Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you.”

Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.

He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.

In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.

“I wish I were asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”

“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.

“Oh, they’re paying you?”

“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”

But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.

Although it was probably true that he was short of cash. A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job. His family was well off — better off than hers, at least — but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie. He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies. Should she offer to pay her own way from now on? But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship. And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.

They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“Kicked me out of the house.”

“Oh, my goodness!”

“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”

Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”

“Oh, what about?”

Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.

“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”

It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.

“We’re cutting up a tree.”

“A tree!”

“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”

“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”

“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”

“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.

“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head. He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk! He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos. He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo. And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her. That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house. Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go.”

“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”

“He says it was already dying.”

“Hmm.”

“Merrick and her bridesmaids have to get dressed at crack of dawn on her wedding day because taking those two photos is going to use up so much time,” Dane said. “Mrs. Whitshank says he’ll make Merrick late for her own wedding.”

“And those full-length skirts! They’ll get all leafy and twiggy!”

“Mr. Whitshank claims they won’t. He’s laying white carpet down the whole walk, and then extra on the sides near the house where the bridesmaids are going to stand.”

Abby looked at Dane with her mouth open. Behind his dark glasses, he gave no hint what he thought of this plan.

“I’m surprised Merrick’s going along with it,” she told him.

“Oh, well, you know Mr. Whitshank,” Dane said.

Abby didn’t, in fact, know Mr. Whitshank at all. ( Mrs . Whitshank was the one she was fond of.) She had the impression, though, that he was a man of strong opinions.

They passed the church where the wedding would take place in six more days. People were heading toward it in clusters, perhaps for Sunday school or an early service — the women and girls in pastels and flower-laden hats and white gloves, the men and boys in suits. Abby looked for Merrick, but she didn’t see her. It was Dane’s church too, not that he ever seemed to attend.

Abby had known Dane, at least by sight, since her early teens, but they hadn’t gotten together till this past May, her first week home from college. She’d run into Red Whitshank one evening in the ticket line at the Senator, and he had two of his friends with him, one of them Dane Quinn. And Abby was with two of her friends; it had all worked out very neatly. Possibly Red had been hoping to sit next to her in the theater (it was common knowledge that he had a little crush on her), but she took one glance at Dane, at his forbidding scowl and his defensively hunched shoulders, and then stepped between him and her friend Ruth like the most brazen hussy (as Ruth said teasingly later). Something just came over her; she felt pulled to him. She liked his edginess, his wariness, his obvious grudge against the universe. Not to mention his good looks. Well, everyone knew his story. He’d been a standard-issue Gilman boy who went on to Princeton, like his father and both grandfathers before him, but just this past September — the start of his junior year — his mother had up and left his father and gone to live in Hunt Valley with the man who boarded her quarter horse. And as soon as Dane heard about it, he’d dropped out of school and come home. First he moped around the house but eventually, at his father’s insistence, he got a job of some sort at Stephenson Savings & Loan. (Bertie Stephenson had been his father’s college roommate.) He never talked about his mother; he iced over at any mention of her, but that just proved to Abby how deeply hurt he must be. Abby had a special fondness for people who tried to hide the damage. He became her newest worthy cause. She flung herself at him, worked to bring him out of himself, zeroed in on him at every gathering, wouldn’t take no for an answer. But no was his answer, at first. He stood around separate from the others and drank too much and smoked too much and made sullen one-word responses to her most sympathetic remarks. Then one evening — on Red Whitshank’s front porch, as it happened — he turned on her almost threateningly and backed her against the wall and said, “I want to know why you keep hanging around me.”

She could have offered any number of good reasons. She could have said it was because of his obvious unhappiness, or her conviction that she could make a difference in his life. But what she said was, “Because of that up-and-down groove between your nose and your upper lip.”