Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Carla’s answer didn’t take much time, but even so, Amanda seemed impatient. “Good,” she said. “Well, could I have my brother’s number? I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

While she wrote it down, Red and Abby hunched forward and stared at the pad, hardly breathing. “Thanks,” Amanda said. “Bye.” And she hung up.

Abby was already reaching for the pad, but Amanda pulled it away from her and said, “ I am making this call.” She dialed once more.

“Denny,” she said, “it’s Amanda.”

They couldn’t hear what his response was.

“Someday,” Amanda said, “you’re going to be a middle-aged man thinking back on your life, and you’ll start wondering what your family’s been up to. So you’ll hop on a train and come down, and when you get to Baltimore it will be this peaceful summer afternoon and these dusty rays of sunshine will be slanting through the skylight in Penn Station. You’ll walk on through and out to the street, where nobody is waiting for you, but that’s okay; they didn’t know you were coming. Still, it feels kind of odd standing there all alone, with the other passengers hugging people and climbing into cars and driving away. You go to the taxi lane and you give the address to a cabbie. You ride through the city looking at all the familiar sights — the row houses, the Bradford pear trees, the women sitting out on their stoops watching their children play. Then the taxi turns onto Bouton Road and right away you get a strange feeling. There are little signs of neglect at our house that Dad would never put up with: blistered paint and gap-toothed shutters. Mismatched mortar patching the walk, rubber treads nailed to the porch steps — all these Harry Homeowner fixes Dad has always railed against. You take hold of the front-door handle and you give it that special pull toward you that it needs before you can push down the thumb latch, but it’s locked. You ring the doorbell, but it’s broken. You call, ‘Mom? Dad?’ No one answers. You call, ‘Hello?’ No one comes running; no one flings open the door and says, ‘It’s you! It’s so good to see you! Why didn’t you let us know? We’d have met you at the station! Are you tired? Are you hungry? Come in!’ You stand there a while, but you can’t think what to do next. You turn and look back toward the street, and you wonder about the rest of the family. ‘Maybe Jeannie,’ you say. ‘Or Amanda.’ But you know something, Denny? Don’t count on me to take you in, because I’m angry. I’m angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these last few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from the beach trips and missing Mom and Dad’s thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie’s baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all, Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.”

She stopped speaking. Denny said something.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m fine. How have you been?”

So Denny came home.

The first time, he came alone. Abby was disappointed that he didn’t bring Susan, but Red said he was glad. “It makes this visit different from those last ones,” he said. “Like he’s getting squared away with us first. He’s not taking it for granted that he can just pick up where he left off.”

He had a point. Denny did seem different — more cautious, more considerate of their feelings. He commented on little improvements around the house. He said he liked Abby’s new hairstyle. (She had started wearing it short.) He himself had lost the boyish sharpness along his jaw, and he had a more settled way of walking. When Abby asked him questions — though she tried her best to ration them — he made an effort to answer. He wasn’t what you’d call chatty, but he answered.

Susan was doing great, he said. She was attending preschool now. Yes, he could bring her to visit. Carla was fine too, although they were not together anymore. Work? Well, at the moment he was working for a construction firm.

“Construction!” Abby said. “Hear that, Red? He’s working in construction!”

Red merely grunted. He didn’t look as happy about this as he might have.

Notice all that was missing, though, from what Denny had told them. How much did he really have to do with his daughter? And when he said he and Carla were “not together,” did he mean they were divorced? Just what were his living arrangements? Was construction his chosen career now? Had he given up on college?

Then Jeannie came over with little Deb, and Red and Abby left them alone, and by the end of her visit they knew more. He had a lot to do with Susan, Jeannie reported; he was very much involved in her life. Divorce was too expensive, for now. He shared half a house with two other guys but they were starting to get on his nerves. Sure, he would finish college. Someday.

But still, somehow, it wasn’t enough information. Oh, always there seemed to be something else — something that surely, if they could ferret it out, would at last explain him.

He stayed a day and a half, that time. Then he left, but — here was the important part — they did have his cell phone number. That number they’d dialed was his cell phone number! This changed everything.

They allowed a strategic lapse of several weeks, and then Abby called him (Red hovering in the background) and invited him to bring Susan for Christmas. Denny said Carla would never allow Susan to be away on Christmas Day, but maybe after Christmas he’d bring her.

Red and Abby knew all about his maybes.

But he did it. He brought her. Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, and he brought her down Wednesday and they stayed through Friday. Susan was a self-possessed four-year-old with a mass of brown curls and very large, very brown eyes. The eyes were a bit of a shock. Those were not Whitshank eyes! Nor were her clothes the rough-and-tumble play clothes that the Whitshank children wore. She arrived in a red velvet dress, with white tights and red Mary Janes. Well, perhaps on account of Christmas. But the next morning, when she came down to breakfast, she wore a ruffled white blouse and a red plaid taffeta pinafore very nearly as fancy. Jeannie said it made her kind of sad to think of Denny having to button all those tiny white buttons down the back of Susan’s pinafore.

“Do you remember us?” they asked her. “Do you remember coming to visit us when you were just a baby?”

Susan said, slowly, “I think so,” which of course could not be true. But it was nice of her to pretend. She said, “Did you have a different dog?”

“No, this is the same one.”

“I thought you had a yellow dog,” she said, and they traded unhappy glances. Who was it she was thinking of who had a yellow dog, and perhaps one not so slobbery and arthritic as old Clarence?

She was entranced with her cousins. (Aha! They could be the Whitshanks’ bait: fairy child Elise and rowdy little Deb.) She seemed unfamiliar with card games but soon developed a passion for Go Fish. Also, it emerged that she knew how to read. They were surprised that Carla could have reared a precocious child, but maybe that was thanks to Denny. She liked to snuggle next to Abby and sound out the words to Hop on Pop , heaving a loud sigh of satisfaction whenever she finished a page.

By the time she left, she’d lost all her reserve. She stood in front of the train station holding Denny’s hand, waving like a maniac and shouting, “Bye-bye! See you! See everybody soon! Bye-bye!”

So Denny brought her again, and then again. She had her own room now, the one that used to be the girls’ room. She drank her cocoa from a mug reading SUSAN, and when it was time to set the table she knew where to find the alphabet plate that Denny had once used. And he, meanwhile, sat back and watched all this benignly. He was the most accommodating father. It seemed she had smoothed his edges down.