Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Any breakfast left?”

“There’s plenty,” Abby said. Nora stood up again to fetch the coffeepot.

“Where’re the kids?” Denny asked when he was seated.

“In the sunroom,” Abby said. “I hope they didn’t wake you.”

“Never heard a thing.”

“How was your trip?”

“Not too bad.” He helped himself to the eggs.

“You could have waited till this morning, you know. The train’s empty on Sunday mornings.”

“It was empty last night,” he said.

Stem asked, “You still working with those kitchen people?”

“Naw, I quit that job.”

“So what are you doing now?”

“I’m here now,” Denny said, and he sent Stem a level gaze.

Nora said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have to get the boys ready for church.”

Denny transferred his gaze to her for a moment, and then he picked up his fork and started eating.

The little boys were thrilled to hear that Denny was awake. They swarmed back into the kitchen and climbed all over him and pelted him with questions and demands — had he brought his baseball glove? would he take them down to the creek? — while Heidi barked and jittered around them and tried to insert herself into their midst. Denny shrugged them away good-naturedly and promised they’d do something later, and then Nora herded them upstairs, Stem following close behind with Sammy on his back, and Red went off to the sunroom with the morning paper.

That left just Abby and Denny. As soon as they were alone, she poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down again. “Dennis,” she said.

“Oh-oh.”

“What?”

“Gotta watch out if you’re calling me ‘Dennis,’ ” he said. He spooned some jam onto his plate.

“Denny, I know what Jeannie must have told you. How I’m so dithery nowadays I need a keeper.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“Well, whatever she said, I just want to explain my side of it.”

He cocked his head.

“This thing that got them all worried,” she said, “I mean the reason Stem and Nora thought they should move in with us: it wasn’t the way it sounds. I didn’t … wander off and get lost like some mental defective or something. What happened was, it was the night of that terrible storm, the one they’re calling a ‘derecho,’ remember that? Oh, Lord, ‘derecho,’ ‘El Niño’… all these words we throw around these days. Tell me that’s not global warming! But anyhow, this storm knocked over one of the Ellises’ giant trees, right on the line between our two properties. That’s not to mention the hundreds of other trees, as well as shutting down half the city’s electrical power, including ours.”

“Bummer,” Denny said. He bit into his toast.

“You should have seen that tree, Denny. It looked like a huge stalk of broccoli lying on its side, only with roots. And the hole it left! A hole as deep as a basement. You can understand why a person would be curious about it.”

“What are you saying: you went out to look at the hole?”

“Well, probably.”

“Probably?”

“I mean, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what I did.”

“Mom. It was a storm the strength of a hurricane. You must remember if you went out in it.”

“I do remember. I mean, I remember I was out in it; I just don’t remember going out. See, sometimes my mind skips across a few minutes, like a needle on a record. I’ll be doing something ordinary, but then all at once it’s later, you know? Maybe five or ten minutes later; I’m not sure. And there’s a completely empty gap between the last minute and the current minute. It’s not like when you phase out doing some routine chore but you’re still aware that time has passed. This is more like … waking after surgery.”

“That sounds like a mini stroke or something,” Denny said. “Or maybe a seizure.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Have you mentioned it to a doctor?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But it could be there’s some easy fix.”

“No fix I’d want at my age,” Abby said. “And besides, it doesn’t happen very often. Not often at all.”

“So, okay, you’re telling me you just found yourself out in a rainstorm, looking down into a hole.”

“Well, it wasn’t a rainstorm anymore. The rain had stopped. But otherwise, yes, that’s it exactly. And I was in my nightgown and slippers, and I didn’t have my house key. Well, why should I? Usually, that lock is set on manual. Oh, I despise an automatic lock! It must have been your father’s doing; he’s always going around fiddling with things. And then naturally he couldn’t hear me when I called; he was sound asleep by then, and you can see how deaf he’s grown. I called, I knocked … I couldn’t ring the doorbell, of course, because the power was out, and anyhow he doesn’t hear the doorbell most of the time. I even tried throwing pebbles at our bedroom windows, but that doesn’t work as well in real life as it does in books. So finally I thought, well, I would just settle in the hammock and wait till morning. It wasn’t so bad, really. It was kind of nice. All the lights were out, the streetlights and people’s house lights, and the only sounds were the leaves dripping and the tree frogs peeping. I curled up in the hammock and went to sleep, and in the morning when I woke it was still too early for your dad to be up, so I figured I’d walk down the block a ways to see the damage. The whole neighborhood was a disaster zone, Denny! Enormous trunks and branches lying clear across the street, electrical lines draped everywhere, a car smushed in front of the Browns’ place … And that’s when Sax Brown saw me, when I went to check the smushed car to make sure nobody was trapped inside. Oh, I know what it must have looked like: I was half a block from home in a nightgown with a muddy hem. Not very confidence-inspiring!” And she gave a little laugh.

Denny said, “Okay …”

“But it’s no reason to call in the nursemaids.”

“No, it doesn’t sound like it,” Denny said.

“Oh, good.”

“It sounds more like, say, a confluence of circumstances outside of your control. I can certainly relate to that .”

“So you agree that none of you needs to be here,” Abby said. “Not that I don’t love having you, of course, each and every one of you. But I certainly don’t need you.”

“Why didn’t you tell Stem all this?”

“Stem? Well, I did. I tried to. I tried to tell everyone.”

“Why don’t you ask him to leave? Why ask me and not him?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not asking you to leave. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. I’m just saying I don’t need a babysitter. You understand that. Stem just … doesn’t. He’s more on your father’s wavelength, you know? He and Dad put their heads together sometimes and develop these notions , you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Denny said.

But then just as Abby was sitting back in her seat with an expression of relief, her forehead finally losing its tightness, he said, “Same old same old,” and stood up and walked out of the kitchen.

It was a piece of bad luck that one of Abby’s orphans showed up for Sunday lunch. Atta, her name was, and some complicated last name — a recent immigrant in her late fifties or so, overweight and putty-skinned, wearing a heavy, belted dress and stockings that looked like Ace bandages. (It was ninety-two degrees out, and stockings had not been seen in Baltimore for months.) The first anybody knew of her, she was standing outside the front screen door rat-tat-tatting and calling, “Hello? I have come to the right place?”

“Khello” was how she pronounced it, and “have” sounded like “khev.”