Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“So you still have to pay rent?”

“Nah. It’s just one room above a garage; my landlady doesn’t care.”

This was puzzling. What kind of landlady didn’t charge rent unless her tenant was physically present? Oh, so much of his life seemed … irregular, somehow.

Or maybe it was perfectly regular, and Abby had just been sensitized by too many past experiences with Denny — too many evasions and semi-truths and suspect alibis.

Last week she’d knocked on his bedroom door to ask if he could take her to buy some greeting cards, and she’d thought she heard him tell her to come in, but she was mistaken; he was talking on his cell phone. “You know I do,” he was saying. “How’m I going to make you believe me?” and then he’d looked over at Abby and his expression had altered. “What do you want?” he had asked her.

“I’ll just wait till you’re off the phone,” she had said, and he’d told his caller, “I’ve got to go,” and snapped his phone shut too quickly.

If it was a girl he’d been speaking to — a woman — Abby was truly glad. Everyone should have someone. Still, a part of her couldn’t help feeling hurt that he hadn’t mentioned this person. Why did he have to turn everything into such a mystery? Oh, he just took an active pleasure in going against the grain! No, the current, she meant. Going against the current. It was like a hobby for him.

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed. Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn’t screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!

While she was flipping through her mail the other day, she’d grown gradually aware that he was speaking to her. “Hmm?” she’d said absently, slitting an envelope. Then, “ ‘Wealth management,’ ” she had said, biting off the words. “Don’t you hate that phrase?” and Denny had said, “You’re not listening, dammit.”

“I’m listening.”

“When I was a kid,” he told her, “I used to daydream about kidnapping you just so I could have your full attention.”

“Oh, Denny. I paid you a lot of attention! Too much, your dad always says.”

He just cocked his head at her.

Not only had she paid him attention, but she had secretly taken more pleasure in him than in any of the others. He was so full of life, so fierce. (In fact, he sometimes brought Dane Quinn to mind — her renegade ex-boyfriend, killed these many years ago in a one-car accident.) And he could delight her with his unexpected slants of vision. Last month, rolling up the supposedly dusty rug in the little boys’ room, he had paused to ask, “Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn’t forced themselves to mess up!” Abby had laughed aloud.

Maybe when he was grown, she remembered thinking during his childhood, he would finally tell her what used to make him so angry. But then when he was grown she had asked him, and he had said, “I don’t know, to be honest.”

Abby sighed and watched a schoolboy walk past, bowed low beneath an overstuffed backpack.

This porch was not just long but deep — the depth of a smallish living room. In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing — a low table, a settee, and two armchairs — and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch. But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck. Abby thought that summed up her role in this family. She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.

She looked down through the trees and saw a flash of white: Heidi’s mane feathering as she pranced homeward, followed by Nora wheeling the stroller in her sashaying, aimless way. Without even thinking about it, Abby bounded up from the swing like a much younger woman and slipped into the house.

The front hall still smelled of coffee and toast, which ordinarily struck her as cozy but today made her feel claustrophobic. She headed straight for the stairs and climbed them swiftly. She was out of sight by the time she heard the thump-thump of Sammy’s stroller being hauled up the porch steps.

Her study door — Denny’s door now — was shut, and a heavy silence lay behind it. His schedule had not reset itself as she had first imagined it might. He was still the last one to bed every night and the last one up in the morning, emerging at ten or eleven o’clock in his battle-weary outfit of olive-drab T-shirt and none-too-clean khakis, his face creased from his pillow and his hair hanging limp and greasy. Oh, Lord.

“Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ” she’d asked Ree in last week’s pottery class.

“Socrates,” Ree answered promptly.

“Really? I was thinking more along the lines of Michelle Obama.”

“Actually I don’t know who said it,” Ree admitted, “but believe me, it goes a whole lot farther back than Michelle.”

You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child — whichever one is unhappy.

She circled the hall to close the door to the little boys’ room, a distracting welter of clothes and towels and parts of toys. Legos would bite the soles of your feet if you ventured in without your shoes on. She backtracked to her own room, stepped inside, and shut the door soundlessly behind her.

The bed was still unmade, because she’d wanted to get downstairs and eat a peaceful breakfast before Nora and the little boys came down. (Oh, the exhausting enthusiasm of small children hurling themselves into each new day!) Now she pulled up the covers and hung her bathrobe, and she folded Red’s pajamas and tucked them beneath his pillow. On workdays Red dressed in the dark, and he always left a mess behind.

This was the room that had seen the fewest occupants: just Mr. and Mrs. Brill, then Junior and Linnie, then Red and Abby. The armoire in the corner was the Brills’, in fact, because it had been too massive for the downtown apartment they’d moved to. And the other furniture was Junior and Linnie’s, although the decorative objects were Abby’s — the framed color print from her childhood showing a guardian angel hovering behind a little girl, and her mother’s glass-slipper pincushion stuffed with velvet, and the little Hummel fiddler boy Red had given her when they were courting.

She heard Nora’s voice downstairs, low and unintelligible, and a crowing sound from Sammy. A moment later there was a scratching at her door. She opened her door and Clarence slipped in. “I know, sweetie,” Abby said. “It’s very noisy down there.” He circled on the rug a few times and then lay down. Good old Clarence. Brenda. Whoever. Abby did know this was Brenda if she bothered to stop and think about it.

“It’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a gear sort of slips in your head,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Have you ever had that happen? You’re having this very clear thought, but then all at once you’re on this totally other illogical, unconnected thought and you can’t trace it back to the first one. It’s just tiredness, I imagine. I mean, once about five or ten years ago — oh, long before I was old — I had to drive home alone from the beach late at night to keep an appointment the next morning, and I suddenly found myself in this very scary neighborhood in Washington, D.C. And I could swear I’d managed to do it without crossing the Bay Bridge! I don’t know how I did it. To this day I don’t know. I was tired, was all. That was all it was.”