Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Linnie Mae Whitshank was pale and subdued, dressed in a wan flowered shift that could have been bought in a country store, but something about the tracery of smile lines at the corners of her eyes told Abby she might be taking in more than she let on. Long after the Big Sister charade had petered out, Abby thought of Linnie fondly. And then years later, when Abby started dating Red’s friend Dane, there was Linnie, as openhearted as ever, stepping out on the porch night after night to offer homemade lemonade to all the neighborhood gang. Sometimes Junior put in an appearance, too—“Why, hey there! Boys. Girls.” He’d hang around talking, talking, telling the girls they looked mighty pretty this evening and rehashing Colts games with the boys, till Linnie touched his sleeve and said, “Come away, now, Junior. Time to leave these young folks to their socializing.”

Both of them dead and gone now; oh, my. Wiped off the face of the earth by a freight train, leaving not even bodies to mourn, just two closed caskets, and no one but the police to break the news. So unsatisfying, so inconclusive. That bothered Abby more than it did Red. Red was of the opinion that instantaneous death was a mercy, but Abby wanted goodbyes. She would have liked to say, “Linnie, you were a good, good woman, and I’ve always felt sorry you led such a lonely life.”

Abby had been visited, lately, by thoughts of all the people whose deaths she had been present for. Two grandparents, her mother, her beloved older brother who’d died young. Not her father, though. For her father, she had arrived just minutes too late. But she had hoped, as she bent and laid her face against his, that there was some lingering vestige of him that would register her presence. Even now, sitting on the porch and gazing down at Bouton Road, she felt her eyes tear up at the memory of his dear, whiskery cheek already cooling. We should all go out attended by someone! That was what she wanted for herself, certainly: Red’s large hand enclosing hers as she lay dying. But then she reflected that this meant he would be without her when his own time came, and she couldn’t endure the thought of that. How would Red survive, if she were the one to go first?

He always held her whole hand, rather than interlacing his fingers with hers. When she was in her early teens, hearing from her more forward friends about the boys who reached for their hands at the movies, it was that enfolding clasp that she had envisioned, and the first date who surreptitiously threaded his fingers through hers had convinced her that hand-holding was not all it was cracked up to be. Till Red.

Maybe she and Red could die at the same time. Say, on a plane. They could have a few minutes’ warning, a pilot’s announcement that would give them a chance to trade last words. Except that they never flew anywhere, so how was that going to happen?

“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”

“But, Mom, there is no ending,” Jeannie said.

“Well, I know that,” Abby said.

In theory.

It was possible that in her heart of hearts, she was thinking that the world couldn’t go on without her. Oh, weren’t human beings self-deluding! Because the plain fact was that no one needed her anymore. Her children were grown up, and her clients had vanished into thin air the moment she retired. (And anyhow, toward the last it had seemed that her clients’ needs were bottomless — that society was falling apart faster than she could patch it together. She was getting out just in time, she had felt.) Even her “orphans,” as her family called them, were all but gone. B. J. Autry was dead of drugs and old Mr. Dale of a stroke, and the various foreign students had either returned to their own countries or else assimilated so successfully that they cooked Thanksgiving dinner for themselves now.

In the past, she had been at the center of things. She’d known everybody’s secrets; everyone confided in her. Linnie had told her — swearing her to silence — that she and Junior were their families’ black sheep; and Denny had told her (offhandedly, when she marveled at Susan’s brown eyes) that Susan was not his. Nothing she heard had Abby relayed to anybody else, not even to Red. She was a woman of her word. Oh, people would have been amazed at all she knew and didn’t say!

“You owe your job to me,” she could have said to Jeannie. “Your father was dead set against having a woman on the construction site, but I persuaded him.” What a temptation to let that slip! But she didn’t.

And now she was so unnecessary that her children thought she should move to a retirement community — she and Red both, neither one of them nearly old enough yet. Thank God that had come to nothing. It was worth putting up with Nora, even, in order to dodge the retirement community. It had even been worth putting up with Mrs. Girt. Or almost worth it.

Abby felt bad now about Mrs. Girt. They had let her go without a thought! And she’d probably had some very sad story. It wasn’t at all like Abby to pass up a chance to hear someone’s sad story. “Amanda,” she had said recently, “did we give that Mrs. Girt any severance pay?”

“Severance pay! She was with you nine days!”

“Still,” Abby said, “she meant well. And you all meant well to arrange for her; I hope you don’t think I’m ungrateful.”

“Well, since both you and Dad were dead set against a retirement community, for some reason …”

“But you can see our side of it, can’t you? Why, I bet those places have social workers to deal with the inmates. We’d be the objects of social work! Can you imagine?”

To which Amanda had said, “The ‘inmates’? And the ‘objects,’ Mom? Goodness. What does that say about your attitude to your own profession, all these years?”

Amanda could be so sharp-edged, sometimes.

Of the two girls, Jeannie was easier. (Abby knew she should stop calling them “the girls,” but it would feel so silly to say “the women” and “the men.”) Jeannie was biddable and unassuming; she lacked Amanda’s acidity. She didn’t confide in Abby, though. It had been such a blow when Jeannie had asked Denny to help out during that bad spell after Alexander was born. She could have asked Abby. Abby was right there in town! And then Denny: why had he never mentioned that he had finished college? He must have been taking courses for years, working them in around his various jobs, but he hadn’t said a thing, and why not? Because he wanted her to go on worrying about him, was why. He didn’t want to let her off the hook. So when he sprang it like that — just announced it after lunch that day: yes, he had his degree — it had felt like a slap in the face. She knew she should have been pleased for him, but instead she had felt resentful.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?

Although Denny might not be okay, even now. Abby wasn’t entirely at ease about him. Shouldn’t he be looking for work? Maybe substitute teaching? Or even really teaching! He surely couldn’t be thinking that helping out around the house was enough of an occupation, could he? Or that the odd bits of money she slipped him — a couple of twenties any time he ran an errand for her, never requesting change — could be called a living wage.

Yesterday, she had asked him, “How about your other belongings? You must have more than what you brought down. Did you put them into storage?”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” he’d said. “They’re stashed in my old apartment.”