Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“What, not tell anyone ? Not even Denny and the girls?”

“No one. Promise you’ll keep it quiet.”

“How come?” Red asked him.

“I just want you to.”

“But you’re grown now. It couldn’t change anything.”

“I mean this: I need you to forget you ever saw it.”

“Well,” Red said. And he leaned forward and handed it over.

Stem folded the contract and put it in his shirt pocket.

It emerged that not even Red’s bottom desk drawer had provided quite enough space for Abby’s papers. Where her funeral directive showed up, finally, was the cupboard beneath the window seat, interleaved with programs from other people’s funerals — her parents’ and her brother’s and a “ceremony of remembrance” for someone named Shawanda Simms whom none of the rest of the family had heard of. And no, she did not request “Good Vibrations,” or “Amazing Grace,” either, for that matter. She wanted “Sheep May Safely Graze” and “Brother James’s Air,” both to be sung by only the choir, thank goodness; and then the congregation should join in on “Shall We Gather at the River?” Friends and/or family could give testimonials, supposing they cared to (this wording struck her daughters as pathetically tentative), and Reverend Stock could say something brief and — if it wasn’t asking too much—“not too heavy on the religion.”

The mention of Reverend Stock threw everyone into a tizzy. First, they couldn’t even think who he was. Then Jeannie figured out that he must be the pastor at Hampden Fellowship — the little church that Abby had gone back to from time to time, having belonged to it in her childhood. But the Whitshanks’ official place of worship, at least on Christmas Eve and Easter, was St. David’s, and St. David’s was what Amanda had booked for eleven o’clock Monday morning. Did it really, really make any difference? she wondered aloud. Red said it did. Perhaps reasoning that Nora was their expert on religious matters, he commissioned her to place the necessary calls to St. David’s and to Reverend Stock. Nora went off to the sunroom phone and came back some time later to report that Reverend Stock had retired several years ago, but Reverend Edwin Alban was saddened to hear of their loss and would pay a visit that afternoon to discuss the particulars. Red blanched at the mention of a visit, but he thanked her for arranging it.

By now, everybody in the family was unraveling around the edges. The three little boys kept waking at night and crossing the hall to climb into bed with Stem and Nora. Stem forgot to cancel an appointment with a Guilford woman who was thinking of adding a major extension to her house. Jeannie and Amanda got into a quarrel after Amanda said that while Alexander might indeed have held a special place in Abby’s heart, it was only to be expected because “Alexander is so … you know.” “He’s so what? What?” Jeannie had demanded, and Amanda had said, “Never mind,” and made a big show of clamping her mouth shut. Not ten minutes later, Deb gave Elise a black eye for claiming that their grandma had once confided that she loved Elise the best. “Now, how to amuse them today?” Red asked — a line from a Christopher Robin poem that Abby used to quote whenever some new family catastrophe arose. Then he got a stricken look, no doubt at the sound of Abby’s merry voice echoing in his head. Meanwhile Denny, true to form, started spending long periods shut away in his room doing no one knew what, although occasionally he could be heard talking on his cell phone. But to whom? It was a mystery. Even Heidi was acting up. She kept raiding the garbage container under the kitchen sink and leaving disgusting knots of chewed foil beneath the dining-room table.

“You girls have to tell me if I start looking seedy,” Red told his daughters. “I don’t have your mother around anymore to keep me up to par.” But as the week wore on, and his shirts developed food stains and he never got out of those slippers, he shrugged off any suggestion they made. “You know, Dad,” Jeannie said, “I believe those pants of yours are ready for the rag bag,” and he said, “What are you talking about? I’ve just now got them properly broken in.” When Amanda offered to take his suit to the cleaner’s in preparation for the funeral, he told her there was no need; he’d be wearing a dashiki. “A what ?” Amanda asked him. He turned and walked out of the sunroom, leaving his daughters staring at each other in dismay. A few minutes later he came back carrying a blousy sort of smock in a teal blue so brilliant, so electrically vibrant, that it was painful to the eyes. “Your mother made this for our wedding,” he said, “and I thought it would be appropriate if I wore it to her funeral.”

“But, Dad,” Amanda said, “your wedding was in the sixties.”

“So?”

“Maybe in the sixties people wore these, although I can’t quite … but that was almost half a century ago! All the seams are fraying, just look. There’s a rip under one arm.”

“So we’ll fix it,” Red said. “It’ll be just as good as new.”

Amanda and Jeannie exchanged a look, which Red caught. He turned abruptly to Denny, who was lounging on the couch cycling through TV channels. “This is easy to fix,” Red told him, holding up the dashiki on its wire hanger. “Right? Am I right?”

Denny said “Huh?” and flicked his eyes over. “Oh, sure, I can fix that,” he said. “If I can find the same color thread.”

The girls groaned, but Denny stood up and took the dashiki from Red and left the room. “Thanks,” Red called after him. Then he turned back to his daughters and said, “I’ve got some corduroys I could wear with it, kind of a light gray. Gray goes good with blue, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Dad,” Amanda said.

“At our wedding I wore bell-bottoms,” he said. “Your grandma Dalton had a conniption.”

There’d been no photos of their wedding, because Abby had claimed that a photographer would ruin the mood. So Amanda and Jeannie perked up, and Jeannie asked, “What did Mom wear?”

“This long sort of flowy, I forget what they call it,” Red said. “A Kaplan?”

“A caftan?”

“That’s it.” His eyes filled with tears. “She looked nice,” he said.

“Yes, I bet she did.”

“I know I can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ ” he said. The tears were running down his face now, but he didn’t seem to realize it. “We had forty-eight good years together. That’s way more than a lot of folks get. And I know I should be glad she went first, because she never could have managed without me. She couldn’t even fix a leaky spigot!”

“Right, Dad,” Jeannie said, and she and Amanda were crying too now.

“But sometimes I just have to ask anyhow. You know?”

“Yes, Dad. We know.”

Carla wasn’t happy about letting Susan miss school for the funeral. Everybody heard Denny arguing with her on the phone. “She was my mother’s favorite grandchild,” he said. “You’re telling me the kid can’t skip one measly math test for her sake?” In the end it was agreed that she could come but not stay over, in order to be back in school on Tuesday morning. So immediately after breakfast on the morning of the funeral Denny drove down to the train station to meet her. The child he returned with was a much more solemn, more dignified version of the Susan who’d gone to the beach with them. She wore a charcoal knit dress with a demure white collar, and black tights and black suede pumps. Some sort of training bra appeared to be crumpled around her chest. Stem’s three boys eyed her shyly at first and wouldn’t speak, but she herded them into the sunroom and in a few minutes chattery voices began drifting toward the kitchen, where the grown-ups were still sitting around the breakfast table.