A Spool of Blue Thread (28 page)

Jeannie and Amanda dragged a filled carton between them out to the hall, where one of the boys could come get it later. Then Jeannie unfolded another carton and ran tape across the bottom flaps. “If I know Mom,” she said, “she’d have refused any surgery anyhow.”

“It’s true,” Amanda said. “Her advance directive basically asked us to put her out on an ice floe if she developed so much as a hangnail.” She was collecting framed photos from the top of Abby’s bureau. “I’m going to pack these up for Dad,” she told Jeannie.

“Will he have space for them?”

“Oh, maybe not.”

She studied the oldest photo—a snapshot of the four of them laughing on the beach, Amanda barely a teenager and the rest of
them still children. “We look like we were having such a good time,” she said.

“We
were
having a good time.”

“Well, yes. But things could get awfully fraught, now and then.”

“At the funeral,” Jeannie said, “Marilee Hodges told me, ‘I always used to envy you and that family of yours. The bunch of you out on your porch playing Michigan poker for toothpicks, and your two brothers so tall and good-looking, and that macho red pickup your dad used to drive with the four of you kids rattling around in the rear.’ ”

“Marilee Hodges was a ninny,” Amanda said.

“Goodness, what brought
that
on?”

“It was hell riding in that truck bed. I doubt it was even legal. And I believe children should have their own rooms. And Mom could be so insensitive, so clueless and obtuse. Like that time she sent Denny for psychological testing and then told all of us his results.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Supposedly one of those inkblot thingies showed he’d been disappointed in his early childhood by a woman. ‘What woman could that have been?’ Mom kept asking us. ‘He didn’t know any women!’ ”

“I don’t remember a thing about it.”

“It was pretty clear she loved him best,” Amanda said, “even though he drove her crazy.”

“You’re just saying that because you’ve got only one child,” Jeannie told her. “Mothers don’t love children best; they love them—”

“—differently, is all,” Amanda finished for her. “Yes, yes, I know.” Then she held up a photo of Stem at age four or five. “Would Nora like this, do you think?”

Jeannie squinted at it. “Put it in her box,” she suggested.

“And what do I do with this one of Denny?”

“Does he have a box?”

“He says he doesn’t want anything.”

“Start a box for him anyhow. I bet wherever he lives is nothing but bare walls.”

“I asked him yesterday,” Amanda said, “whether he had let his landlady know that he was coming back, and all he said was, ‘We’re working on that.’ ”

“ ‘Working on that’! What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“He’s so darn secretive,” Amanda said. “He pokes and pries into
our
lives, but then he gets all paranoid when we ask about his.”

“I think he’s mellowing, though,” Jeannie told her. “Maybe losing Mom has done that. When I was taking down the wall of photos in his room, I asked him, ‘Should I just chuck these?’ All those photos of the Daltons, those chunky aunts from the forties with their shoulder pads and thick stockings. But Denny said, ‘Oh, I don’t know; that seems kind of harsh, don’t you think?’ I said, ‘Denny?’ I actually knocked on the side of his head with my knuckles. ‘Knock knock,’ I said. ‘Is that
you
in there?’ ”

“Good,” Amanda said promptly. “Let’s give him these.” And she reached for a sheet of newspaper and started wrapping a photo.

“Denny’s getting nicer and Stem is getting crankier,” Jeannie said. “And Dad! He’s being impossible.”

“Oh, well, Dad,” Amanda said. “It’s like you can’t say anything right to him.” She placed the wrapped photo in the carton Jeannie had just set up. “He’s been fretting about the house so,” she said. “How long it will take to sell it, how people might not appreciate it … So I asked him, I said, ‘Should we try and get in touch with the Brills?’ ”

“The Brills,” Jeannie repeated.

“The original-owner Brills. The ones who had the house built in the first place.”

“Yes, I know who they
are
, Amanda, but wouldn’t they be dead by now?”

“Not the sons, I don’t imagine. The sons were only in their teens
when Dad was a little boy. So I said, ‘What if all these years the sons have been pining over this house and wishing they still lived here?’ You remember what one of them said when their mother said they were moving. ‘Aw,
Ma
?’ he said. Well, you would think I’d suggested lighting a match to the place. ‘What are you
thinking
?’ Dad asked me. ‘Where did you get such a damn-fool notion as that? Those two spoiled Brill boys are not
ever
getting their hands on this house. Put it right out of your mind,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, sorry. Gee. My mistake entirely.’ ”

“It’s grief,” Jeannie told her. “He’s just lost the love of his life, bear in mind.”

“Which loss are you talking about—Mom or the house?”

“Well, both, I guess.”

“Huh,” Amanda said. “I never heard before that grief makes people bad-tempered.”

“Some it does and some it doesn’t,” Jeannie said.

They had reached that stage of packing where it seemed they’d created more mess than they had cleared out. Several half-filled cartons sat open around the room—the photos in a carton for Denny, blankets in a carton for Red, a mass of Abby’s sweaters in a carton for Goodwill. With each sweater there had been a debate—“Don’t you want to take this? You would look good in this!”—but after holding it up for a moment, one or the other of them would sigh and let it fall into the carton with the rest. The rug was linty, the floor was strewn with cast-off hangers and dry-cleaner’s bags, and a hard gray light from the stripped windows gave the room a bleak and uncared-for look.

“You should have heard Dad’s reaction when I told him he should maybe leave this bed behind and take a single,” Amanda said.

