Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

They had reached the top of St. Paul Street now. It would be a straight shot south to Penn Station. Nora sat back in her seat, her fingers loose on the bottom of the wheel. Even driving, she gave the impression of floating. She said, “I would just like to say, Denny — Douglas and I would both like to say — that we appreciate your coming to help out. It meant a lot to your mom and dad. I hope you know that.”

He looked her way again. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, you’re welcome. Well, thank you both, too.”

“And it was nice of you not to tell about his mother.”

“Oh, well, it’s nobody’s business, really.”

“Not to tell Douglas, I mean. When he was younger.”

“Oh.”

There was another silence.

“You know what happened?” he asked suddenly. There was something startled in his tone, as if he hadn’t intended to speak until that instant. “You know when I was mending Dad’s shirt?”

“Yes.”

“His dashiki kind of thing?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I was thinking I would never find the right shade of blue, because it was such a bright blue. But I went to the linen closet where Mom always kept her sewing box, and I opened the door, and before I could even reach for the box this spool of bright-blue thread rolled out from the rear of the shelf. I just cupped my hand beneath the shelf and this spool of thread dropped into it.”

They were stopped for a red light now. Nora sent him a thoughtful, remote look.

“Well, of course that can be explained,” he said. “First of all, Mom would have that shade, because she was the one who had made the dashiki in the first place, and you don’t toss a spool of thread just because it’s old. As for why it was out of the box like that … well, I did spill a bunch of stuff out earlier when I was sewing on a button. And I guess the rolling had to do with how I opened the closet door. I set up a whoosh of air or something; I don’t know.”

The light turned green, and Nora resumed driving.

“But in the split second before I realized that,” he said, “I almost imagined that she was handing it to me. Like some kind of, like, secret sign. Stupid, right?”

Nora said, “No.”

“I thought, ‘It’s like she’s telling me she forgives me,’ ” Denny said. “And then I took the dashiki to my room and I sat down on my bed to mend it, and out of nowhere this other thought came. I thought, ‘Or she’s telling me she knows that I forgive her .’ And all at once I got this huge, like, feeling of relief.”

Nora nodded and signaled for a turn.

“Oh, well, who can figure these things?” Denny asked the row houses slipping past.

“I think you’ve figured it just right,” Nora told him.

She turned into Penn Station.

In the passenger drop-off lane, she shifted into park and popped her trunk. “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” she told him.

“Oh, sure. I’d never just disappear; they need me around for the drama.”

She smiled; her two dimples deepened. “They probably do,” she said. “I really think they do.” And she accepted his peck on her cheek and then gave him a languid wave as he stepped out of the car.

The clouds overhead were a deep gray now, churning like muddy waters stirred up from the bottom of a lake, and inside the station, the skylight — ordinarily a kaleidoscope of pale, translucent aquas — had an opaque look. Denny bypassed the ticket machines, which had lines that wound back through the lobby, and went to stand in the line for the agents. Even there some ten or twelve people were waiting ahead of him, so he set down his bags and shoved them along with his foot as the line progressed. He could sense the anxiety of the crowd. A middle-aged couple standing behind him had apparently not thought to reserve, and the wife kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, they’re not going to have any seats left, are they?”

“Sure they are,” her husband told her. “Quit your fussing.”

“I knew we should have called ahead. Everybody’s trying to beat the hurricane.”

“Hurkeen,” she pronounced it. She had a wiry, elastic Baltimore accent and a smoker’s rusty voice.

“If there’s not any seats for this one we’ll catch the next one,” her husband told her.

“Next one! Watch there not be a next one. They’ll stop running them after this one.”

The husband made an exasperated huffing sound, but Denny sympathized with the wife. Even with his own reserved seat, he didn’t feel entirely confident. What if they shut down the trains before his train arrived? What if he had to turn around and go back to Bouton Road? Stuck in his family, trapped. Ingrown, like a toenail.

The man in front of him was called to a window, and Denny shoved his bags farther up. He was going to get the elderly agent with the disapproving face; he just knew it. “Sorry, sir …” the agent would say, not sounding sorry in the least.

But no, he got the cheery-looking African-American lady, and her first words when he gave her his confirmation number were “Aren’t you the lucky one!” He signed for his ticket gladly, without his usual muttering at the price. He thanked her and lugged his bags to the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy coffee and, on second thought, a pastry as well, to celebrate. He was going to make it out of here after all.

The few tables outside the Dunkin’ Donuts were occupied, and so were all the benches in the waiting room. He had to eat standing against a pillar with his bags piled at his feet. More passengers were milling around than at Christmas or Thanksgiving, even, all wearing frazzled expressions. “No, you can’t buy a candy bar,” a mother snapped at her little boy. “Stick close to me or you’ll get lost.”

A mellifluous female voice on the loudspeaker announced the arrival of a southbound train at gate B. “That’s B as in Bubba,” the voice said, which Denny found slightly odd. So did the young woman next to him, apparently — an attractive redhead with that golden tan skin that was always such an unexpected pleasure to see in a redhead. She quirked her eyebrows at him, inviting him to share her amusement.

Sometimes you glance toward a woman and she glances toward you and there is this subtle recognition, this moment of complicity, and anything might happen after that. Or not. Denny turned away and dropped his paper cup in the waste bin.

The train at gate B-for-Bubba was traveling to D.C., where nobody seemed to want to go, but when Denny’s northbound train was announced there was a general surge toward the stairs. Denny thought of what Jeannie’s Hugh had said the night before; shouldn’t all these people be heading away from the hurricane? But north was where home was, he’d be willing to bet — drawing them irresistibly, as if they were migratory birds. They pressed him forward, down the stairs, and when he reached the platform he felt a twinge of vertigo as they steered him too close to the tracks. He pulled ahead, making his way to where the forward cars would board. But he didn’t want the quiet car. Quiet cars made him edgy. He liked to sit surrounded by a sea of anonymous chatter; he liked the living-room-like coziness of mixed and mingled cell-phone conversations.

The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop. There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell. He boarded through the nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself. First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window. Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his inside breast pocket.