A Spool of Blue Thread (31 page)

Merrick took a deep drag of her cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“Anyhow!” Abby told Merrick. “I bet it was one of those dreams you were really glad to wake up from, wasn’t it?”

Merrick said, “Mm-hmm,” with her eyes on the fan blades spinning above her.

Then a girl’s voice called, “Mare? Hello?” and Merrick straightened and called, “In the kitchen.”

The screen door slammed, and a moment later Pixie Kincaid and Maddie Lane arrived in the kitchen, both wearing Bermuda shorts, Maddie carrying a powder-blue Samsonite vanity case. “Merrick Whitshank, you’re still in your bathrobe!” Pixie said.

“I didn’t get home from the party till after three in the morning.”

“Well, neither did we, but it’s almost ten! Did you forget we’re practicing your makeup today?”

“I remember,” Merrick said. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Come on upstairs and let’s do this.”

“Hi, Mrs. Whitshank,” Pixie said belatedly. “Hi, um, Abby. See you later.” Maddie just gave a little wave like a windshield wiper. Then the three of them walked out, Merrick’s heels clattering. A sudden quiet descended.

“I guess Merrick must be feeling kind of tense these days,” Abby said after a moment.

“Oh, no, that’s just how she is,” Mrs. Whitshank said cheerfully. She had finished slicing the okra. She stirred the slices around in the milk, using a slotted spoon. “She was a snippy little girl and now she’s a snippy
big
girl,” she said. “Nothing much I can do about it.” She began transferring the okra slices to the cornmeal mixture. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to me there’s just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over. Merrick’s always put me in mind of my granny Inman. Disapproving kind of woman; tongue like a rasp. She never did think much of me.
You
, now, you’re a sympathizer, same as my aunt Louise.”

“Oh,” Abby said. “Yes, I see what you’re saying. It’s kind of like reincarnation.”

Mrs. Whitshank said, “Well …”

“Except it’s within one single lifetime instead of spread out over different lifetimes.”

“Well, maybe,” Mrs. Whitshank said. Then she said, “Honey, you want to do something for me?”

“Anything,” Abby said.

“Fetch that pitcher of water from the icebox and those paper cups on the counter and take them out to the men, will you? I know they must be dying of thirst. And tell them lunch will be early; I’ll bet they’re wondering.”

Abby stood up and went to the refrigerator. Her stockings were
sticking damply to the backs of her legs. It might not have been the best idea to wear them on a day like today.

As she was crossing the front hall, she overheard Mr. Whitshank talking on the phone in the sunroom. “This afternoon? What the hell?” he was saying. “Goddammit, Mitch, I’ve got five men out there waiting on you to tell them how to do that tree stump!” Abby made her footsteps lighter, thinking he might be embarrassed that she’d caught him using swear words.

Outside, the air hit her face like a warm washcloth, and the porch floorboards gave off the smell of hot varnish. But the soft, fresh breeze—unusual for this time of year—lifted the damp wisps along her hairline, and the water pitcher she was hugging chilled the insides of her arms.

Landis had gotten hold of a second chainsaw from somewhere, and he and Earl were slicing the thickest branches into fireplace-size logs. Dane and Ward were hacking off the thinner branches and dragging them to a huge pile down near the street, while Red had set up a chopping block and was splitting the logs into quarters. They all stopped work when Abby arrived. Earl and Landis killed their chainsaws and a ringing silence fell, so that her voice sounded shockingly clear: “Anybody want water?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Earl told her, and they set down their tools and came over to her. Ward had taken his shirt off, which made him look like an amateur, and he and Dane were deeply flushed. Red, of course, had been working this hard the whole summer, but even he had rivulets of sweat running down his face, and Earl and Landis were so drenched that their blue chambray shirts were almost navy.

She distributed paper cups and then filled them while the men held them out, and they emptied them in one gulp and held them out again before she’d finished the first round. It wasn’t till halfway through the third round that anyone said more than “Thanks.” Then Red asked, “Did Dad get ahold of Mitch, do you know?”

“I think he’s on the phone with him now.”

“I still say we just go ahead and take the whole thing down,” Earl told Red.

“Well, I don’t want Mitch showing up and saying we made his job harder.”

Dane and Abby were looking at each other. Dane’s hair was damp, and he gave off a wonderful smell of clean sweat and tobacco. Abby had a sudden, worrisome thought: she didn’t own any nice underwear. Just plain white cotton underpants and white cotton bras with the tiniest pink rosebud stitched to the center V. She looked away again.

“Hello?”

It was a beefy man in a seersucker suit, parting the azalea hedge that bordered the lawn next door. Twigs crackled under his chalk-white shoes as he walked toward them. “Say, there,” he said when he reached them. He had his eyes fixed specifically on Red.

“Hi, Mr. Barkalow,” Red said.

“Wonder if you realize what time your men started work this morning.”

Landis was the one who answered. “Eight o’clock,” he said.

“Eight o’clock,” Mr. Barkalow repeated, still looking at Red.

Landis said, “That’s when me and Red and Earl here started. The rest of them showed up later.”

“Eight o’clock in the morning,” Mr. Barkalow said. “A
Sunday
morning. A weekend. Does that strike you as acceptable?”

“Well, it seems okay to me, sir,” Red said in a steady voice.

“Is that right. Eight o’clock on a Sunday morning seems a fine time to run a chainsaw.”

He had ginger eyebrows that bristled out aggressively, but Red didn’t seem intimidated. He said, “I figured most folks would be—”

“Morning, there!” Mr. Whitshank called.

