Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

“That Atta woman’s here,” Jeannie whispered to her husband.

“Who?”

“The orphan who came to lunch last month, remember?”

Apparently, in the process of rising for the prayer, Jeannie had contrived to cast a backward glance at the congregation. Now she glanced again and said, “Oh! And there’s the driver of the car. She’s got somebody with her; could be her husband.”

“Poor gal,” Hugh said.

The driver of the car that killed Abby had paid a visit to the house the day after the accident, all upset, and apologized a dozen times even though it was common knowledge that it hadn’t been her fault. She kept saying that she would see that sweet dog till her dying day.

“There are a lot of people here,” Jeannie whispered, but then a look from Amanda hushed her.

Abby had not specified a Bible reading, but Reverend Alban provided one anyhow — a long passage from Proverbs about a virtuous woman. It was okay. At least, the family found nothing offensive in it. Then they were asked to sing a hymn called “Here I Am, Lord” that none of them was familiar with. Evidently Reverend Alban had felt the need of more musical selections than Abby had suggested. But that was okay too. Jeannie said later that it made her envision Abby arriving in heaven all brisk and bustly and social-worky: “Here I am, Lord; what needs doing?”

Abby had specified a poem. An Emily Dickinson poem, “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking,” which Amanda read aloud at the lectern, after first welcoming everybody and thanking them for coming. She was the only one of Red and Abby’s children who had wanted to speak. Denny claimed he wasn’t good at such things; Jeannie had worried she would break down; Stem had simply said no without giving any reason.

However, Merrick had volunteered. Merrick! That was unexpected. She had flown in from Florida as soon as she heard the news and come directly to the house, prepared to roll up her sleeves and take over. Amanda had managed to fend her off, but no one could deny her when she begged to say a few words at the service. “I knew Abby longer than anyone did,” she had said. “Longer even than Red!” And that was how she began her speech, standing not behind the lectern but beside it, as if to give the congregation the full benefit of her stark black dress with the asymmetrical hemline. “I knew Abby Dalton since she was twelve years old,” she said. “Since she was a scrappy little Hampden girl whose father owned one of those hardware stores where you walk in off the street and say, ‘Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I seem to be in somebody’s basement!’ Shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows crowded up close together, coils of rope and lengths of chain hanging down from this really low ceiling you could practically bump your head on, and a tabby cat sound asleep on a sack of grass seed. But you know what? Abby turned out to be the livest wire in our whole school. She wasn’t held back by her origins! She was a firecracker , and I’m proud to say she was my closest, dearest friend.” Then her chin began to quiver, and she pressed her fingertips to her lips and shook her head and hurried back to her seat, which happened to be next to her mother-in-law. All the other Whitshanks looked at each other with their eyes wide — even Red.

Next came Ree Bascomb, bless her heart, tiny and sprite-like in her cap of bouncy white curls. She started talking while she was still walking up the aisle. “I was actually at a hardware store once with Abby,” she said. “Not her father’s, of course. I didn’t know her back then. I got to know her when we were young mothers going stir-crazy at home, and sometimes we’d just take off together, hop into one or the other’s car and throw the kids in the backseat and drive somewhere just to be driving. So one day we were at Topps Home and Garden because Abby wanted a kitchen fire extinguisher, and while the man was ringing it up she said, ‘Do you mind hurrying? It’s kind of an emergency.’ Just being silly, you know; she meant it as a joke. Well, he didn’t get it. He said, ‘I have to follow procedures, ma’am,’ and she and I just doubled up laughing. We were crying with laughter! Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever again laugh as hard as I laughed with Abby. I’m going to miss her so much!”

She stepped away from the lectern dry-eyed, smiling at the Whitshanks as she passed them, but hers was the speech that made Jeannie and Amanda grow teary all over again.

“Thank you,” Reverend Alban said. “And now we’ll hear from Elise Baylor, Mrs. Whitshank’s granddaughter.”

Elise had an index card with her. She teetered up to the lectern on her strappy high heels, gazed out at the congregation with a dazzling smile, and cleared her throat. “When me and my cousins were little,” she said, “Grandma would call us on the phone and say, ‘It’s Saturday! Let’s have Camp Grandma!’ And we’d all go over to her house and she would do handicrafts with us — pressed flowers and pot holders and Popsicle-stick picture frames — or she’d read to us from these storybooks about children from other lands. I mean, some of those books were boring but parts were, like, sort of interesting. I’m going to remember my grandma for as long as I live.”

Deb and Susan glared at her — it must have been the “ my grandma” that irked them — while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.

“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.

At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories — all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others — one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”

Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ ” and everybody stood up.

“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “ Where did he say she went?”

“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.

“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”

Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.

Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.