A Spool of Blue Thread (29 page)

Oh, and here came Dane! His two-tone Buick, blue and white, slowed for the stop sign at the corner. Already she could hear the
pounding thrum of his radio. She grabbed her purse and tore open the screen door and rushed out lickety-split, so that by the time he’d double-parked in front of the Laundromat across the street she was flying down the stairs at the side of the house and there was no need for him to honk. His arm was dangling out his window—tanned skin, subtly muscled, glinting with gold hairs, she knew—and his face was turned toward her but she couldn’t read his expression because cars kept passing between them. (All of a sudden there was traffic, as if his presence had enlivened the neighborhood.) She waited for a driver who made way too much of a production about having to veer around him, and then she darted across, causing another driver to brake and tap his horn. She circled the Buick’s front end and opened the passenger door and hopped in with a flounce of her skirt. “Johnny B. Goode” was the song that was playing. Chuck Berry, hammering away. She set her purse on the seat between them and turned to meet Dane’s gaze.

He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you.”

Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.

He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.

In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.

“I wish I
were
asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”

“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.

“Oh, they’re paying you?”

“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”

But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.

Although it was probably true that he was short of cash. A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job. His family was well off—better off than hers, at least—but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie. He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies. Should she offer to pay her own way from now on? But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship. And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.

They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“Kicked me out of the house.”

“Oh, my goodness!”

“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”

Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”

“Oh, what about?”

Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.

“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”

It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that
she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.

“We’re cutting up a tree.”

“A tree!”

“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”

“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”

“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”

“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.

“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head. He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk! He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos. He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo. And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her. That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house. Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go.”

“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”

“He says it was already dying.”

“Hmm.”

“Merrick and her bridesmaids have to get dressed at crack of dawn on her wedding day because taking those two photos is going to use up so much time,” Dane said. “Mrs. Whitshank says he’ll make Merrick late for her own wedding.”

“And those full-length skirts! They’ll get all leafy and twiggy!”

“Mr. Whitshank claims they won’t. He’s laying white carpet down the whole walk, and then extra on the sides near the house where the bridesmaids are going to stand.”

Abby looked at Dane with her mouth open. Behind his dark glasses, he gave no hint what he thought of this plan.

“I’m surprised Merrick’s going along with it,” she told him.

“Oh, well, you know Mr. Whitshank,” Dane said.

Abby didn’t, in fact, know Mr. Whitshank at all. (
Mrs
. Whitshank was the one she was fond of.) She had the impression, though, that he was a man of strong opinions.

They passed the church where the wedding would take place in six more days. People were heading toward it in clusters, perhaps for Sunday school or an early service—the women and girls in pastels and flower-laden hats and white gloves, the men and boys in suits. Abby looked for Merrick, but she didn’t see her. It was Dane’s church too, not that he ever seemed to attend.

Abby had known Dane, at least by sight, since her early teens, but they hadn’t gotten together till this past May, her first week home from college. She’d run into Red Whitshank one evening in the ticket line at the Senator, and he had two of his friends with him, one of them Dane Quinn. And Abby was with two of
her
friends; it had all worked out very neatly. Possibly Red had been hoping to sit next to her in the theater (it was common knowledge that he had a little crush on her), but she took one glance at Dane, at his forbidding scowl and his defensively hunched shoulders, and then stepped between him and her friend Ruth like the most brazen hussy (as Ruth said teasingly later). Something just came over her; she felt
pulled
to him. She liked his edginess, his wariness, his obvious grudge against the universe. Not to mention his good looks. Well, everyone knew his story. He’d been a standard-issue Gilman boy who went on to Princeton, like his father and both grandfathers before him, but just this past September—the start of his junior year—his mother had up and left his father and gone to live in Hunt Valley with the man who boarded her quarter horse. And as soon as Dane heard about it, he’d dropped out of school and come home. First he moped around the house but eventually, at his father’s insistence, he got a job of some
sort at Stephenson Savings & Loan. (Bertie Stephenson had been his father’s college roommate.) He never talked about his mother; he iced over at any mention of her, but that just proved to Abby how deeply hurt he must be. Abby had a special fondness for people who tried to hide the damage. He became her newest worthy cause. She flung herself at him, worked to bring him out of himself, zeroed in on him at every gathering, wouldn’t take no for an answer. But no
was
his answer, at first. He stood around separate from the others and drank too much and smoked too much and made sullen one-word responses to her most sympathetic remarks. Then one evening—on Red Whitshank’s front porch, as it happened—he turned on her almost threateningly and backed her against the wall and said, “I want to know why you keep hanging around me.”

