A Spool of Blue Thread (22 page)

“Huh,” Abby said, and she had flounced over to her left side so she was lying with her back to him.

He was getting old, too. She wasn’t the only one! He wore reading glasses that slipped down his nose and made him look like his father. And that “Eh?” of his when he hadn’t heard right: where had
that
come from? It was almost as if he were acting a part. He thought that was how a person was supposed to sound at his age. And sometimes what he said landed oddly off the mark—“scarlet teenager,” for instance, referring to a red bird he saw perched on their feeder. Which probably had to do with his hearing, again, but still, she couldn’t help worrying. She saw the way salesclerks treated him lately, how condescendingly, speaking to him too loudly and using words of fewer syllables. They took him for just another doddery old man. It made her chest ache when she saw that.

Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda
chided her for saying that something was “cool” (“I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger,” she had said), did she not realize that “cool” had been used in Abby’s time, too, not to mention long before?

She didn’t mind
looking
old. It wasn’t a real concern of hers. Her face had grown slightly puffy and her body had softened and slumped, but when she studied the family album she thought that her younger self seemed unappealingly puny by comparison—pinched and tight, almost starved-looking. And Red seemed downright frail in those photos, with his Adam’s apple poking forth too sharply from his too-long neck. He weighed no more now than he had then, but somehow he gave the impression of greater solidity.

Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was
perfect
, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

“I bought a goat,” she sang as she walked. “His name was Jim.” Then she broke off, because she caught sight of someone approaching up ahead. But he turned left at the corner, so Abby resumed singing. “I bought him for …” Clarence trudged next to her in silence, every
now and then accidentally or maybe deliberately bumping against her knee.

Wasn’t it interesting how song lyrics stayed in your memory so much longer than mere prose! Not just the songs of her teens—“Tom Dooley” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”—but ditties from her childhood, “White Coral Bells” and “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine” and “We’re Happy When We’re Hiking,” and her mother singing something that began “I’ll come down and let you in,” and even jump-rope chants—“Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea …” Anything that rhymed, it seemed. Rhyme imprinted things in your brain. Dental appointments should be put into rhyme, and important anniversaries. In fact, all of life’s more meaningful events! If you came across any gap, all you had to do was start singing as much as you could remember—embark on the first line, confidently—and the missing part would arrive in your head just in the nick of time.

Abby used to worry about becoming forgetful, because her maternal grandfather had ended up with dementia. But that wasn’t turning out to be her particular problem. She had a better memory than most of her friends, they all agreed. Why, just last week Carol Dunn had phoned, but when Abby answered she had heard only silence. “Hello?” she’d said again, and Carol had said, “I forget who I dialed.” “This is Abby,” Abby said, and Carol said, “Oh, hi, Abby! How are you? Gosh, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t—but anyhow, you aren’t who I meant to call,” and she had hung up.

Or Ree, who kept losing the names of things. “Next summer I think I’ll plant some of those … Maryland flowers,” she said, and Abby said, “Black-eyed Susans?” “Yes, right.” It always seemed to be Abby who had to fill in the blanks. She should tell Dr. Wiss that.

“In some ways,” she should tell him, “my memory’s better now than it was when I was young. The most surprising details suddenly show up again! Tiny things, infinitesimal things. The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the
handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present. I got a whole set of CorningWare with one interchangeable handle that you twisted to lock into place. That was almost fifty years ago! I used those for only a little while; they kept scorching things on the bottom. Who else could remember that?”

She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners, back when Abby was a toddler whining with hunger and tiredness and just general five p.m. blues. She might hear the long-ago humming in the wires that the number 29 streetcar made when it sped down Roland Avenue without having to stop. And out of nowhere she pictured her childhood dog, Binky, who used to sleep with both paws folded over his nose to keep himself warm on cold nights. It was exactly like a time trip. She was bobbing along in a time machine gazing out the window at one scene after another in no particular order. At one
story
after another. Oh, there’d been so many stories in her life! The Whitshanks claimed to have only two; she couldn’t imagine why. Why select just a certain few stories to define yourself? Abby had a wealth of them.

For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.

What street was this? She hadn’t been paying attention.

She stopped at the curb and gazed around her, and Clarence sat down on his haunches. To her left was the Hutchinsons’ house, with that beautiful huge magnolia tree that always seemed freshly enameled. She was surprised that she had walked this far; she’d thought Clarence would have protested by now. She made a clucking sound and he rose with a groan, the weight of the world on his shoulders,
his head sagging so that it nearly touched the ground. “We’ll take you home,” she told him, “and you can have a nice long nap.”

