Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Red just gazed at her miserably, his eyes so empty of light that he seemed almost sightless.

“Be honest,” Jeannie said to Amanda. “Does any little part of you feel relieved that Mom died so suddenly?”

“You mean on account of her lapses,” Amanda said.

“They would only have gotten worse; we can be pretty sure of that. Whatever they were. And Dad would be trying to look after her, and so would Nora; and Denny would have thought of some excuse to leave by then.”

“But maybe it was just, oh, a circulation problem or something, and the doctors could have fixed it.”

“That’s not very likely,” Jeannie said.

They were up in Red’s bedroom on a rainy Sunday afternoon, packing cartons while the others watched a baseball game downstairs. Both of them wore scruffy clothes, and Amanda’s chin was smudged with newspaper ink.

All week they had been packing, any free moment they could find. Separate islands of belongings had begun rising here and there in the house as people put in their requests: Abby’s crafts supplies and her sewing machine in the upstairs hall for Nora, the good china packed in a barrel in the dining room for Amanda. (Red would keep the everyday china, which they were leaving in the cupboard until just before moving day.) Color-coded stickers dotted the furniture — a few pieces for Red’s apartment, a few more for Stem and Jeannie and Amanda, and the vast majority for the Salvation Army.

Jeannie and Amanda dragged a filled carton between them out to the hall, where one of the boys could come get it later. Then Jeannie unfolded another carton and ran tape across the bottom flaps. “If I know Mom,” she said, “she’d have refused any surgery anyhow.”

“It’s true,” Amanda said. “Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.” She was collecting framed photos from the top of Abby’s bureau. “I’m going to pack these up for Dad,” she told Jeannie.

“Will he have space for them?”

“Oh, maybe not.”

She studied the oldest photo — a snapshot of the four of them laughing on the beach, Amanda barely a teenager and the rest of them still children. “We look like we were having such a good time,” she said.

“We were having a good time.”

“Well, yes. But things could get awfully fraught, now and then.”

“At the funeral,” Jeannie said, “Marilee Hodges told me, ‘I always used to envy you and that family of yours. The bunch of you out on your porch playing Michigan poker for toothpicks, and your two brothers so tall and good-looking, and that macho red pickup your dad used to drive with the four of you kids rattling around in the rear.’ ”

“Marilee Hodges was a ninny,” Amanda said.

“Goodness, what brought that on?”

“It was hell riding in that truck bed. I doubt it was even legal. And I believe children should have their own rooms. And Mom could be so insensitive, so clueless and obtuse. Like that time she sent Denny for psychological testing and then told all of us his results.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Supposedly one of those inkblot thingies showed he’d been disappointed in his early childhood by a woman. ‘What woman could that have been?’ Mom kept asking us. ‘He didn’t know any women!’ ”

“I don’t remember a thing about it.”

“It was pretty clear she loved him best,” Amanda said, “even though he drove her crazy.”

“You’re just saying that because you’ve got only one child,” Jeannie told her. “Mothers don’t love children best; they love them—”

“—differently, is all,” Amanda finished for her. “Yes, yes, I know.” Then she held up a photo of Stem at age four or five. “Would Nora like this, do you think?”

Jeannie squinted at it. “Put it in her box,” she suggested.

“And what do I do with this one of Denny?”

“Does he have a box?”

“He says he doesn’t want anything.”

“Start a box for him anyhow. I bet wherever he lives is nothing but bare walls.”

“I asked him yesterday,” Amanda said, “whether he had let his landlady know that he was coming back, and all he said was, ‘We’re working on that.’ ”

“ ‘Working on that’! What is that supposed to mean?”

“He’s so darn secretive,” Amanda said. “He pokes and pries into our lives, but then he gets all paranoid when we ask about his.”

“I think he’s mellowing, though,” Jeannie told her. “Maybe losing Mom has done that. When I was taking down the wall of photos in his room, I asked him, ‘Should I just chuck these?’ All those photos of the Daltons, those chunky aunts from the forties with their shoulder pads and thick stockings. But Denny said, ‘Oh, I don’t know; that seems kind of harsh, don’t you think?’ I said, ‘Denny?’ I actually knocked on the side of his head with my knuckles. ‘Knock knock,’ I said. ‘Is that you in there?’ ”

“Good,” Amanda said promptly. “Let’s give him these.” And she reached for a sheet of newspaper and started wrapping a photo.

“Denny’s getting nicer and Stem is getting crankier,” Jeannie said. “And Dad! He’s being impossible.”

“Oh, well, Dad,” Amanda said. “It’s like you can’t say anything right to him.” She placed the wrapped photo in the carton Jeannie had just set up. “He’s been fretting about the house so,” she said. “How long it will take to sell it, how people might not appreciate it … So I asked him, I said, ‘Should we try and get in touch with the Brills?’ ”

“The Brills,” Jeannie repeated.

“The original-owner Brills. The ones who had the house built in the first place.”

“Yes, I know who they are , Amanda, but wouldn’t they be dead by now?”

“Not the sons, I don’t imagine. The sons were only in their teens when Dad was a little boy. So I said, ‘What if all these years the sons have been pining over this house and wishing they still lived here?’ You remember what one of them said when their mother said they were moving. ‘Aw, Ma ?’ he said. Well, you would think I’d suggested lighting a match to the place. ‘What are you thinking ?’ Dad asked me. ‘Where did you get such a damn-fool notion as that? Those two spoiled Brill boys are not ever getting their hands on this house. Put it right out of your mind,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, sorry. Gee. My mistake entirely.’ ”

“It’s grief,” Jeannie told her. “He’s just lost the love of his life, bear in mind.”

“Which loss are you talking about — Mom or the house?”

“Well, both, I guess.”

“Huh,” Amanda said. “I never heard before that grief makes people bad-tempered.”

“Some it does and some it doesn’t,” Jeannie said.

They had reached that stage of packing where it seemed they’d created more mess than they had cleared out. Several half-filled cartons sat open around the room — the photos in a carton for Denny, blankets in a carton for Red, a mass of Abby’s sweaters in a carton for Goodwill. With each sweater there had been a debate—“Don’t you want to take this? You would look good in this!”—but after holding it up for a moment, one or the other of them would sigh and let it fall into the carton with the rest. The rug was linty, the floor was strewn with cast-off hangers and dry-cleaner’s bags, and a hard gray light from the stripped windows gave the room a bleak and uncared-for look.

“You should have heard Dad’s reaction when I told him he should maybe leave this bed behind and take a single,” Amanda said.

“Well, I can understand: he wants the bed that he’s used to.”