Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

He said, “What?”

“Because your hair falls down all shaggy as if you’re a little bit crazy.”

He blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t have to know what I mean,” she told him, and then, completely out of character, she moved toward him and raised her face to him and saw him begin to believe her.

Now it was more or less accepted that they were a couple, although she could tell that their friends were surprised. She didn’t explain herself to them. She became, in a way, a little like Dane; she grew cagey and evasive. She began to notice how stodgy their friends were, and although she had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house with a yard, all at once she began biting off the words “domestic” and “suburban” with her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Who wants to go to the Club for dinner?” someone would say, and Dane would say, “Gosh, the Club, what an unspeakable thrill.” Everybody would look sideways at Abby, but she would just smile tolerantly and take another sip of her Coke. She was the only one who knew him, she was saying — who divined that he was nowhere near as bad as he pretended to be.

Although every now and then, for a flash of a second, she wondered if his badness was precisely what attracted her. Not that he was really bad, but there was something risky about him, something contrary and outrageous. After he was fired, for instance, he had left the building with twenty-four boxes of staples. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred staples; later he’d done the math. (His glee when he told her this had made her smile.) And he didn’t even own a stapler! He had once driven out to where his mother was living with Horse Guy, as Dane called him, and duct-taped all the doors shut in the middle of the night. That escapade had made Abby laugh aloud. “Why in the world …?” she had asked, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain; it was almost the only time he had let the word “mother” cross his lips, and maybe he already regretted it.

Also his drinking, while it was deplorable, lent him a certain shambling, reckless, juvenile-delinquent quality that touched her heart even while she was shaking her head over him. You could see this boy coming half a block away and know him by his rolling walk, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face half hidden by his shank of hair and his back a brooding C shape. Oh, it wasn’t only the disadvantaged who needed compassion! He was leading a life just as hard, in some ways, as the lives of those poor little Negro children she was tutoring this summer. He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her.

She looked over at his profile, the slant of his cheek below the dark glasses, and sent him a small, warm smile even though he didn’t see it.

“But. So. Anyhow. I was saying,” he said, lifting his arm to signal a turn. “About my cousin.”

“Your cousin,” she repeated.

“George. The one I’m staying with.”

“Oh, have I met him?”

“No, he’s older. He’s got a career and all. He’s going away next weekend to visit his girlfriend in Boston.”

The Buick tilted slightly as it swerved onto Bouton Road, and Abby grabbed her purse before it could slide off the seat.

“I’ll have the place to myself,” Dane said. He parked in front of the Whitshanks’ and took his key from the ignition. The music stopped short but he went on sitting there, gazing through the windshield. “I was thinking you could come over Friday evening. Maybe tell your mom you were spending the night with a friend.”

She had foreseen that something like this would arise, sooner or later. It was where they’d been heading all along. It was where she wanted to head.

So she couldn’t explain what she said next. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.

He turned and looked at her, although his expression was still a blank behind the dark glasses. “Don’t know what?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure what friend I could tell her, and besides, I might be busy that night, I might have to do something with my parents; I’m not sure.”

She wasn’t handling this very smoothly. She was cross with herself for sounding so flustered. “I’ll have to see,” she told him, and she yanked open her door and all but fell out of the car in her haste to leave the moment behind.

Walking in front of him toward the house, though, she was conscious of her slim waist, and the sway of her skirt, and the swing of her hair down her back. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

Red Whitshank and another friend of his, Ward Rainey, stood talking with two workmen at the lower edge of the lawn. One of the workmen had a chainsaw, and Red and the other workman were carrying axes. All around them, in a massive tangle, lay thick branches and cross sections of trunk. That tulip poplar must have been gigantic. (And nowhere near dying, if you judged by all the green leaves.) The remainder of the trunk, some ten feet tall, still towered near the front porch, as flat-topped and perfectly cylindrical as an architectural column.

“… figure when Mitch gets here he can tell us how much he wants left,” Red was saying, and the man with the chainsaw said, “Well, I can’t see as he’ll want any left, because he’s not going to haul it out roots and all, is he? That would leave too big of a hole.”

“What, you’re thinking he’ll bring in a stump grinder?”

“Seems like that would make more sense.”

Abby called, “Hi, everybody.”

They turned, and Red said, “Hi, Abby! Hi, Dane.”

“Red,” Dane said, impassively.

Abby had always thought Red’s looks didn’t go with his name. He should have had red hair and that pinkish skin that went with it; he should have been freckled and doughy. Instead, he was all black-and-white, lean and lanky, with a boyishly prominent Adam’s apple and wrist bones as distinct as cabinet knobs. Today he was wearing a T-shirt that was more holes than fabric, and khakis with dirty knees. He could have been one of his father’s workmen. “These here are Earl and Landis,” he was saying. “They’re the guys who took this thing down.”

Earl and Landis nodded without smiling, and Ward lifted a palm.

“You took it down just the two of you?” Abby asked the men.

“Naw, Red helped plenty,” Earl said.

“Only with the muscle power,” Red told her. “It was Earl and Landis who knew how not to take everything else with it.”

“Laid her in place like a baby,” Landis said with satisfaction.

Abby lifted her eyes to study the canopy of leaves above them. So many trees remained that she couldn’t detect any change in the filtering of the light, but still, the loss of the poplar seemed a pity. The cross sections strewn about looked perfectly sound, and the sap filled the air with a scent as vital and sharp as fresh blood.

The men had returned to the subject of stump removal. Earl was of the opinion that they ought to just go ahead and cut the last of the trunk level with the ground, while Landis suggested waiting for Mitch. “Meantime we can strip these branches,” he said, and he set a foot on the nearest branch and gave one of its shoots an experimental tap with his axe. Abby liked hearing workmen discuss logistics. It made her feel like a small child again, sitting on her father’s counter swinging her feet and breathing in the smells of metal and machine oil.

Earl yanked the cord of his chainsaw and set up a deafening roar. He lowered the blade to the thickest part of a branch while Ward bent to grab another branch and haul it out of the way. “I don’t guess you brought an axe,” Red shouted to Dane.