Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Oh, okay, thank you, Hugh,” Red said.

Amanda’s Hugh was famous in the family for asking, once, why there seemed to be a diploma under the azalea bushes. He’d been referring to the white PVC drainage pipe leading from the basement sump pump. The family never got over it. (“Seen any diplomas out in the shrubbery lately, Hugh?”) They liked him well enough, but they marveled at how astonishingly impractical he was, how out of touch with matters they considered essential. He couldn’t even replace a wall switch! He was trim and model-handsome and accustomed to admiration, and he kept seizing on new careers and then abandoning them in a fit of impatience. Currently, he owned a restaurant called Thanksgiving that served only turkey dinners.

Jeannie’s Hugh, by contrast, was a handyman who worked at the college Jeannie’d gone to. The other girls had had their hearts set on pre-med students, but evidently one look at unassuming Hugh, with his sawdust-colored beard and his tool belt slung low around his hips, had made Jeannie feel instantly at home. Now, here was someone she could relate to! They married during her senior year, causing some discomfort among the college administrators.

At the moment, he was asking Elise all about her ballet, which was considerate of him. (She’d been left out of the conversation up till then.) “Is it on account of ballet that you’re wearing your hair so tight?” he asked, and Elise said, “Yes, Madame O’Leary requires it,” and sat up taller — a reed-thin, ostentatiously poised child — and touched the little doughnut on the tippy-top of her head.

“But what if you were frizzy-haired and couldn’t make it stay in place?” he asked. “Or what if you were one of those people whose hair will only grow so long?”

“No exceptions are made,” Elise told him severely. “We have to have a chignon.”

“Well, shoot!”

“And also these flowing skirts,” Amanda told him. “They tie them on over their leotards. Everyone expects tutus, but tutus are just for performances.”

Abby said, “Oh, Jeannie, remember when Elise was just born and we dressed her in a tutu?”

“Do I!” Jeannie said. She laughed. “She had three of them, remember? We dressed her in one tutu after the other.”

“Your mom had asked us to babysit,” Abby told Elise. “It was the first time she was leaving you and she felt safer starting with family. So we told her, ‘Go on! Go!’ and the instant she was gone we stripped you down to your diaper and started trying clothes on you. Every single piece of clothing you’d gotten at your baby shower.”

“ I never knew that,” Amanda said, while Elise looked pleased and self-conscious.

“Oh, we’d been dying to get our hands on all those cunning outfits. Not just the tutus but a darling little sailor dress and a bikini swimsuit and then — remember, Jeannie? — navy-ticking coveralls with a hammer loop.”

“Of course I remember,” Jeannie said. “I was the one who gave them to her.”

“Well, we were sort of punch-drunk,” Abby explained to Atta. “Elise was the first grandchild.”

“Or else not,” Denny said.

“What, sweetie?”

“You seem to be forgetting that Susan was the first grandchild.”

“Oh! Well, of course. Yes, I just meant the first grandchild who was close; I mean geographically close. I wouldn’t forget Susan for the world!”

“How is Susan?” Jeannie asked.

“She’s good,” Denny said.

He ladled gravy over his meat and passed the tureen to Atta, who squinted into it and passed it on.

“What’s she doing with her summer?” Abby asked.

“She’s in some kind of music program.”

“Music, how nice! Is she musical?”

“I guess she must be.”

“Which instrument?”

“Clarinet?” Denny said. “Clarinet.”

“Oh, I figured maybe French horn.”

“Why would you figure that?”

“Well, you used to play French horn.”

Denny sliced into his meat.

“What’s Susan doing over the summer?” Red asked.

Everyone looked at him.

“Clarinet, Red,” Abby said finally.

“Eh?”

“Clarinet!”

“My grandson in Milwaukee plays the clarinet,” Mrs. Angell said. “It’s hard to listen to him without giggling, though. Every third or fourth note comes out as this terrible squawk.” She turned to Atta and said, “I have thirteen grandchildren, can you believe it? Do you have grandchildren, Atta?”

“How would that be possible?” Atta demanded.

Another silence fell, this one heavy and muffling, like a blanket, and they all turned their attention to the food.

After lunch Atta took her leave, carrying with her the remains of the store-bought sheet cake they’d served for dessert. (She’d barely touched the tuna salad—“Mercury,” she had announced — but it seemed she had quite a sweet tooth.) Elise joined the other children in the backyard, but everyone else went out onto the porch. Even Nora had been persuaded to leave the kitchen cleanup till later, and Red chose to nap in the mildew-smelling hammock at the south end of the porch rather than up in his room.

“Why are Dad’s arms so splotchy?” Denny asked his sisters in a low voice. The three of them were sharing the porch swing.

But it was Abby who answered, sharp-eared as always. She broke off a conversation with Mrs. Angell to call, “It’s the blood thinner he’s on. It makes him subject to bruising.”

“And since when has he started napping?”

“The doctors ordered him to do that. He’s supposed to nap even on weekdays, but he doesn’t.”

Denny was quiet a moment, absently kicking the swing back and forth and watching a gray squirrel skitter beneath a bush. “Interesting how nobody told me about his heart attack,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing till last night. If I hadn’t happened to phone Jeannie, I might not ever have known.”

“Well, it’s not as if you could have made any difference,” Amanda said.

“Thanks heaps, Amanda.”

Abby stirred protestingly in her rocker.

“Hasn’t it been just the loveliest summer?” Mrs. Angell asked in a lilting voice.

Since in fact it had been a very hot summer, wracked by violent storms, it was obvious that she was merely trying to change the subject. Abby reached over to pat her hand. “Oh, Lois,” she said, “you always look on the bright side.”

“But I enjoy the heat, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Abby said, “but I can’t help thinking of those poor souls down in the inner city with no means of keeping cool.”

The Whitshanks themselves kept cool only with ceiling fans and a cleverly rigged attic fan and high, old-fashioned ceilings. Every now and then Red talked about installing air conditioning, but he said it didn’t sit right with him to disturb the bones of the house. Even the porch had ceiling fans, three of them, spaced out along its length — beautiful old fans with varnished wooden blades that matched the varnished porch ceiling and floor and the honey-colored porch swing and the wide front steps. (Junior’s choices, all of them, and Junior’s decision to set the lacy windowless transoms above every ground-floor doorway to let the breezes flow through.) And then the tulip poplars, of course: they provided shade, although Abby often complained about too much shade. Nothing would grow beneath them; the lawn was mostly packed earth with a few hardy sprigs of crabgrass poking forth, and the only plants that bloomed along the north edge of the lot were the hostas, with their miserly buds and their giant, monstrous leaves.

“What are the Nelson kids up to?” Jeannie asked, her eyes on the Nelsons’ house across the street.

“I’m not sure,” Abby said. “Nowadays, you ask people about their children and you can see they wish you hadn’t. They say, ‘Well, our son just graduated from Yale but at the moment he’s, um …’ and then it turns out he’s bartending or brewing cappuccinos, and more often than not he’s moved back home again.”