Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”

And then no more.

WHITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE, was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Linnie had died. But that had been so long ago; Red was the only one left alive with any firsthand memory of it. (Nobody counted Merrick.) And Red was not himself right now. He was just a shell of himself. He walked around in his slippers, unshaven, with a vacant look in his eyes. For one whole day it appeared that he had lost his powers of speech, till it was discovered that he’d once again neglected to put his hearing aids in.

Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.

Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo. They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty — an iffy business in the best of times — and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”

“I want him to come back from Jesus.”

“Her,” Nora said. “You want her to come back. But she’s happier where she is.”

“She was old, buddy,” Stem said.

An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Luckily, though, Sammy failed to make the obvious connection. He hadn’t mentioned Abby once, although she used to spend hours at a time reading him his favorite, unutterably boring dinosaur book over and over and over.

She’d been singing, Louisa Hutchinson said. Louisa was the one who had rushed out to the street when she heard the crash, and then called 911 and later had phoned the family. Thank heaven, because Abby hadn’t been carrying any identification. “She walked toward our house singing,” Louisa said, “and I went to our front window and I said to Bill, I said, ‘ Somebody’s in a good mood.’ I don’t know as I’d ever heard Abby singing before.”

“Singing!” Jeannie and Stem said at exactly the same time. Then Jeannie asked, “What was the song?”

“Something about a goat; I don’t know.”

Jeannie looked at Stem. He shrugged.

Louisa said, “The dog lay so far from where Abby lay, I guess he must have been thrown. The driver found him, poor woman. The driver was beside herself. She found him lying close to where her car had knocked the lamppost over. I’m just thankful Abby didn’t have to see him.”

“Her,” Jeannie said.

“Pardon?”

“The dog was a her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“She was old,” Jeannie said. “The dog, I mean. She’d had a good long life.”

“Still, though,” Louisa said.

Then she held up the casserole she’d brought and told them it was gluten-free, in case anybody cared.

And how did it happen, pray tell, that Abby had chanced to be off serenading the neighborhood with none of the family any the wiser? Amanda was the only one who came right out and asked, once Louisa was gone, but no doubt the others were wondering too. They sat around the living room listlessly, with the light coming in all wrong — sunshine filtering through the rear windows on a weekday morning, when most of the family should have been at work. “Don’t look at me ,” Denny told Amanda. “I wasn’t even up yet”—interrupting Nora, who was wearing a troubled expression and had started to speak also.

“I’ve asked myself and asked myself,” Nora said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve asked. When the boys and I left for school, she was sitting on the porch. When I came back she was gone. But Brenda was in the house still, so where was Mother Whitshank? Was she up in her room? Was she in the backyard? How did she leave for a walk without my knowing?”

“Well, you couldn’t keep an eye on her every single minute,” Jeannie said.

“I should have, though! It turns out I should have. I am so, so sorry. The two of us had a very special bond, you know. I’m never going to forgive myself.”

“Hey,” Stem said. “Hon.”

Which was about as far as Stem could ever go when it came to offering comfort. Nora seemed grateful, however. She smiled at him, her eyes brimming.

“We’re not mind readers,” Denny said. “She should have told us she wanted a walk. She had no business taking off like that!”

Oh, everybody was true to form — Denny angry, Nora remorseful, Amanda looking for someone to blame. “How could she have told you,” Amanda asked Denny, “when you were snoring away in bed?”

“Whoa!” he said, and drew back in his chair, holding up both hands.

“Anybody would think you’d worn yourself out with hard work,” Amanda said.

“Well, it’s not as if you’ve been over here slaving away.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Jeannie said. “We’re getting off the subject.”

“What is the subject?” Amanda’s Hugh asked.

“I have this really, really awful feeling that Mom wanted us to play ‘Good Vibrations’ at her funeral.”

“ What ?” Hugh said.

“She used to say as much. Didn’t she, Mandy?”

Amanda couldn’t answer because she had started crying, so Denny stepped in. He said, “I don’t know if she meant that literally, though.”

“We need to find her instructions. I remember she wrote some.”

“Dad?” Stem asked. “Do you know where her instructions could be?”

Red was staring into space, both of his hands on his knees. He said, “Eh?”

“Mom’s instructions for her funeral. Did she tell you where she put them?”

Red shook his head.

“We should check her study,” Stem told the others.

“They wouldn’t be in her study,” Nora said. “She cleared out those shelves when Denny moved in. She said she was going to borrow some desk space from Father Whitshank.”

“Oh!” Red said. “She did. She asked if she could put her stuff in one of my drawers.”

Amanda sat up straighter and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “We’ll look there,” she said briskly. “And, Jeannie, I’m sure she didn’t really want ‘Good Vibrations.’ Not when it came right down to it.”

“You must not know Mom, then,” Jeannie said.

“ My only fear is, she’s requested ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

“I like ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Stem said mildly.

“So did I, till it got to be a cliché.”

“It’s not a cliché to me .”

Amanda raised her eyes to the ceiling.

At lunchtime they just foraged in the fridge instead of cooking. “I can’t find a thing in here but casseroles,” Denny complained, and Amanda said, “Isn’t it interesting: people never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles, and who eats casseroles nowadays?”