Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Or last December, when the McCarthys had invited her and Red to a Christmas concert along with a bunch of their other friends, and she had been so chatty and confiding with the man who happened to be seated next to her but then discovered, by and by, that he was a total stranger, had nothing to do with the McCarthys and no doubt thought she was a lunatic. Just a skip in the record, that was. You can see how it might happen.

“And time,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you’re little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you’re grown. Well, now it’s just a blur. I can’t keep track of it anymore! But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”

She heard Nora climbing the stairs. She heard her say, “No, silly-billy. Cookies are for dessert.” Her footsteps proceeded at a stately pace toward the boys’ room, followed by Sammy’s little sneakers.

Was there something wrong with Abby, that she didn’t fall all over herself to spend every waking minute with her grandchildren? She did love them, after all. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them — an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next. Petey was the worrier, bossing his brothers around not out of meanness but from a protective, herding instinct; Tommy had his father’s sunny nature and his peacemaking skills; and Sammy was her baby, still smelling of orange juice and urine, still happy to cuddle up and let her read to him. And then the older ones: Susan so serious and dear and well-behaved — was she all right ? — and Deb who was Abby herself at that age, a wiry knot of inquisitiveness, and poor clumsy, effortful Alexander who could wrench her heart, and finally Elise who was just so different from Abby, so completely other , that Abby felt privileged to be granted this close-up view of her.

But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

The upstairs hall was quiet again. Abby turned her doorknob by degrees, opened the door a bare minimum, and slipped out. The dog shoved the door wider open with his nose and plodded after her, snuffling noisily and causing Abby to wince and glance toward the boys’ room.

Down the stairs to the front door she went, and out onto the porch. Then she stopped short, struck by an idea. She reached back into the house for the leash that hung on a hook just inside. Clarence made a glad moaning sound and shambled onto the porch behind her, while somewhere in the depths of the house Heidi gave a yelp of envy. Eat your heart out, Heidi. Abby was not a fan of overexcitable dogs.

She paused on the flagstone walk to clip the leash to Clarence’s collar. This was the old-fashioned, short kind of leash, not the permissive retractable kind that people nowadays favored. Strictly speaking, Clarence didn’t need a leash; he was so slow and stodgy and mindlessly obedient. But he did have a willful streak when it came to very small dogs. They seemed to bring out all the old feistiness of his puppy days. He never could resist pouncing on a toy terrier.

“We’re not going far,” Abby told him. “Don’t get your hopes up.” From the stiff-jointed way he moved, she suspected he wasn’t up to more than a block or two in any case.

They turned to the left when they reached the street — the opposite direction from Ree’s house. Not that Abby wouldn’t love to see Ree, but after Abby’s little lapse that time, Ree would have been distressed to find her walking alone. And Abby loved walking alone. Oh, it felt so good to set out like this, free as a bird, no “What’ll we do about Mom?” hanging unspoken over her head! She hoped she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.

Sometimes on her walks it would strike her that of all her original family, she was the only one left. Who would ever have dreamed that she’d be traveling through the world without them? She thought again of the framed picture in her bedroom: the solitary child threading a path beneath giant, looming trees, the guardian angel following protectively behind. Except that Abby didn’t believe in angels, and hadn’t since she was seven. No, she was truly on her own.

She used to have at least one of her children with her everywhere she went. It was both comforting and wearing. “Hand? Hand?” she used to say before she crossed a street. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.

Clarence eyed a squirrel but kept on heeling, not even tempted. “I agree,” Abby told him. “Squirrels are beneath you.” Then she gave a testing pat to the cushiony space above her breasts. Had she thought to hang the house key around her neck before she set out? No, but never mind; the lock was set to manual. And there was always Nora to let her back in if need be.

Another secret she knew, but this wasn’t something anyone had told her: it had occurred to her just recently that the song Stem remembered his father’s singing him to sleep with could very well have been “The Goat and the Train.” Burl Ives used to sing that on a children’s record she had owned when she was small. Should she suggest it to Stem? It could be a transporting moment for him, hearing that song again after all these years. But he might think she was tactlessly reminding him that he was not a Whitshank. Or maybe her reason for keeping silent was more selfish. Maybe she just wanted him to forget that she wasn’t his first and only mother.

He and Denny had treated each other with artificial politeness ever since their fight at the beach. You would think they were barely acquainted. “Denny, are you going to want that last piece of chicken?” Stem would ask, and Denny would say, “Be my guest.” They didn’t fool her for a minute. They could have been two strangers in a waiting room, and she was beginning to lose hope that that would ever change.

Oh, always lately it seemed that some crisis arose at the beach house. No wonder she dreaded vacations! Not that she ever let on.

“What’s gone wrong with us?” she’d asked Red on the ride home from this year’s trip. “We used to be such a happy family! Weren’t we?”

“Far as I can recall,” Red had answered.

“Remember that time we all got the giggles at the movies?”

“Well, now …”

“It was a Western, and the hero’s horse was staring straight at us, head-on, chewing oats, with these two little balls of muscle popping out at his jaws when he chomped down. He looked so silly! Remember that? We burst out laughing, all of us at once, and the rest of the audience turned toward us just mystified.”

“Was I there?” Red asked her.

“You were there. You were laughing too.”

Maybe the reason he’d forgotten was that he took their happiness for granted. He didn’t fret about it. Whereas Abby … oh, she fretted, all right. She couldn’t bear to think that their family was just another muddled, discontented, ordinary family.

“If you could have one single wish,” she had asked Red one night in bed when neither of them could sleep, “what would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I would wish wonderful lives for our children,” Abby said.

“Yeah, that’s good.”