Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“I eat casseroles,” Nora told her. “I serve them several times a week.”

Amanda sent Denny a guilty glance and said no more.

“I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the next-door people,” Jeannie said musingly. “The people at the beach. They’ll tell each other next summer, they’ll say, ‘Oh, look at that! They don’t have their mother anymore!’ ”

“Will we still go to the beach?” Stem wondered.

“Of course we’ll go,” Amanda told him. “Mom would expect us to. It would kill her if we didn’t go!”

There was a silence. Then Jeannie gave a wail and buried her face in her hands.

Nora stood up and walked around the table, Sammy straddling her hip, to stroke Jeannie’s shoulder. Sammy hung out at an angle and gazed down at her with interest. “There, there,” Nora told her. “This will get easier, I promise. God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Jeannie only cried harder.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Denny said in an informative tone of voice. He was leaning back against the fridge with his arms folded.

Nora glanced at him, still smoothing Jeannie’s shoulder.

“He gives people more than they can handle every day of the year,” Denny told her. “Half of the world is walking around just … destroyed , most of the time.”

The others turned to Nora for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to take offense. She just said, “Douglas, could you find Sammy’s juice cup, please?”

Stem rose and left the room. The others stayed as they were. There was something disjointed about all of them, something ragged and out of alignment.

Stem was the one who searched Red’s desk for the funeral instructions, while Red just watched from the couch with his hands resting slack on his knees. It turned out that Abby had taken over his bottom drawer. Her papers filled it to the brim — her poems and journals, letters from needy orphans and old friends, photos of long-ago classmates and her parents and various strangers.

All of these Stem leafed through in a desultory way and then handed over to Red, who took longer with them. The photos alone consumed several minutes. “Why, there’s Sue Ellen Moore!” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in years.” And he gazed lingeringly at a laughing young Abby hanging on to the arm of a sullen boy smoking a cigarette. “I fell for her the first time I saw her,” he told Stem. “Oh, she was always talking about the day she fell for me , I know. ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,’ she’d say, but that was when she was almost grown, she was grown, whereas I, now … I had been mooning over Abby all along. That’s my friend Dane you see her with there; Dane was the one she liked first.”

A desiccated violet flattened in waxed paper made him first frown in perplexity and then smile, but without saying why, and he spent some time studying a typewritten list of what must have been New Year’s resolutions. “ ‘I will make myself count to ten before I speak to the children in anger,’ ” he read out. “ ‘I will remind myself daily that my mother is getting old and will not be with us forever.’ ” The folder of Abby’s poems, though, he laid aside without a glance, as if fearing he would find them too painful, and he didn’t so much as crack open any of her little black-and-red bound journals.

Some of the items were mystifying. A wrinkled, flattened Hershey’s-bar wrapper; a piece of tree bark in a tiny brown paper bag; a yellowing two-page newsletter from a nursing home in Catonsville. “ ‘Five Tasks for Dying,’ ” Stem read aloud from the newsletter.

“For dieting?”

“Dying.”

“Oh, what’s it say?”

“Nothing to do with a funeral service,” Stem said, passing it over. “Telling people you love them, telling them goodbye …”

“Just — please, God — don’t let her ask for a ‘celebration,’ ” Red said. “I don’t much feel like celebrating just now.” He let the newsletter drop unread onto the couch beside him. Stem didn’t seem to have heard him, though. He was studying a sheet of onionskin covered with blurred typewriting — a carbon copy, obviously; the one and only item in an unmarked manila envelope.

“Found it?” Red asked.

“No, just …”

Stem went on reading. Then he raised his head. His lips had gone white; he had a drawn, almost dehydrated look. “Here,” he said, and he handed the paper to Red.

“ ‘I, Abigail Whitshank,’ ” Red read out, “ ‘hereby agree that—’ ” He stopped. His eyes went to the bottom of the page. He cleared his throat and continued, “ ‘—hereby agree that Douglas Alan O’Brian will be raised like my own child, with all attendant rights and privileges. I promise that his mother will be granted full access to him whenever she desires, and that she may reclaim him entirely for her own as soon as her life circumstances permit. This agreement is contingent upon his mother’s promise that she will never, ever, for any reason, reveal her identity to her son unless and until she assumes permanent responsibility for him; nor will I reveal it myself.’ ” He cleared his throat again. He said, “ ‘Signed, Abigail Dalton Whitshank. Signed, Barbara Jane Autry.’ ”

“I don’t understand,” Stem said.

Red didn’t answer. He was staring down at the contract.

“Is that B.J . Autry?” Stem asked.

Red still didn’t speak.

“It is,” Stem said. “It’s got to be. Barbara Jane Eames, she started out, and then at some point she must have married someone named Autry. She was right there in front of us all along.”

“I guess she found your listing in the phone book,” Red said, looking up from the contract.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Stem demanded. “You had an obligation to tell me! I don’t care what you promised!”

“ I didn’t promise,” Red said. “I knew nothing about this.”

“You had to know.”

“I swear it: your mom never said word one.”

“You’re claiming she knew the truth all these years and kept it from her own husband?”

“Evidently,” Red said. He rubbed his forehead.

“That’s not possible,” Stem told him. “Why on earth would she do that?”

“Well, she … maybe she was worried I would make her give you up,” Red said. “I’d tell her she would have to hand you over to B. J. And she was right: I would have.”

Stem’s jaw dropped. He said, “You’d have handed me over.”

“Well, face it, Stem: this was a crazy arrangement.”

“But still,” Stem said.

“Still what? You were B. J.’s legal offspring.”

“I guess it’s a good thing she’s not around anymore, then,” Stem said bitterly. “She died, right?”

“Yes, I seem to remember she did,” Red said.

“You ‘seem to remember,’ ” Stem said, as if it were an accusation.

“Stem, I swear to God I had no knowledge of any of this. I barely knew the woman! I can’t even figure how your mom could get a lawyer to go along with it.”

“She didn’t get a lawyer. Look at the language. Oh, she tried to sound legal—‘attendant rights and privileges,’ ‘unless and until’—but what lawyer writes ‘never, ever’? What official document is a single paragraph long? She cooked it up herself, she and B. J. between them. They didn’t even have it notarized!”

“I have to say,” Red said, looking down at the contract again, “I’m a little bit … annoyed by this.”

Stem gave a humorless snort.

“Sometimes your mother could be … I mean, Abby could be …” Red trailed off.

“Look,” Stem said. “Just promise me this. Promise you won’t tell people.”