Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“And then what?” Jeannie asked.

“What do you mean, what?”

“What happened with the furniture making?”

“Oh, well … I forget. I think we moved on to the boring part, then. Baseboards or something. So I quit, by and by.”

Jeannie sighed and collected the bandage wrappings from the table. “Okay, Susan,” she said. “You can help your dad to the living room now.”

But just as Denny was getting to his feet, Stem walked in, with Nora close behind. By the looks of him, he’d recovered from the blow to his head. He seemed himself again, only paler and more rumpled. “Denny,” he said, “I want to apologize.”

“He is very, very sorry,” Nora put in.

“I should not have lost my temper, and I want to pay for your String Cheese Incident T-shirt.”

Denny made a little puffing sound of amusement, and Abby, who had come into the room behind them — of course she had to be part of this, falling all over herself to set her family to rights — said, “Oh, Stem, that’s no problem; I’m sure we can treat it with OxiClean,” which made Denny laugh aloud.

“Forget it,” he told Stem. “Let’s just say it never happened.”

“Well, that’s very generous of you.”

“Fact is, I’m kind of relieved to find out you’re human,” Denny said. “Till now I didn’t think you had a competitive bone in your body.”

“Competitive?”

“Let’s shake on it,” Denny said, holding out his hand.

Stem said, “Why do you say I’m competitive?”

Denny let his hand drop. “Hey,” he said. “You just assaulted me for saying I should be the one to help out with Mom and Dad. You don’t call that competitive?”

“God damn !” Stem said.

Nora said, “Oh! Douglas.”

Stem socked Denny in the mouth.

It wasn’t an expert blow — it landed clumsily, a bit askew — but it was enough to send Denny tumbling back onto his chair. Blood bubbled up instantly from his lower lip. He gave a dazed shake of his head. Abby shrieked, “Stop! Please stop!” and Jeannie said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and Susan started crying again and biting her knuckles. The others appeared in the doorway so instantaneously that it almost seemed they’d been lying in wait for this. Stem was looking surprised. He stared down at his fist, which was scraped across the knuckles. He shifted his gaze to Denny.

“Out,” Jeannie ordered everyone.

Then she said, in a weary tone of voice, “First we’re going to clean the wound and see if it needs stitches.”

ABBY FELT NERVOUS AT FIRST about the appointment with Dr. Wiss, but then she thought, “I can do this, because I’m so familiar with my mother’s Wiss pinking shears.” And the exact, clunky weight of those shears instantly came to her mind, along with the too-thick handle loop that pressed uncomfortably against the bone at the base of her thumb, and the initial balkiness as the heavy teeth began chewing into the fabric.

But wait. Really, the one kind of Wiss had nothing to do with the other.

It was Nora who made the appointment. She had called her pastor for the name of a gerontologist, and then she phoned Dr. Wiss’s office without consulting Abby. Meddlesome! She must have discussed it first with Red, though, because when Abby complained to him he didn’t seem surprised, and he told her it wouldn’t hurt to hear what a doctor had to say.

Abby was finding that Nora had started to get on her nerves. Why, for instance, did she persist in calling Abby “Mother Whitshank”? It made Abby sound like an old peasant woman in wooden clogs and a headscarf. Abby had offered all her children’s spouses a choice of “Mom” or “Abby” when they first joined the family. “Mother Whitshank” hadn’t so much as crossed her lips.

Also, Nora stacked the plates on top of each other when she was clearing the table, instead of carrying one in each hand as Abby had been taught was polite. All the plates arrived in the kitchen with food stuck to their backs. Yet she criticized Abby’s housekeeping! Or that was her implication, at least, when she blamed the dust in the rugs for Sammy’s allergies. And she cooked fatty fried foods that were bad for Red’s heart, and she was much too lax with her children, and that queen bed she had requested completely filled Stem’s little room, barely allowing space for a person to edge around it.

Oh, well, this was just roommate-itis, Abby told herself. It was rubbing elbows at too-close quarters; that was why she felt so irritable.

She told herself this several times a day.

She also reminded herself that some of our connections are brand-new connections, unrelated to our past incarnations — new experiences to broaden our horizons. Maybe Nora’s role in Abby’s life was to deepen and enrich Abby’s soul; could that be true?

It wasn’t as if Abby were a difficult mother-in-law. Why, look at how well she got along with Amanda’s Hugh! A challenge, as Amanda herself admitted, but Abby found him entertaining. And Jeannie’s Hugh, of course, was a sweetheart. Some of Abby’s friends had a terrible time with their children-in-law. Daughters-in-law more than sons-in-law, all of them agreed. Some were not on speaking terms. Abby was doing way better than they were.

If only she didn’t feel so pushed aside. So extraneous, so unnecessary.

She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded — how empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom.

What on earth had happened to her?

Her appointment with Dr. Wiss wasn’t till November. (Long waiting line of problem oldsters, evidently.) Everything might have changed by November. Maybe her minor little inconsequential glitches — her “brain jumping the track,” as she thought of it — would have disappeared on their own. Or maybe she would be dead! No, shelve that thought.

It was only mid-September now. Still summery, the leaves barely starting to turn, the mornings crisp but not truly cold. She could sit out on the porch after breakfast in just a sweater, gently toeing the swing back and forth and watching the parents and children walk past on their way to school. You could tell it was early in the school year because the children were so nicely dressed. Another month and they would be making less effort. And some of the older children would have shed their parents, although Petey and Tommy were too young for that, of course. They had set out with Nora several minutes ago — Sammy leaning forward in his stroller like a sea captain watching for landfall, Heidi prancing in front on her ridiculous great long leash. Three little towheads glimmering away through the trees; so non-Whitshank-like. Although Stem had been a towhead, so it was only to be expected.

The boys seemed to have settled easily into the neighborhood, zipping their scooters up and down the sidewalk out front and bringing playmates in for snacks. They told her that the other children called their house “the porch house.” Abby liked that. She could remember her own first sight of the house, back when she was a freckle-faced middle-schooler from Hampden and snooty Merrick Whitshank was her designated Big Sister. That enormous, wonderful porch glimpsed from the street, Merrick and two teenaged friends lounging in this very swing so casually, so stylishly, wearing rolled-up blue jeans and gaily patterned neckerchiefs tied in jaunty knots. “Oh, Gawd, it’s the midgets,” Merrick had drawled, because Abby had two of her classmates with her, Little Sisters to Merrick’s two friends. They were supposed to spend a companionable, fun-filled Saturday afternoon learning the words to the school song and baking cookies together. But that part Abby couldn’t remember now — just her awe at the sight of this porch and the impressive flagstone walk leading up to it. Oh, and Merrick’s mother: sweet Linnie. (Or Mrs. Whitshank, as Abby called her then.) It had probably been Linnie who supervised the cookie baking, because Abby couldn’t picture Merrick doing that.