Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Heidi was nowhere near him — she was racing around the perimeter with her usual exuberance — but Stem whistled and she came bounding up the porch steps. “Down, girl,” he said. He tousled her mane affectionately, and she gave a resigned whimper and curled herself at his feet.

“Brenda must be getting old,” Denny told his sisters. “She’d have been out here chasing Heidi, once upon a time.”

Jeannie said, “It kills me to think she’s old. Can you imagine this house without a dog?”

“Easily,” Denny said. “Dogs are hell on houses.”

“Oh, Denny.”

“What? They scratch the woodwork, they scuff the floors …”

Amanda made a tch- ing sound of amusement.

“What’s so funny?” he asked her.

“Listen to you! You sound like Dad. You’re the only one of us who doesn’t have a dog, and Dad claims he wouldn’t have one, either, if it were up to him.”

“Oh, that’s just talk,” Abby told them. “Your dad loves Clarence as much as we do.”

Her four children exchanged glances.

In the hammock, Red groaned and sat up. “ What are you saying?” he asked, rummaging through his hair.

“Just talking about how you love dogs, Dad,” Jeannie called.

“I do?”

Amanda tapped Denny’s wrist. “When will we be seeing Susan?” she asked him.

“Well, she can’t visit till we’ve got a room free to put her up in,” Denny said.

Till Stem and his family moved out, was his implication, but Amanda sidestepped that by saying, “She could always share the bunk room with the little boys. Would she mind?”

“Or wait for the beach trip,” Jeannie suggested. “That’s coming up very soon, and the beach house has tons of beds.”

Denny let the subject drop. His eyes followed the children playing in the yard — Petey tussling with Tommy, Elise pulling them apart and chiding them in her thin, bossy voice.

“Think I’m going to have to call the Petronelli brothers and have them repair the front walk again,” Red said, ambling down the porch to join them. On his way, he grabbed a rocker by one of its ears. He set it next to Abby.

“Every time I come here, you’re doing something to that walk,” Denny told him.

“The trouble goes back to your grandfather’s time. He wasn’t happy with how it was laid.”

“It did seem he was always fiddling with it,” Abby said.

“One of my first memories after we moved in was, he had all the mortar ripped out and the stones reset. But still he wasn’t satisfied. He claimed it was graded wrong.”

“What’s that got to do with now , though?” Stem asked. “It’s been graded several times over, since then. In order to fix that walk once and for all, you’d have to cut down all the poplars with their roots that burrow beneath it, and I don’t see you doing that.”

“Oh, you men, stop talking shop!” Abby said. “It’s too nice a day for that. Isn’t it, Lois?”

“Goodness, yes,” Mrs. Angell said. “It’s a lovely day. I believe I feel a bit of a breeze starting up.”

It was true that the leaves had begun rustling overhead, and Heidi’s petticoats of fur were stirring on her haunches.

“Weather like this always takes me back to the day I fell in love with Red,” Abby said dreamily.

The others smiled. They knew the story well; even Mrs. Angell knew it.

Sammy was sound asleep against his mother’s breast. Elise was spinning and spinning under a dogwood tree, with her head tipped back and her arms flung out.

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon …” Abby began. Which was the way she always began, exactly the same words, every single time. On the porch, everybody relaxed. Their faces grew smooth, and their hands loosened in their laps. It was so restful to be sitting here with family, with the birds talking in the trees and the crosscut-sawing of the crickets and the dog snoring at their feet and the children calling, “Safe! I’m safe!”

ON MONDAY, Denny slept till almost eleven. “Will you look at Mr. Sleepyhead!” Abby said when he finally came downstairs. “What time did you get to bed?”

He shrugged and took a box of cereal from the cupboard. “One thirty?” he said. “Two?”

“Oh, no wonder, then.”

“If I stay up late enough, I have some hope of sleeping through,” he said. “All those middle-of-the-night thoughts swarming in on me; I hate that.”

“Your dad gets up and reads when that happens,” Abby told him.

Denny didn’t bother answering her. The Whitshanks held two opposing opinions about what to do with their wakeful hours, and they had long ago argued the subject into the ground.

After breakfast, as if to make up for lost time, he became a whirlwind of activity. He vacuumed the whole downstairs, oiled the hinges on the backyard gate, and trimmed the backyard hedge. He skipped lunch to scrub the charcoal grill, and then he borrowed Abby’s car and drove to Eddie’s to buy steaks to barbecue for supper. Abby told him to charge the steaks to her account, and he didn’t argue.

The house seemed invisibly partitioned between Nora and Abby — Nora busying herself in the kitchen or tending her children, Abby up in her bedroom or reading in the living room. They were courteous to each other but wary, clearly trying not to get in each other’s way. The only time all day that they engaged in a real conversation was when Denny was at the grocery store. Nora, carrying Sammy upstairs for his afternoon nap, met Abby coming down the stairs with a stack of papers. “Oh, Mother Whitshank,” Nora said. “Is that something I can help you with?”

“No, thank you, dear,” Abby said. “I just thought while Denny was out of the house I’d collect the last of my things from his room. Though heaven knows where I’ll put them.”

“Couldn’t you pack them into a box and store them in the back of his closet?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

“I could bring up a box from the basement. I saw some near the washing machine.”

“I don’t think so,” Abby said more firmly, and then she sighed and patted the spiral-bound notebook on the top of her stack. “I never feel quite comfortable leaving my belongings where Denny can get at them,” she said.

“Oh,” Nora said. She hitched Sammy higher on her hip, but she didn’t continue up the stairs.

“I know he doesn’t mean any harm, but I have poems and private journals and little thoughts I’ve jotted down. I’d feel silly if anyone saw them.”

“Well, of course,” Nora said.

“So I figured I’d haul it all to the sunroom and do some pruning. Then I’ll see if Red will lend me one of his desk drawers.”

“I’d be happy to bring down what’s left,” Nora said.

“Oh, I think I’ve got everything, dear.”

And the two of them went their separate ways.

For supper they had Denny’s grilled steaks and Nora’s homemade succotash. Nora cooked in a sort of country style; succotash wasn’t something the rest of them were accustomed to. And she did that modern thing of preparing a whole different dish for the children when they wouldn’t eat their steaks. She went out to the kitchen without complaint and fixed macaroni and cheese from a box. Abby told the boys, “Oh, your poor mother! Isn’t she nice to get up from her meal and make you something special,” which was her way of saying that her own children used to eat what was set before them. But the boys had heard this before, and they just gazed at her expressionlessly. Only Red seemed to read her meaning. “Now, hon,” he told her. “That’s how things are done these days.”

“Well, I know that!”