Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

He set a hand on the small of her back to guide her. Merrick took his other hand and walked next to him, and Redcliffe toddled behind with his homemade wooden tractor rattling after him on a string. Linnie said, “Oh, look, they left behind their porch furniture.”

“I told you they were doing that,” he said.

“Did they charge you for it?”

“Nope. Said I could have it for free.”

“Well, that was nice.”

He wasn’t going to point out the swing. He was going to wait for her to notice it.

There was a moment when he wondered if she would notice — she could be very heedless, sometimes — but then she came to a stop, and he stopped too and watched her taking it in. “Oh,” she said, “that swing’s real pretty, Junior.”

“You like it?”

“I can see why you would favor it over wrought iron.”

He slid his hand from the small of her back to cup her waist, and he pulled her closer. “It’s a sight more comfortable, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

“What color you going to paint it?”

“What?”

“Could we paint it blue?”

“Blue!” he said.

“I’m thinking a kind of medium blue, like a … well, I don’t know what shade exactly you would call it, but it’s darker than baby blue, and lighter than navy. Just a middling blue, you know? Like a … maybe they call it Swedish blue. Or … is there such a thing as Dutch blue? No, maybe not. My aunt Louise had a porch swing the kind of blue I’m thinking of; my uncle Guy’s wife. They lived over in Spruce Pine in this cute little tiny house. They were the sweetest couple. I used to wish my folks were like them. My folks were more, well, you know; but Aunt Louise and Uncle Guy were so friendly and outgoing and fun-loving and they didn’t have any children and I always thought, ‘I wish they’d ask if I could be their child.’ And they sat out in their porch swing together every nice summer evening, and it was a real pretty blue. Maybe Mediterranean blue. Do they have such a color as Mediterranean blue?”

“Linnie Mae,” Junior said. “The swing is already painted.”

“It is?”

“Or varnished, at least. It’s finished. This is how it’s going to be.”

“Oh, Junie, can’t we paint it blue? Please? I think how best to describe that blue is ‘sky blue,’ but by that I mean a real sky, a deep-blue summer sky. Not powder blue or aqua blue or pale blue, but more of a, how do you say—”

“Swedish,” Junior said through set teeth.

“What?”

“It was Swedish blue; you had it right the first time. I know because every goddamn house in Spruce Pine had Swedish-blue porch furniture. You’d think they’d passed a law or something. It was a common shade. It was common and low-class.”

Linnie was looking at him with her mouth open, and Merrick was tugging his hand to urge him toward the house. He wrung his fingers free and charged on up the walk, leaving the others to follow. If Linnie said one more word, he was going to fling back his head and roar like some kind of caged beast. But she didn’t.

The main thing he needed to do before they moved in was add a back porch. All the house had now was a little concrete stoop — one of the few battles with the Brills that Junior had lost, although he had pointed out to them repeatedly that their architect had provided no space for the jumble of normal life, the snow boots and catchers’ masks and hockey sticks and wet umbrellas.

Junior always made a spitting sound when someone mentioned architects.

He didn’t have men to spare these days because of the war. Two of them had enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, and one had gone to work at the Sparrows Point Shipyard, and a couple more had been drafted. So what he did, he took Dodd and Cary off the Adams job and set them to roughing out the porch, after which he finished the rest on his own. He went over there in the evenings, mostly, using the last of the natural light for the outside work and after that moving inside (the porch was enclosed at one end) to continue under the glare of the ceiling fixture his electrician had installed.

He liked working by himself. Most of his men, he suspected — or the younger ones, at least — found him stern and forbidding. He didn’t set them straight. They’d be talking woman troubles and trading tales of weekend binges, but the instant he showed himself they would shut up, and inwardly he would smile because little did they know. But it was best they never found out. He still did some hands-on work; he wasn’t too proud for that, but generally he did it off in some separate room — cutting dadoes, say, while the rest of them were framing an addition. They’d be gossiping and joking and teasing one another, but Junior (usually so talkative) worked in silence. In his head, a tune often played without his deciding which one—“You Are My Sunshine” for one task, say, and “Blueberry Hill” for another — and his work would fall into the tempo of the song. One long week, installing a complicated staircase, he found himself stuck with “White Cliffs of Dover” and he thought he would never finish, he was moving so slowly and mournfully. Although it did turn out to be a very well made staircase. Oh, there was nothing like the pleasure of a job done right — seeing how tidily a tenon fit into a mortise, or how the proper-size shim, properly shaved, properly tapped into place, could turn a joint nearly seamless.

A couple of days after he took Linnie to visit the house, he drove over there around four p.m. and parked in the rear. As he was stepping out of the truck, though, he saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks.

The porch swing sat next to the driveway, resting on a drop cloth.

And it was blue.

Oh, God, an awful blue, a boring, no-account, neither-here-nor-there Swedish blue. It was such a shock that he had a moment when he wondered if he was hallucinating, experiencing some taunting flash of vision from his youth. He gave a kind of moan. He slammed the truck door shut behind him and walked over to the swing. Blue, all right. He bent to set a finger on one armrest and it came away tacky, which was no surprise because up close, he could smell the fresh paint.

He looked around quickly, half sensing he was being watched. Someone was lurking in the shadows and watching him and laughing. But no, he was alone.

He had the key out of his pocket before he realized the back door was already open. “Linnie?” he called. He stepped inside and found Dodd McDowell at the kitchen sink, blotting a paintbrush on a splotched rag.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Junior asked him.

Dodd spun around.

“Did you paint that swing?” Junior asked him.

“Why, yes, Junior.”

“What for? Who told you you could do that?”

Dodd was a very pale, bald-headed man with whitish-blond eyebrows and lashes, but now he turned a deep red and his eyelids grew so pink that he looked teary. He said, “Linnie did.”

“Linnie!”

“Did you not know about it?”

“Where did you see Linnie?” Junior demanded.

“She called me on the phone last night. Asked if I would pick up a bucket of Swedish-blue high-gloss and paint the porch swing for her. I thought you knew about it.”

“You thought I’d hunt down solid cherry, and pay an arm and a leg for it, and put Eugene to work varnishing it in a shade to look right with the porch floor, and then have you slop blue paint on it.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I figured: women . You know?” And Dodd spread his hands, still holding the brush and the rag.

Junior forced himself to take a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Women.” He chuckled and shook his head. “What’re you going to do with them? But listen,” he said, and he sobered. “Dodd. From now on, you take your orders from me. Understand?”