Just then, though—how could this happen?—a little mosquito of a chihuahua minced past on the sidewalk across the street. No owner anywhere to be seen, and no leash and not even a collar. Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby’s hand. Somehow she had time to see his entire life streaming by: his soft, pudgy belly and giant paws when he was a pup, his old fondness for playing fetch with tennis balls gone soppy with spit, his pure, delirious joy when the children used to come home from school. “Clarence!” she shrieked, but he paid no attention, so she tore after him into the street, while something she couldn’t quite place—something huge and sleek and metallic that she hadn’t been expecting—came speeding toward her.

“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”

And then no more.

W
HITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE,
was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Linnie had died. But that had been so long ago; Red was the only one left alive with any firsthand memory of it. (Nobody counted Merrick.) And Red was not himself right now. He was just a shell of himself. He walked around in his slippers, unshaven, with a vacant look in his eyes. For one whole day it appeared that he had lost his powers of speech, till it was discovered that he’d once again neglected to put his hearing aids in.

Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.

Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo.
They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty—an iffy business in the best of times—and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”

“I want him to come back from Jesus.”

“Her,” Nora said. “You want
her
to come back. But she’s happier where she is.”

“She was old, buddy,” Stem said.

An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Luckily, though, Sammy failed to make the obvious connection. He hadn’t mentioned Abby once, although she used to spend hours at a time reading him his favorite, unutterably boring dinosaur book over and over and over.

She’d been singing, Louisa Hutchinson said. Louisa was the one who had rushed out to the street when she heard the crash, and then called 911 and later had phoned the family. Thank heaven, because Abby hadn’t been carrying any identification. “She walked toward our house singing,” Louisa said, “and I went to our front window and I said to Bill, I said, ‘
Somebody’s
in a good mood.’ I don’t know as I’d ever heard Abby singing before.”

“Singing!” Jeannie and Stem said at exactly the same time. Then Jeannie asked, “What was the song?”

“Something about a goat; I don’t know.”

Jeannie looked at Stem. He shrugged.

Louisa said, “The dog lay so far from where Abby lay, I guess he must have been thrown. The driver found him, poor woman. The driver was beside herself. She found him lying close to where her car had knocked the lamppost over. I’m just thankful Abby didn’t have to see him.”

“Her,” Jeannie said.

“Pardon?”

“The dog was a her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“She was old,” Jeannie said. “The dog, I mean. She’d had a good long life.”

“Still, though,” Louisa said.

Then she held up the casserole she’d brought and told them it was gluten-free, in case anybody cared.

And how did it happen, pray tell, that Abby had chanced to be off serenading the neighborhood with none of the family any the wiser? Amanda was the only one who came right out and asked, once Louisa was gone, but no doubt the others were wondering too. They sat around the living room listlessly, with the light coming in all wrong—sunshine filtering through the rear windows on a weekday morning, when most of the family should have been at work. “Don’t look at
me
,” Denny told Amanda. “I wasn’t even up yet”—interrupting Nora, who was wearing a troubled expression and had started to speak also.

“I’ve asked myself and asked myself,” Nora said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve asked. When the boys and I left for school, she was sitting on the porch. When I came back she was gone. But Brenda was in the house still, so where was Mother Whitshank? Was she up in her room? Was she in the backyard? How did she leave for a walk without my knowing?”

“Well, you couldn’t keep an eye on her every single minute,” Jeannie said.

“I should have, though! It turns out I should have. I am so, so sorry. The two of us had a very special bond, you know. I’m never going to forgive myself.”

“Hey,” Stem said. “Hon.”

Which was about as far as Stem could ever go when it came to offering comfort. Nora seemed grateful, however. She smiled at him, her eyes brimming.

“We’re not mind readers,” Denny said. “She should have
told
us she wanted a walk. She had no business taking off like that!”

Oh, everybody was true to form—Denny angry, Nora remorseful, Amanda looking for someone to blame. “How could she have told you,” Amanda asked Denny, “when you were snoring away in bed?”

“Whoa!” he said, and drew back in his chair, holding up both hands.

“Anybody would think you’d worn yourself out with hard work,” Amanda said.

“Well, it’s not as if
you’ve
been over here slaving away.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Jeannie said. “We’re getting off the subject.”

“What
is
the subject?” Amanda’s Hugh asked.

“I have this really, really awful feeling that Mom wanted us to play ‘Good Vibrations’ at her funeral.”

“
What
?” Hugh said.

“She used to say as much. Didn’t she, Mandy?”

Amanda couldn’t answer because she had started crying, so Denny stepped in. He said, “I don’t know if she meant that literally, though.”

“We need to find her instructions. I remember she wrote some.”

“Dad?” Stem asked. “Do you know where her instructions could be?”

Red was staring into space, both of his hands on his knees. He said, “Eh?”