“Well, I can understand: he wants the bed that he’s used to.”

“You haven’t seen his apartment, though. It’s dinky.”

“It’s going to feel weird to visit him there,” Jeannie said.

“Yes, last night I had this peculiar moment when I was saying
goodbye to him. He asked, ‘Don’t you want to take some leftovers with you?’
Mom’s
thing to ask! ‘It’ll save you from cooking supper,’ he said, ‘one of the nights this week.’ Oh, Lord, isn’t it strange how life sort of … closes up again over a death.”

“Even the little boys have adjusted,” Jeannie said. “That’s kind of surprising, when you think about it—that children figure out so young that people die.”

“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”

Amanda was looking around at the accumulation as she spoke—at the cartons and the stacked pillows and the tied-up bales of old magazines and the lamps with their shades removed. And that was nothing compared with the clutter elsewhere in the house—the towers of faded books teetering on the desk in the sunroom, the rolled carpets in the dining room, the stemware tinkling on the buffet each time the little boys stampeded past. And out on the front porch, waiting to go to the dump, the miscellaneous items that no one on earth wanted: a three-legged Portacrib, a broken stroller, a high chair missing its tray, and a string-handled shopping bag full of cracked plastic toys with somebody’s small, clumsy pottery house perched on top, painted in kindergarten shades of red and green and yellow.

PART TWO
What a World, What a World

I
T WAS A BEAUTIFUL, BREEZY,
yellow-and-green morning in July of 1959, and Abby Dalton was standing at her front window watching for her ride. She wanted to run out before he could honk his horn. Her mother had a rule that boys should ring the doorbell and step inside the house and hold a polite conversation before they could carry Abby off, but try telling Dane Quinn that! He wasn’t much of a one for small talk.

If her mother complained later, Abby would say, “Oh, didn’t you hear him ring?” Her mother wouldn’t quite believe her, but she would probably let it pass.

Abby was dressed in the new style she’d come home from college with this spring—a flowery, translucent skirt with a black knit leotard, and black nylon stockings even though the morning was already warming up. The stockings gave her a beatnik look, she hoped. (These were her only pair, and when she took them off
at the end of the day she knew she’d find startling black splotches here and there on her legs where she had colored in the holes with a felt-tip marker.) Her long fair hair was streaked lighter in places from half a summer’s worth of sun, and her eyes were heavily outlined with a black Maybelline eyebrow pencil but her lips were pale, which her mother said just made it seem she had forgotten something. Dane wasn’t given to compliments—and that was fine; Abby could understand that—but occasionally, when she slid into his car, he would rest his eyes on her for a moment longer than usual, and she was thinking he might do that this morning. She had taken extra care getting ready, dampening her hair to comb it straight and dabbing a drop of vanilla on the insides of her wrists. Some days it was almond extract or rosewater or lemon oil, but today was most definitely a vanilla day, she’d decided.

She heard her mother’s footsteps crossing the upstairs hall and she turned, but the footsteps stopped and her mother said something to Abby’s father. He was shaving at the bathroom sink with the door open; it was Sunday and he’d slept late, for him. “Did you remember to …?” her mother asked, and then something, something. Abby relaxed and turned back to the window. The Vincents from next door were getting into their Chevy. A good thing they were leaving: Mrs. Vincent was the kind of woman who would have asked Abby’s mother, seemingly in innocence, “Now, who was that fella I saw Abby tearing out of the house to meet? Young folks nowadays are so … informal-like, aren’t they?”

All Abby had told her mother was that she was hitching a ride with Dane to help set up for Merrick Whitshank’s wedding. She had made it sound like a chore, not a date. (Although it
was
a date, in her mind. She and Dane were still at that early stage where even tagging along with him on some humdrum errand, hanging around his edges like a puppy tied outside a grocery store, made her feel especially chosen.) So far, Dane and her mother had come face-to-face only twice, and it hadn’t gone well. Her mother just had a tendency
to take against people, sometimes. She wouldn’t say anything outright, but Abby always knew.

The Vincents drove away and a panel truck pounced on their space. Parking was very tight on this block. Almost no one had a garage. What could have been the Daltons’ garage—the basement area at street level, opening onto the sidewalk—was Abby’s father’s hardware store. If Dane were to ring the doorbell for her, he would have had to park who-knows-where and walk from there to her house. So honking was just sensible, really.

Her mother was complaining about something, in her mild way. “… asked you a dozen times if I’ve asked once,” she was saying, and Abby’s father offered some muted response—“Sorry, hon,” maybe, or “… told you I would get to it.” Abby’s cat marched purposefully down the stairs, each paw landing
plop, plop, plop
, as if he were offended. He leapt into the armchair near Abby and curled up and gave a disgusted sniff.

Some oppressive quality in the room—its small size, or its overstuffed furniture, or its dimness compared to the sunlight out on the street—made Abby feel suddenly desperate to get away. Although she loved her home, really. And loved her family, too, and had thought she couldn’t wait to finish her freshman year and come back to where she was cherished and made much of and admired. But all this summer she had felt so itchy and impatient. Her father told corny jokes and then laughed louder than his audience, “Haw! Haw!” with his mouth wide open, and her mother had this habit of humming a tiny fragment of some hymn every few minutes or so, just a couple of measures under her breath, after which, presumably, the hymn continued playing silently in her head until a few more notes emerged a moment later. Had she always done that? It would have perked things up if Abby’s brother were around, but he was away lifeguarding at a Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania.