A Spool of Blue Thread (25 page)

Deb and Susan glared at her—it must have been the “
my
grandma” that irked them—while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.

“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.

At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is
their
memories—all that they take away with them.
What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the
porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what
my
experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others—one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”

Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?,’ ” and everybody stood up.

“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “
Where
did he say she went?”

“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.

“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”

Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.

Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.

When Denny said his goodbyes before driving Susan to the train station, it was clear that he assumed the guests would be gone by the time he got back. But no, there they still were when he returned. Sax Brown and Marge Ellis were arguing about Afghanistan. Elise had
got hold of a glass of white wine; she was pinching the stem daintily between her thumb and index finger with all her other fingers splayed out, and her makeup had worn thin and her black eye was re-emerging. Ree Bascomb’s maid was serving crudités in her stocking feet now, and Ree herself, who had maybe had a tad too much to drink, stood with an arm looped around the waist of somebody’s teenage son. Red looked exhausted. His face was gray and sagging. Nora was trying to make him sit down, but he stayed stubbornly upright.

Then suddenly the guests were gone, all of them at once, as if they had heard some secret dog whistle. The living room held no one but family, and it seemed too bright, like outdoors after a daytime movie. A decimated cheese board rested on an ottoman, and cracker crumbs littered the rug, and someone’s forgotten shawl was slung across the back of a chair. Ree Bascomb’s maid tinkled glassware in the kitchen. The toilet flushed in the powder room, and Tommy returned to the living room still hitching up his pants.

“Well,” Red said. He looked around at everyone.

“Well,” Amanda echoed.

They were all standing. They were all empty-handed. They had the look of people waiting for their next assignment, but there wasn’t one, of course. It was over. They had seen Abby off.

It seemed there should be something more—some summing up, some account to deliver. “You wouldn’t believe what Merrick said,” they wanted to report. And “You’d have laughed to see Queen Eula. No sign of Trey, wouldn’t you know, because he had an important meeting, but Queen Eula came. Can you imagine? Remember how she always used to swear you were a Communist?”

But wait. Abby was dead. She would never hear about any of this.

I
T COULD BE ARGUED
that with Abby gone, there was no further need for anyone to stay on in the house with Red. He was more or less able-bodied, after all, and he went right back to work the morning after the funeral. That afternoon, though, he came home early and slipped upstairs to bed, and if Nora hadn’t walked into his room with a stack of folded laundry he might have lain there undiscovered for who knows how long, one hand clamped to his chest and a line of either pain or worry crimping his forehead. He said it was nothing, just a tired spell, but he didn’t object when Nora insisted on Denny’s driving him to the emergency room.

In fact it
was
nothing—indigestion, the doctors decided six hours later, and he was sent home along with all four of his children, the other three having assembled at the hospital as soon as Nora phoned them. Still, it started his daughters thinking.

They had agreed, till then, that there would be plenty of time to sort out the household arrangements. Let things settle a bit, they told each other. But the rest of that week, both girls seemed to be on Bouton Road more often than they were at home—and generally without their husbands and children, as if to show that they meant
business. They would wander in on some errand, Jeannie wanting Abby’s recipe box or Amanda bringing grocery-store cartons to sort Abby’s clothes into, and then they would hang around engaging one or another person in pointed conversation.

“You know we can’t depend on Denny in any permanent way,” Amanda told Nora, for instance. “He might promise us the moon, but one day he’ll up and leave us. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long.” Then Denny walked into the kitchen and she broke off. Had he heard? But even after he’d set his cup in the sink and walked out again, Nora made no reply. She slid cookies off a baking sheet, her expression pleasant and noncommittal, as if Amanda had been talking just to hear herself talk.

And Stem! Maybe it was grief, but he’d become very quiet. “Underneath,” Jeannie tried telling him once, “I think Dad has always assumed that you and Nora would live here forever. Inheriting the house, I mean, after he’s gone.” Then she sent a guilty look toward Denny, who was sitting next to Stem on the couch flicking through TV channels, but Denny merely grimaced. Even he knew it was Stem that Red would have pinned his hopes on. As for Stem himself, he didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen, although there was nothing to watch just then but commercials and more commercials.

After Sunday lunch, while Red was upstairs napping, Amanda told the others, “It’s not like Dad needs a real caretaker. I grant you that. But someone should make sure every morning that he’s made it through the night, at least.”

“A simple phone call could establish that much,” Stem said.

Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other. It was a remark they would have expected from Denny rather than Stem.

Stem wasn’t looking at either of them. He was watching the children playing a board game on the rug.

Denny said, “Ah, well, maybe sooner or later Dad will find himself a lady friend.”

“Oh! Denny!” Jeannie said.

“What?”

“Yes, he could do that,” Amanda said equably. “Part of me wishes he would, by and by. Some nice, nurturing woman. Though another part of me says, ‘But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”

“Dad would
never
fall for a woman who wore the back of her collar up!” Jeannie said.

Then Red’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs, and everybody fell silent.

Later that same afternoon, when the girls had collected their families and were saying goodbye at the door, Red asked Amanda if he should let their lawyer know about Abby’s death. “Goodness, yes,” Amanda said. “Haven’t you already done that? Who
is
your lawyer?” and Red said, “I have no idea; it was years ago we made our wills. Your mother was the one who took care of that stuff.”

Stem made a sudden, sharp sound that resembled a laugh, and everybody looked at him.

“It’s like that old joke,” he told them. “The husband says, ‘My wife decides the little things, like what job I take and which house we buy, and I decide the big things, like whether we should admit China to the U.N.’ ”

Jeannie’s Hugh said, “Huh?”

“Women are the ones in charge,” Stem told him. “Make no mistake about it.”

“Isn’t China
already
in the U.N.?”

But then Nora stepped in to say, “Don’t worry, Father Whitshank, I’ll track down your lawyer’s name,” and the moment passed.

On Monday, while Red was at work, Amanda arrived with more cartons. You’d think she didn’t have a job. She was dressed in business clothes, though, so she must have been on the way to her office. “Tell me the truth, Nora,” she said as soon as she had set the cartons
in a corner of the dining room. “Can you imagine you and Stem staying on here forever?”

“You know we would never leave Father Whitshank if he really needed assistance,” Nora said.

“So, do you think he
does
need assistance?”

“Oh, Douglas should be the one to answer that.”

Amanda’s shoulders slumped, and she turned without a word and walked out.

In the front hall she met up with Denny, who was coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I wish Stem and Nora weren’t so … virtuous. It’s wearing, is what it is.”

“Is that a fact,” Denny said.

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.

“How’s it working?” Denny asked.

“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”

Denny passed Stem the screwdriver. They were taking all the screens down, preparing to put the storm windows in for the winter, and Red was supervising. Not that he really needed to, since the boys had done this many times before. He was sitting on the back steps, wearing a huge wool cardigan made by Abby during her knitting days.

“Last night I dreamed about her,” he said. “She had this shawl wrapped around her shoulders with tassels hanging off it, and her hair was long like old times. She said, ‘Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.’ ” He stopped speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Denny and
Stem stood with a screen balanced between them and looked at each other helplessly.

“Then I woke up,” Red said after a minute. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I thought, ‘This must mean I miss having her close attention, the way I’ve always been used to.’ Then I woke up again, for real. Have either of you ever done that? Dreamed that you woke up, and then found you’d still been asleep? I woke up for real and I thought, ‘
Oh
, boy. I see I’ve still got a long way to go with this.’ Seems I haven’t quite gotten over it, you know?”

“Gosh,” Stem said. “That’s hard.”

“Maybe a sleeping pill,” Denny suggested.

“What could
that
do?” Red asked.

“Well, I’m just saying.”

“You think every one of life’s problems can be solved by taking a drug.”

“Let’s lean this against that tree,” Stem told Denny.

Denny nodded, tight-lipped, and swung around to back toward a poplar tree with the screen.

That evening, Ree Bascomb brought over an apple crumble and stayed to have a piece with them. “There’s rum in it, is why I waited till I thought the little boys would be in bed,” she said. Actually, the little boys were not in bed, although it was nearly nine. (They didn’t seem to have a fixed bedtime, as Abby had often remarked in a wondering tone to her daughters.) But they were occupied with some sort of racetrack they’d constructed to run through the living room, so the grown-ups moved to the dining room—Ree, Stem and Nora, Red and Denny—where Ree set squares of apple crumble on Abby’s everyday china and passed them around the table. She knew Abby’s house as well as she knew her own, she often said. “You don’t have to lift a finger,” she told Nora, although Nora had already started a pot of decaf and rustled up cream and sugar, mugs and silverware and napkins.

Ree sat down at the table and said, “Cheers, everybody,” and picked up her fork. “They say sweets are helpful in times of sadness,” she said. “I’ve always found that to be true.”

“Well, this was nice of you, Ree,” Red said.

“I could use some sweets myself tonight. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but on top of everything else now, Jeeter’s died.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Nora said. Jeeter was Ree’s tabby cat, going on twenty years old. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him.

Red said, “My God!” He set his fork down. “How in the world did that
happen
?” he asked.

“I just stepped out on the back stoop this morning and there he was, lying on the welcome mat. I hope he hadn’t been waiting there all night, poor thing.”