Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Oh,” Merrick said. “Yes, maybe I did.”

“And I’m not so spry either, lately.”

“This is ridiculous,” Merrick said. “Two people get a bit wobbly and their entire family moves in with them? I never heard of such a thing.”

Denny cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “Stem is not here on a permanent basis.”

“Well, thank heaven.”

“ I am.”

Merrick looked at him, waiting for him to go on. The others stared down at their laps.

“I’m the one who’s staying,” Denny said.

Stem said, “Well, not—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, why is anyone staying?” Merrick asked. “If your parents are really so decrepit — and I must say I find that hard to believe; they’re barely in their seventies — they should move to a retirement community. That’s what other people do.”

“We’re too independent for a retirement community,” Red told her.

“Independent? Bosh. That’s just another word for selfish. It’s stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.”

Stem rose to his feet. “Well,” he said, “I guess Nora must be fretting about her supper getting cold,” and he stood waiting in the center of the room.

Everyone looked at him in surprise. Finally Merrick said, “Oh, I see. Clear that tiresome woman out of here; she tells too many home truths.” But she was standing up as she spoke, draining the last of her drink as she moved toward the front hall. “I know, I know,” she said. “I see how it is.”

The others rose to follow her. “Here,” Merrick said at the door, and she thrust her empty glass at Abby. “And by the way,” she told Denny. “You’re supposed to have a life by now. You’re only putting things off, scurrying back home on the slightest excuse.”

She left, clicking across the porch with a brisk, energetic stride, like someone triumphant in the knowledge that she had set everybody straight.

“What is she talking about?” Denny asked after a moment.

Abby said, “Oh, you know how she is.”

“I can’t abide that woman.”

Ordinarily Abby would have tut-tutted, but now she just sighed and headed for the kitchen.

The men went into the dining room and settled at the table, none of them speaking, although Red did say, as he dropped onto his chair, “Ah, me.” They waited in a kind of drained silence. From the kitchen they could hear the burble of the little boys’ voices and a clatter of utensils. Then Nora emerged through the swinging door, carrying a casserole. Abby came behind with a salad. “You should see Merrick’s leftovers,” she told the men. “A smidgen of store-bought pasta sauce in the bottom of a jar. A wedge of Brie completely hollowed out inside the rind. And … what else, Nora?” she asked.

“A cold broiled lamb chop,” Nora said, setting the casserole on the table.

“A lamb chop, yes, and a Chinese take-out carton of rice, and one single, solitary pickle in a bottle of scummy brine.”

“We should put her in touch with Hugh,” Denny said.

“Hugh?” Abby asked.

“Amanda’s Hugh. Do Not Pass Go. She could call him before every trip.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Abby said. “They’re made for each other!”

“He’d tell her he knows a soup kitchen that’s dying to have her leftovers, and he’d come by her house and collect them and take them off to the trash.”

This made the others laugh — even Nora, a little. Red said, “Oh, now. You folks,” but he was laughing too.

“What?” Tommy asked. He’d cracked open the door from the kitchen. “What’s so funny?”

None of them wanted to say; they just smiled and shook their heads. To a child, they must have looked like some happy, cozy club that only grown-ups could belong to.

It took a total of five vehicles to carry them all to the beach. They could have managed with fewer, but Red insisted, as usual, on driving his pickup. How else could they bring everything they needed, he always asked — the rafts and boogie boards, the sand toys for the children, the kites and the paddle-ball racquets and the giant canvas shade canopy with its collapsible metal frame? (In the old days, before computers, he used to include the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica .) So he and Abby made the three-hour trip in the pickup, while Denny drove Abby’s car with Susan in the passenger seat and the food hampers in the rear. Stem and Nora and the three little boys came in Nora’s car, and Jeannie and Jeannie’s Hugh started out separately from their own house with their two children, though not with Hugh’s mother, who always spent the beach week visiting Hugh’s sister in California.

Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh and Elise traveled on a whole different day — Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, since Amanda always had trouble getting away from her law office — and they stayed in a different cottage, because Amanda’s Hugh couldn’t tolerate what he called the hurly-burly.

None of the dogs came. They were all boarding at Penpals.

The house the Whitshanks rented every summer stood right on the beach — a comparatively uncrowded stretch of the Delaware coast — but it wasn’t what you’d call luxurious. The walls were tongue-and-groove, painted a depressing pea-soup green; the floorboards were so splintery no one dared go barefoot; the kitchen dated from the 1940s. But it was big enough for all of them, and far homier than the glittering new mansions with giant Palladian windows that had popped up elsewhere along the shore. Besides, Red could always use a few fix-it jobs to keep him occupied. (He wasn’t a natural vacationer.) Even before Abby and Nora had unpacked the food, he had happily catalogued half a dozen minor household emergencies. “Will you look at this outlet!” he said. “Practically dangling by a thread!” And off he went to the truck for his tools, with Jeannie’s Hugh not far behind.

“The next-door people are back,” Jeannie called, stepping in from the screen porch.

Next door was almost the only house as unassuming as theirs was, and the people she was referring to had been renting it for at least as long as the Whitshanks had been renting theirs. Oddly enough, though, the two families never socialized. They smiled at each other if they happened to be out on the beach at the same time, but they didn’t speak. And although Abby had once or twice debated inviting them over for drinks, Red always voted her down. Leave things as they were, he told her: less chance of any unwelcome intrusions in the future. Even Amanda and Jeannie, on the lookout during the early days for playmates, had hung back shyly, because the next-door people’s two daughters always brought friends of their own, and besides, they were slightly older.

So for all these years — thirty-six, now — the Whitshanks had watched from a distance while the slender young parents next door grew thicker through the middle and their hair turned gray, and their daughters changed from children to young women. One summer in the late nineties, when the daughters were still in their teens, it was noticed that the father of the family never once went down to the water, spending the week instead lying under a blanket in a chaise longue on their deck, and the summer after that, he was no longer with them. A muted, sad little group the next-door people had been that year, when always before they had seemed to enjoy themselves so; but they did come, and they continued to come, the mother taking her early-morning walks along the beach alone now, the daughters in the company of boyfriends who metamorphosed into husbands, by and by, and then a little boy appearing and later a little girl.

“The grandson has brought a friend this year,” Jeannie reported. “Oh, that makes me want to cry.”