Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Everyone looked at Abby. Abby said, “Oh. Would you like one?”

“I don’t suppose you have any vodka,” Merrick said happily.

There was a moment when it seemed that Abby might say no, but then some sort of hostess instinct must have kicked in, and she said, “Of course.” (They had it because of Merrick.) Red and Denny slumped. “Will you see to the drinks, dear?” Abby asked Denny. “Let’s the rest of us go to the living room.”

As she and Red and Merrick left the kitchen, Petey was heard to say, “But we’re starving!” and Nora murmured something in reply.

“I haven’t had a chance to sit down all day,” Merrick told Abby as they crossed the hall. “It’s exhausting, getting ready for a trip.”

“Where are you off to?”

“We’re taking a cruise down the Danube.”

“How nice.”

“Wouldn’t you know, Trey is being a bore about it. He’d rather go golfing somewhere. Oh! Brenda! There you are! God, she looks dead, the poor darling. What happened to Father’s clock?”

Abby glanced from Brenda, stretched out on the cooling hearthstones, to the clock on the mantel above. A crack ran across the glass of its case. “There was a little mishap with a baseball,” she said. “Won’t you have a seat?”

“Boys are so hard on houses,” Merrick said, folding herself into an armchair. She had been shadowed by Heidi, who settled expectantly at her knee. “And why are there so many of them? Did I count three?”

“Oh, yes,” Abby said. “There are three, all right.”

“Was the third one planned?” Merrick asked. “Oh. Stem. Hello. Had you planned on a third child?”

“Not really,” Stem said cheerfully. He gave off the scent of Dial soap as he crossed the room to a chair. “How’re you doing, Aunt Merrick?”

“I’m exhausted, I was just saying,” Merrick told him. “It seems preparing for a trip gets more tiring every year.”

“Why not stay home, then?”

“What!” she said in horror. Then she sat up straighter; Denny was bringing the drinks. In one hand he held a tumbler tinkling with ice and filled to the brim with vodka, and in the other a glass of white wine. Three cans of beer were tucked perilously under his left arm. “ Here we go,” he said. He placed the tumbler on the lamp table next to her. He crossed to give Abby the wine and then handed a can of beer each to Red and Stem, after which he sat down on the couch with the third can and popped the tab. “Cheers,” he said.

Merrick took a deep swig of her drink and breathed out a long “Ahh.” She asked Denny, “Is Sarah here too?”

“Who’s Sarah?”

“Sarah your daughter.”

“Susan, you mean.”

“Susan, Sarah … Is Susan here too?”

“She’s coming down for the beach trip.”

“Oh, God, not that everlasting beach trip,” Merrick said. “You’re like lemmings about that beach! Or spawning salmon, or something. Don’t you all ever think about vacationing any place else?”

“We love the beach,” Abby told her.

“Really,” Merrick said, and she drew her sharp purple fingernails languidly across the top of Heidi’s head. “Sometimes it amazes me that our ancestors had the gumption to make it to America,” she told Red.

“Excuse me?”

“America!” she shouted.

Red looked confused.

“Mother and Father never traveled at all, if you’ll remember,” she told him.

“Well, you have certainly made up for that,” Red said. “You seem to need more than one house, even.”

“What can I say? I hate winter.”

“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”

“Are you calling Baltimore summers the easy part?” Merrick asked. Then, as if to prove her point, she said “Whew!” and left off petting Heidi to bat a hand in front of her face. “Can somebody turn that fan up a notch?”

Stem rose and gave the fan cord a tug.

“ I can see why you might want two houses,” Denny spoke up. “Or even more than two. I get that. I bet sometimes when you wake in the morning you don’t know where you are for a moment, am I right? You’re completely disoriented.”

“Well … I guess,” Merrick said.

“Before you open your eyes you think, ‘Why does it feel like the light is coming from my left? I thought the window was on my right. Which house is this, anyway?’ Or you get out of bed at night to go pee and you walk into a wall. ‘Whoa!’ you say. ‘Where’s the bathroom gone?’ ”

Merrick said, “Well …” and Abby took on a worried look. Evidently Denny was having one of his unexpectedly confiding moments.

“I love that feeling,” he said. “You don’t know your place in the world; you’re not pegged; you’re not nailed into this one single same old never-ending spot.”

“I suppose,” Merrick said.

“You think that might be the reason people travel?” he asked. “I’ll bet it could be. Is that why you travel?”

“Oh, well, it’s more like I’m just trying to get as far as possible from Trey’s mother,” Merrick said. She swirled the ice in her glass. “The old bat just celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday,” she told Red. “Can you believe it? Queen Eula the Immortal. I swear, I think she’s staying alive just to spite me. It’s not only that she’s a pill herself; I blame her for making Trey such a pill. She spoiled that man rotten, I tell you. Gave him every little thing he ever wanted: the Prince of Roland Park.”

Red put a hand to his forehead and said, “This is so eerie! Is it déjà vu? Why do I feel like I’ve heard this someplace before?”

“And the older he gets, the worse he gets,” she went on obliviously. “Even when he was young he was a hopeless hypochondriac, but now! Believe me, it was a dark day in the universe when the Internet started letting people research their medical symptoms.”

She might have gone on (she usually did), but at that moment Petey came into the room. “Grandma,” he said, “can we have the last of that fudge ripple?”

“What: before supper?” Abby asked.

“We’re already eating our supper.”

“Yes, you can have it. And take Heidi when you go, will you? She’s sneezing again.”

It was true that Heidi had started sneezing — a whole fit of sneezes, light but spattery. “Gesundheit,” Merrick told her. “What’s the trouble, honeybunch? Coming down with something?”

“She does this all day long,” Abby said. “You wouldn’t suppose sneezing would be such an irritation, but it is.”

Petey said, “Mom thinks it’s on account of she’s allergic to Grandma’s rugs.”

“Well, I wouldn’t bring her to visit, then, poor baby,” Merrick said.

“She’s got to visit. She lives here.”

“Heidi lives here?”

“She lives here with us.”

“ You live here?”

“Yes, and Sammy’s allergic, too. All night he breathes dramatically.” Merrick looked at Abby.

“Take Heidi to the kitchen, Petey,” Abby said. “Yes,” she told Merrick, “they’ve moved in to help out; isn’t that nice?”

“Help out with what?”

“Well, just … you know. We’re getting older!”

“I’m getting older too, but I haven’t turned my house into a commune.”

“To each his own, I guess!” Abby sang out merrily.

“Wait,” Merrick said. “Is there something someone’s not telling me? Has one of you been diagnosed with some terminal disease?”

“No, but after Red’s heart attack—”

“Red had a heart attack?”

“You knew that. You sent him a fruit basket in the hospital.”