She could have offered any number of good reasons. She could have said it was because of his obvious unhappiness, or her conviction that she could make a difference in his life. But what she said was, “Because of that up-and-down groove between your nose and your upper lip.”

He said, “What?”

“Because your hair falls down all shaggy as if you’re a little bit crazy.”

He blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t have to know what I mean,” she told him, and then, completely out of character, she moved toward him and raised her face to him and saw him begin to believe her.

Now it was more or less accepted that they were a couple, although she could tell that their friends were surprised. She didn’t explain herself to them. She became, in a way, a little like Dane; she grew cagey and evasive. She began to notice how stodgy their friends were, and although she had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house with
a yard, all at once she began biting off the words “domestic” and “suburban” with her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Who wants to go to the Club for dinner?” someone would say, and Dane would say, “Gosh, the Club, what an unspeakable thrill.” Everybody would look sideways at Abby, but she would just smile tolerantly and take another sip of her Coke. She was the only one who knew him, she was saying—who divined that he was nowhere near as bad as he pretended to be.

Although every now and then, for a flash of a second, she wondered if his badness was precisely what attracted her. Not that he was
really
bad, but there was something risky about him, something contrary and outrageous. After he was fired, for instance, he had left the building with twenty-four boxes of staples. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred staples; later he’d done the math. (His glee when he told her this had made her smile.) And he didn’t even own a stapler! He had once driven out to where his mother was living with Horse Guy, as Dane called him, and duct-taped all the doors shut in the middle of the night.
That
escapade had made Abby laugh aloud. “Why in the world …?” she had asked, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain; it was almost the only time he had let the word “mother” cross his lips, and maybe he already regretted it.

Also his drinking, while it was deplorable, lent him a certain shambling, reckless, juvenile-delinquent quality that touched her heart even while she was shaking her head over him. You could see this boy coming half a block away and know him by his rolling walk, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face half hidden by his shank of hair and his back a brooding C shape. Oh, it wasn’t only the disadvantaged who needed compassion! He was leading a life just as hard, in some ways, as the lives of those poor little Negro children she was tutoring this summer. He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her.

She looked over at his profile, the slant of his cheek below the
dark glasses, and sent him a small, warm smile even though he didn’t see it.

“But. So. Anyhow. I was saying,” he said, lifting his arm to signal a turn. “About my cousin.”

“Your cousin,” she repeated.

“George. The one I’m staying with.”

“Oh, have I met him?”

“No, he’s older. He’s got a career and all. He’s going away next weekend to visit his girlfriend in Boston.”

The Buick tilted slightly as it swerved onto Bouton Road, and Abby grabbed her purse before it could slide off the seat.

“I’ll have the place to myself,” Dane said. He parked in front of the Whitshanks’ and took his key from the ignition. The music stopped short but he went on sitting there, gazing through the windshield. “I was thinking you could come over Friday evening. Maybe tell your mom you were spending the night with a friend.”

She had foreseen that something like this would arise, sooner or later. It was where they’d been heading all along. It was where she
wanted
to head.

So she couldn’t explain what she said next. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.

He turned and looked at her, although his expression was still a blank behind the dark glasses. “Don’t know what?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure what friend I could tell her, and besides, I might be busy that night, I might have to do something with my parents; I’m not sure.”

She wasn’t handling this very smoothly. She was cross with herself for sounding so flustered. “I’ll have to see,” she told him, and she yanked open her door and all but fell out of the car in her haste to leave the moment behind.

Walking in front of him toward the house, though, she was conscious of her slim waist, and the sway of her skirt, and the swing
of her hair down her back. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

Red Whitshank and another friend of his, Ward Rainey, stood talking with two workmen at the lower edge of the lawn. One of the workmen had a chainsaw, and Red and the other workman were carrying axes. All around them, in a massive tangle, lay thick branches and cross sections of trunk. That tulip poplar must have been gigantic. (And nowhere near dying, if you judged by all the green leaves.) The remainder of the trunk, some ten feet tall, still towered near the front porch, as flat-topped and perfectly cylindrical as an architectural column.

“… figure when Mitch gets here he can tell us how much he wants left,” Red was saying, and the man with the chainsaw said, “Well, I can’t see as he’ll want
any
left, because he’s not going to haul it out roots and all, is he? That would leave too big of a hole.”