Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

His fingers stilled on the napkin. He said, “What’s that you say?”

“You’re glad your daughter’s marrying a rich boy but it irks you rich boys are so spoiled. You want your son to join the gentry but you’re mad when he’s polite to them. I guess you just can’t be satisfied, can you?”

“Missy, you’ve got no business taking that tone with me,” he said.

Abby felt as if she were about to run out of breath, but she stood her ground. “Well?” she asked. “Can you?”

“I’m proud of both my children,” Mr. Whitshank said in a steely voice. “Which is more than your daddy can say for you , I reckon, with that disrespectful tongue of yours.”

“My father is very proud of me,” she told him.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering where you come from.”

Abby opened her mouth but then closed it. She snatched up the cobbler dish and marched out to the kitchen with it, her back very straight and her head high.

Mrs. Whitshank had left off washing dishes to start drying some of those that were sitting on the drain board. Abby took the towel from her, and Mrs. Whitshank said, “Why, thank you, honey,” and returned to the sink. She didn’t seem to notice how Abby’s hands were shaking. Abby felt bitterly triumphant but also wounded in some way — cut to the quick.

How dare he say a word about where she came from? He of all people, with his shady, shameful past! Her family was very respectable. They had ancestors they could brag about: a great-great-grandfather, for instance, who had once rescued a king. (Granted, the rescue was merely a matter of helping to lift a carriage wheel out of a rut in the road, but the king had nodded to him personally, it was believed.) And a great-aunt out west who’d gone to college with Willa Cather, although it was true that the great-aunt hadn’t known at the time that Willa Cather existed. Oh, there was nothing lower-class about the Daltons, nothing second-rate, and their house might be on the smallish side but at least they got along with their neighbors.

Mrs. Whitshank was talking about dishwashing machines. She just didn’t see the need, she was saying. She said, “Why, some of my nicest conversations have been over a sinkful of dishes! But Junior thinks we ought to get a machine. He’s all for going out and buying one.”

“What does he know about it?” Abby demanded.

Mrs. Whitshank was quiet a moment. Then, “Oh,” she said, “he just wants to make my life easier, I guess.”

Abby fiercely dried a platter.

“People don’t always understand Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “But he’s a better man than you know, Abby, honey.”

“Huh,” Abby said.

Mrs. Whitshank smiled at her. “Could you check out on the porch, please,” she asked, “and see if there’s any dishes?”

Abby was glad to leave. She might have said something she’d be sorry for.

No one was sitting on the porch. She picked up Merrick’s cereal bowl and her spoon, and then she straightened and surveyed the lawn. At the moment, both chainsaws were silent. The air seemed oddly bright; evidently that naked trunk had made more difference than she had suspected. It was lying flat now, pointing toward the street, and Landis was untying a length of rope that had been looped around its circumference. Dane had paused for a cigarette, Earl and Ward were loading the wheelbarrow, and Red was standing next to the sheared-off stump with his head bowed.

From his posture, Abby thought at first that he was brooding about what had happened at lunch, and she turned away quickly so he wouldn’t know she had seen. But in the act of turning, she realized that what he was doing was counting tree rings.

After all Red had been through today — the grueling physical effort and the din and the punishing heat, the altercation with the neighbor and the painful scene with his father — Red was calmly studying that stump to find out how old it was.

Why did this hearten her so? Maybe it was the steadiness of his focus. Maybe it was his immunity to insult, or his lack of resentment. “Oh, that ,” he seemed to be saying. “Never mind that. All families have their ups and downs; let’s just figure the age of this poplar.”

Abby felt buoyed by a kind of airiness at her center, like the airiness of the lawn once that trunk had been felled. She stepped back into the house so lightly that she made almost no sound at all.

“What’s going on out there?” Mrs. Whitshank asked. She was wiping a counter; the last of the pots and pans had been dried and put away.

Abby said, “Well, they got the trunk down, but Mitch hasn’t shown up yet. Dane is taking a cigarette break, and Ward and Earl and Landis are clearing the yard, and Red is counting tree rings.”

“Tree rings?” Mrs. Whitshank asked. Then, perhaps imagining that Abby had no knowledge whatsoever of the natural world, she said, “Oh! He must be guessing its age.”

“He was just standing there, after all that fuss, wondering how old a poplar was,” Abby said, and all at once she felt on the verge of tears; she had no idea why. “He’s a good man, Mrs. Whitshank,” she said.

Mrs. Whitshank glanced up in surprise, and then she smiled — a serene, contented, radiant smile that turned her eyes into curls. “Why, yes, honey, he is,” she said.

Then Abby went out to the porch again and settled in the swing. It was the prettiest afternoon, all breezy and yellow-green with a sky the unreal blue of a Noxzema jar, and in a minute she was going to tell Red she’d like to ride with him to the wedding. For now, though, she was saving that up — hugging it close to her heart.

She nudged a porch floorboard with her foot to set the swing in motion, and she swung slowly back and forth, absently tracing the familiar, sandy-feeling undersides of the armrests with her fingertips. Her eyes were on Dane now; she watched him with a distant feeling of sorrow. She saw how he dropped his cigarette, how he ground it beneath his heel, how he picked up his axe and sauntered over to a branch. What a world, what a world. And then the line that came after that one: “Who would have thought,” the witch had asked, “that a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

But Abby stood up from the swing, even so, and started walking toward Red, and with every step she felt herself growing happier and more certain.

EVERY GROUND-FLOOR ROOM but the kitchen had double pocket doors, and above each door was a fretwork transom for the air to circulate in the summer. The windows were fitted so tightly that not even the fiercest winter storm could cause them to rattle. The second-floor hall had a chamfered railing that pivoted neatly at the stairs before descending to the entrance hall. All the floors were aged chestnut. All the hardware was solid brass — doorknobs, cabinet knobs, even the two-pronged hooks meant to anchor the cords of the navy-blue linen window shades that were brought down from the attic every spring. A ceiling fan with wooden blades hung in each room upstairs and down, and out on the porch there were three. The fan above the entrance hall had a six-and-a-half-foot wingspan.

Mrs. Brill had wanted a chandelier in the entrance hall — a glittery one, all crystal, shaped like an upside-down wedding cake. Silly woman. Junior had dissuaded her by pointing out the impracticality: any time the tiniest cobweb was spotted trailing from a prism, he would need to send a workman over with a sixteen-foot stepladder. (He failed to disclose that for another client, he had once designed an ingenious cable-and-winch lift system to raise and lower a chandelier at will.) His main objection, of course, was that a chandelier would not have been in keeping with the house. This was a plain house, in the way that a handcrafted blanket chest is plain — simple, but impeccably built, as Junior, who had built it, should know. He had overseen every detail, setting his hand to every part of it except those parts that somebody else could do better, like the honeycombing of tiny black-and-white ceramic tiles in the bathroom, laid by two brothers from Little Italy who didn’t speak any English. The stairway, though, with the newel posts running clean through the hand-cut openings in the treads, and those pocket doors that glided almost silently into their respective walls: those were Junior’s. He was a brash and hasty man in all other areas of life, a man who coasted through stop signs without so much as a toe on the brake, a man who bolted his food and guzzled his drinks and ordered a stammering child to “come on, spit it out,” but when it came to constructing a house he had all the patience in the world.