Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Red wore floppy gray corduroys and his dashiki, which was even more startling off its hanger. The sleeves ballooned extravagantly over elasticized cuffs, giving him a buccaneer air, and the slit at the neck was deep enough to expose a whisk broom of gray chest hair. But Nora said, “Oh, didn’t Denny do a nice job of mending!” and Red looked satisfied, not appearing to notice that she hadn’t said a word about the overall effect.

When the doorbell rang and Heidi started barking, they all gathered themselves together. That would be Ree Bascomb’s maid, who had agreed to babysit the three boys. Once she’d been given her instructions, they all filed out the back door — Stem and Nora, Red, Denny and Susan — and climbed into Abby’s car. Denny drove. Red sat next to him. During the ten-minute trip to the church Red said nothing at all, just gazed out the side window. In the rear, Nora made small talk with Susan. How was school this year? How was her mother? Susan answered politely but briefly, as if she felt it would be disrespectful not to keep her mind on the funeral. Denny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel every time they stopped for a light.

In Hampden, the rest of the world was enjoying an ordinary Monday morning. Two heavyset women stood talking to each other, one of them trailing a wheeled cart full of laundry. A man pushed a bundled-up baby in a stroller. The weather had started out cool but was rapidly growing warmer, and some people wore sweaters but a girl emerging from a liquor store was in short shorts and rubber flip-flops.

The church turned out to be a small, unassuming white cube topped with more of a cupola than a steeple, squeezed between a ma-and-pa grocery store and a house already decorated to the nines for Halloween. They might have missed it altogether if not for the signboard in front. HAMPDEN FELLOWSHIP was spelled out across the top of the frame, with WELCOME HOME PRIVATE SPRINKLE in movable type below. There wasn’t even a parking lot, or not one that Denny could locate. They had to park on the street. As they were piling out of the car, Jeannie and Hugh drew up behind them with their two children and Hugh’s mother. Then Amanda and her Hugh walked up with Elise, who was wearing patent-leather heels and a shiny, froufrou dress so short she could have been a cocktail waitress. A patch of pancake makeup nearly hid her black eye. All it took was the sight of each other for Jeannie and Amanda to dissolve in torrents of tears, and they stood on the sidewalk hugging while Mrs. Angell clucked sympathetically and clasped her purse to her bosom. She wore a pretty flowered hat that looked very churchlike. In fact all of them were dressed in their best today except for Red, whose dashiki hem flared below his Orioles jacket.

Eventually, they climbed the two front steps and entered a low-ceilinged white room lined with dark pews. It had the deep chill of a place that had sat through an autumn night without heat, although a furnace could be heard now rumbling somewhere below. A wooden lectern faced them, with a plain dark cross on the wall behind it, and off to one side a woman with dyed red hair was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on an upright piano. (Reverend Alban had already explained that his choir members were working folk and would not be able to sing on a weekday.) The pianist didn’t look in their direction but continued plinking away while they threaded up the aisle and settled in the second row. Possibly they could have chosen the first row, but there was unspoken agreement that that would have felt too show-offy.

A tall vase of white hydrangeas stood in front of the lectern. Where had those come from? The Whitshanks hadn’t ordered flowers, and they had specified in the Sun that they didn’t want any sent — just donations to the House of Ruth, if people were so inclined. Abby had been odd about flowers. She liked them growing outside, unpicked. Jeannie whispered, “Maybe they’re from someone’s yard,” which would have been preferable, at least, to flowers from a florist, but Amanda, sitting next to her, whispered, “Isn’t it too late in the year?” They could have spoken in normal tones, but they were all a little self-conscious. None of them felt entirely certain about funeral etiquette — whom to greet, where to look, who should be handed discreet envelopes of cash at the end of the service. Twice just this morning, Amanda had phoned Ree Bascomb for advice.

The children sat at the far end, with Susan in the middle because she was from away and therefore the most interesting. Red was on the aisle, at Amanda’s insistence. She had pointed out that friends might like to stop by his pew and say a few words to him. Since this was exactly what Red feared, he sat hunch-shouldered with his head lowered, like a bird in the rain, and stared fixedly at his knees.

Reverend Alban entered from a side door near the piano. Eddie, he’d asked them to call him. He was a very blond, disconcertingly young man in a black suit, his skin so fair that you could see the blood coursing beneath it. First he bent over Red and pressed Red’s right hand between both of his own, and then he asked Amanda if she had the list of people who would be speaking. At the time of his visit to the house they hadn’t yet decided on the speakers, but now Amanda handed him a sheet of paper and he ran his eyes down it and nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “And how do you pronounce this one? E-lyce?”

“E-leece,” Amanda said firmly, and Jeannie stiffened next to her. It didn’t seem a good sign that he had had to ask. He slipped the paper inside his jacket and went to sit on a straight-backed chair beside the lectern.

Guests had begun trickling into the pews behind them. The Whitshanks heard footsteps and murmurs, but they went on facing forward.

Reverend Alban — Eddie — had admitted during his visit to the house that he hadn’t known Abby personally. “I’ve only pastored at Hampden three years,” he’d said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to get acquainted. I’m sure she was a very nice lady.”

The word “lady” had made them all go steely-faced and wary. This man had no idea of Abby! He was picturing some old biddy in orthopedic shoes. “She was not but seventy-two,” Jeannie told him with her chin out.

But he himself was so young, that must have sounded old to him. “Yes,” he’d said, “it always feels too soon. But the Lord in his wisdom … Tell me, Mr. Whitshank, do you have any wishes of your own for the service?”

“Me? Oh, no,” Red had said. “No, I’m not … I don’t … we haven’t thrown a lot of funerals in this family.”

“I understand. Then might I suggest—”

“It’s true my parents passed away, but I mean, that was so sudden. Their car stalled on the railroad tracks. I guess I was in shock; I really don’t remember too much about the funeral.”

“That must have been—”

“Now that I look back on it, I don’t feel like I really took it in. I feel like it sort of slipped by me. And it all seems so long ago, although truth to tell it was only back in the sixties. Modern times! We’d sent men into space by then. Why, my folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.”

“Just fancy that,” Reverend Alban had said.

So what with one thing and another, his visit hadn’t settled much. None of the family knew what to expect when he rose to stand at the lectern, finally, and the piano fell silent.

“Let us pray,” he told the congregation. He held up both arms and everyone rose; pews creaked all through the room. He closed his eyes, but the Whitshanks kept theirs open — all but Nora. “Heavenly Father,” he intoned in a hollow-sounding voice, “we ask you this morning to comfort us in our bereavement. We ask you to …”