Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

When Denny said his goodbyes before driving Susan to the train station, it was clear that he assumed the guests would be gone by the time he got back. But no, there they still were when he returned. Sax Brown and Marge Ellis were arguing about Afghanistan. Elise had got hold of a glass of white wine; she was pinching the stem daintily between her thumb and index finger with all her other fingers splayed out, and her makeup had worn thin and her black eye was re-emerging. Ree Bascomb’s maid was serving crudités in her stocking feet now, and Ree herself, who had maybe had a tad too much to drink, stood with an arm looped around the waist of somebody’s teenage son. Red looked exhausted. His face was gray and sagging. Nora was trying to make him sit down, but he stayed stubbornly upright.

Then suddenly the guests were gone, all of them at once, as if they had heard some secret dog whistle. The living room held no one but family, and it seemed too bright, like outdoors after a daytime movie. A decimated cheese board rested on an ottoman, and cracker crumbs littered the rug, and someone’s forgotten shawl was slung across the back of a chair. Ree Bascomb’s maid tinkled glassware in the kitchen. The toilet flushed in the powder room, and Tommy returned to the living room still hitching up his pants.

“Well,” Red said. He looked around at everyone.

“Well,” Amanda echoed.

They were all standing. They were all empty-handed. They had the look of people waiting for their next assignment, but there wasn’t one, of course. It was over. They had seen Abby off.

It seemed there should be something more — some summing up, some account to deliver. “You wouldn’t believe what Merrick said,” they wanted to report. And “You’d have laughed to see Queen Eula. No sign of Trey, wouldn’t you know, because he had an important meeting, but Queen Eula came. Can you imagine? Remember how she always used to swear you were a Communist?”

But wait. Abby was dead. She would never hear about any of this.

IT COULD BE ARGUED that with Abby gone, there was no further need for anyone to stay on in the house with Red. He was more or less able-bodied, after all, and he went right back to work the morning after the funeral. That afternoon, though, he came home early and slipped upstairs to bed, and if Nora hadn’t walked into his room with a stack of folded laundry he might have lain there undiscovered for who knows how long, one hand clamped to his chest and a line of either pain or worry crimping his forehead. He said it was nothing, just a tired spell, but he didn’t object when Nora insisted on Denny’s driving him to the emergency room.

In fact it was nothing — indigestion, the doctors decided six hours later, and he was sent home along with all four of his children, the other three having assembled at the hospital as soon as Nora phoned them. Still, it started his daughters thinking.

They had agreed, till then, that there would be plenty of time to sort out the household arrangements. Let things settle a bit, they told each other. But the rest of that week, both girls seemed to be on Bouton Road more often than they were at home — and generally without their husbands and children, as if to show that they meant business. They would wander in on some errand, Jeannie wanting Abby’s recipe box or Amanda bringing grocery-store cartons to sort Abby’s clothes into, and then they would hang around engaging one or another person in pointed conversation.

“You know we can’t depend on Denny in any permanent way,” Amanda told Nora, for instance. “He might promise us the moon, but one day he’ll up and leave us. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long.” Then Denny walked into the kitchen and she broke off. Had he heard? But even after he’d set his cup in the sink and walked out again, Nora made no reply. She slid cookies off a baking sheet, her expression pleasant and noncommittal, as if Amanda had been talking just to hear herself talk.

And Stem! Maybe it was grief, but he’d become very quiet. “Underneath,” Jeannie tried telling him once, “I think Dad has always assumed that you and Nora would live here forever. Inheriting the house, I mean, after he’s gone.” Then she sent a guilty look toward Denny, who was sitting next to Stem on the couch flicking through TV channels, but Denny merely grimaced. Even he knew it was Stem that Red would have pinned his hopes on. As for Stem himself, he didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen, although there was nothing to watch just then but commercials and more commercials.

After Sunday lunch, while Red was upstairs napping, Amanda told the others, “It’s not like Dad needs a real caretaker. I grant you that. But someone should make sure every morning that he’s made it through the night, at least.”

“A simple phone call could establish that much,” Stem said.

Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other. It was a remark they would have expected from Denny rather than Stem.

Stem wasn’t looking at either of them. He was watching the children playing a board game on the rug.

Denny said, “Ah, well, maybe sooner or later Dad will find himself a lady friend.”

“Oh! Denny!” Jeannie said.

“What?”

“Yes, he could do that,” Amanda said equably. “Part of me wishes he would, by and by. Some nice, nurturing woman. Though another part of me says, ‘But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”

“Dad would never fall for a woman who wore the back of her collar up!” Jeannie said.

Then Red’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs, and everybody fell silent.

Later that same afternoon, when the girls had collected their families and were saying goodbye at the door, Red asked Amanda if he should let their lawyer know about Abby’s death. “Goodness, yes,” Amanda said. “Haven’t you already done that? Who is your lawyer?” and Red said, “I have no idea; it was years ago we made our wills. Your mother was the one who took care of that stuff.”

Stem made a sudden, sharp sound that resembled a laugh, and everybody looked at him.

“It’s like that old joke,” he told them. “The husband says, ‘My wife decides the little things, like what job I take and which house we buy, and I decide the big things, like whether we should admit China to the U.N.’ ”

Jeannie’s Hugh said, “Huh?”

“Women are the ones in charge,” Stem told him. “Make no mistake about it.”

“Isn’t China already in the U.N.?”

But then Nora stepped in to say, “Don’t worry, Father Whitshank, I’ll track down your lawyer’s name,” and the moment passed.

On Monday, while Red was at work, Amanda arrived with more cartons. You’d think she didn’t have a job. She was dressed in business clothes, though, so she must have been on the way to her office. “Tell me the truth, Nora,” she said as soon as she had set the cartons in a corner of the dining room. “Can you imagine you and Stem staying on here forever?”

“You know we would never leave Father Whitshank if he really needed assistance,” Nora said.

“So, do you think he does need assistance?”

“Oh, Douglas should be the one to answer that.”

Amanda’s shoulders slumped, and she turned without a word and walked out.

In the front hall she met up with Denny, who was coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I wish Stem and Nora weren’t so … virtuous. It’s wearing, is what it is.”

“Is that a fact,” Denny said.

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.