she got to the kitchen, though, Red was walking through the back door. “Oh!” she said. “What are you doing home?”

“Lonesome died,” Red said.

“What?”

“Lawrence. He died.”

“But I thought it was just his appendix!”

“I know,” he said. “I went to his room but he wasn’t there, and the guy in the next bed said he’d been moved to Intensive Care. So I went to Intensive Care but they wouldn’t let me see him, and I was thinking I’d just leave and come back later when all at once this doctor walked out and told me they had lost him. He said they’d worked all night and they’d done what they could but they lost him: peritonitis.”

Something made Abby turn her head, and she saw Douglas in the kitchen doorway. He was gazing up into Red’s face. Abby said, “Oh, sweetheart.” She and Red exchanged glances. How much had he understood? Probably nothing, if you judged by his hopeful expression.

Red said, “Son …”

“It won’t come through to him,” Abby said.

“But we can’t keep it a secret.”

“He’s too young,” Abby said, and then she asked Douglas, “How old are you, sweetheart?”

Neither of them really expected an answer, but after a pause, Douglas held up two fingers. “Two!” Abby cried. She turned back to Red. “I was thinking three,” she said, “but he’s two years old, Red.”

Red sank onto a kitchen chair. “Now what?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” Abby said.

She sat down across from him. Douglas went on watching them.

“You still have the keys, right?” she asked Red. “You’ll have to go back to the apartment, look for papers. Find Lonesome’s next of kin.”

Red said okay and stood up again, like an obedient child.

Then Peg Brown honked out back, and Abby rose to let Denny in.

That evening when she was in Denny’s room, getting Douglas ready for bed, Denny asked her, “Mama?”

“What.”

“When is that little boy going home?”

“Very soon,” she told him. He was hanging around her in a too-close, insistent way, still fully dressed because it wasn’t quite his bedtime yet. “Go on downstairs,” she told him. “Find yourself something to do.”

“Tomorrow is he going?”

“Maybe.”

She waited till she heard his shoes clopping down the stairs, and then she turned back to Douglas. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, looking very neat and clean. That night he’d had a bath, although she had let him skip it the night before. She sat down on the bed beside him and said, “I know I told you that you’d get to see your daddy today. But I was wrong. He couldn’t come.”

Douglas’s gaze was fixed on some middle distance. He appeared to be holding his breath.

“He wanted to, very much. He wanted to see you, but he couldn’t. He can’t.”

That was it, really — the most a two-year-old would be able to comprehend. She stopped speaking. She placed an arm around him, tentatively, but he didn’t relax against her. He sat separate and erect, with perfect posture. After a while she took her arm away, but she went on looking at him.

He lay down, finally, and she covered him up and placed a kiss on his forehead and turned out the light.

In the kitchen, Denny and Jeannie were bickering over a yo-yo, but Mandy looked up from her homework as soon as Abby walked in. “Did you tell him?” she asked. (She was thirteen, and more in touch with what was going on.)

“Well, as much as I could,” Abby said.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to talk.”

“Oh, he has to know how,” Abby said. “It’s just that he’s upset right now.”

“Maybe he’s retarded.”

“But I know he understands me.”

“Mom!” Jeannie broke in. “Denny says this is his yo-yo, when it’s not. He broke his. Tell him, Mom! It’s mine.”

“Stop it, both of you.”

The back door opened and Red stepped in, carrying another grocery bag. All he had said on the phone was to go ahead and eat without him, so Abby’s first question was “What’d you find?”

He set the bag on the table. “The sitter’s this ancient old lady,” he told her. “Her number was Scotch-taped above the phone. By the sound of her, she was way too old to be in charge of a kid. She doesn’t know if he has any relatives, and she doesn’t know where his mother is and says she doesn’t want to know. He’s better off without her, she says.”