He was striding toward them down the slope of the lawn, wearing a black suit coat that must have been put on in haste. The left lapel
was turned wrong, like a dog’s ear flipped inside out. “Fine day!” he said to Mr. Barkalow. “Good to see you out enjoying it.”

“I was just asking your son, Mr. Whitshank, what he considers to be an acceptable hour to run a chainsaw.”

“Oh, why, is there a problem?”

“The problem is that today is Sunday; I don’t know if you’re aware of it,” Mr. Barkalow said.

He had transferred his bushy-browed glare to Mr. Whitshank, who was nodding emphatically as if he couldn’t agree more. “Yes, well, we certainly wouldn’t want to—” he said.

“It is
perverse
how you people love to make a racket while the rest of us are trying to sleep. You’re hammering on your gutters, you’re drilling out your flagstones … Only yesterday, you sawed an entire tree down! A perfectly healthy tree, might I add. And always, always it seems to happen on a weekend.”

Mr. Whitshank suddenly grew taller.

“It doesn’t
seem
to happen on a weekend; it
does
happen on a weekend,” he said. “That’s the only time we honest laboring men aren’t busy doing you folks’ work for you.”

“You ought to thank your lucky stars I don’t report you to the police,” Mr. Barkalow said. “They’re bound to have ordinances dealing with this kind of thing.”

“Ordinances! Don’t make me laugh. Just because you all like to lie abed till noon, you and that spoiled son of yours with his big fat—”

“When you think about it,” Red broke in, “it doesn’t really matter if there are ordinances or there aren’t.”

Both men looked at him.

“What matters is, we seem to be waking our neighbors. I’m sorry about that, Mr. Barkalow. We certainly never intended to discommode you.”

“
‘Discommode’
?” his father repeated in a marveling voice.

Red said, “I wonder if we could settle on an hour that’s mutually agreeable.”

“ ‘Mutually
agreeable
’?” his father echoed.

“Oh,” Mr. Barkalow said. “Well.”

“Does, maybe, ten o’clock sound all right?” Red asked him.

“Ten o’clock!” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Ten?” Mr. Barkalow said. “Oh. Well, even ten is … but, well, I guess we could tolerate ten if we were forced to.”

Mr. Whitshank looked up at the sky as if he were begging for mercy, but Red said, “Ten o’clock. It’s a deal. We’ll make sure to abide by that in the future, Mr. Barkalow.”

“Well,” Mr. Barkalow said. He seemed uncertain. He glanced again at Mr. Whitshank, and then he said, “Well, okay, then. I guess that settles it.” And he turned and walked off toward the hedge.

“
Now
see what you’ve done,” Mr. Whitshank told Red. “Ten o’clock, for God’s sake! Practically lunchtime!”

Red handed his paper cup to Abby without comment.

Landis said, “Uh, boss?”

“What is it,” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Did you get the word from Mitch?”

“He’s coming by this afternoon with his brother-in-law’s stump grinder. He says take the trunk on down.”

“So, cut it low to the ground?”

“Low as you can get it,” Mr. Whitshank said, and by then he had already turned away and was halfway up the hill again, as if he’d washed his hands of all of them. The hem of his suit coat hung unevenly, Abby noticed—sagging at the sides and hitching up at the center, as if it belonged to a much older and shabbier man.

She circulated among the others, collecting their paper cups in silence, and then she started back up the hill herself.

“Sometimes Junior thinks the neighbors might be looking down their noses at him,” Mrs. Whitshank said when she heard about the scene in the yard. “He’s a little bit sensitive that way.”

Abby didn’t say so, but she could see his side of it. During her years as a scholarship student she’d had a few dealings herself with Mr. Barkalow’s type—so entitled, so convinced that there was only one way to live. No doubt all his sons played lacrosse and all his daughters were preparing for their debutante balls. But she shook that thought away and folded the sheet of dough on the counter a second time and a third. (“Fold, fold, and fold again” were Mrs. Whitshank’s instructions when she’d taught Abby how to make her biscuits. “Fold till when you slap the dough, you hear it give a burp.”)

“Anyhow,” Abby said, “Red got them to compromise. It all worked out in the end.”

“Red is not so quick to take offense,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She drew a large bowl from the refrigerator and removed the dish towel that covered it. “I think it’s because he grew up here. He’s used to people like the Barkalows.”

The bowl contained pieces of chicken in a liquid white batter. Mrs. Whitshank lifted them out one by one with canning tongs and laid them on a platter to drain. “It’s like he’s comfortable with both sorts,” she said. “With the neighbors and with the work crew. I know if he had his way, though, he’d quit college right this minute and go on the work crew full-time. It’s only on account of Junior that he’s sticking it out till graduation.”

“Well, it never hurts to have a diploma,” Abby said.

“That’s what Junior tells him. He says, ‘You want the option of something better. You don’t want to end up like me,’ he says. Red says, ‘What’s wrong with ending up like you?’ He says the trouble with college is, it’s not practical. The
people
there aren’t practical. ‘Sometimes they strike me as silly,’ he says.”

Abby had never heard Red talk about college. He was two years ahead of her and they seldom ran into each other on campus. “What are his grades like?” she asked Mrs. Whitshank.

Mrs. Whitshank said, “They’re okay. Well, so-so. That’s just not how his mind works, you know? He’s the kind that, you show him some gadget he’s
never laid eyes on before and he says, ‘Oh, I see; yes, this part goes into that part and then it connects with this other part …’ Just like his daddy, but his daddy wants Red to be different from him. Isn’t that always how it is?”

“I bet Red was one of those little boys who take the kitchen clock apart,” Abby said.

“Yes, except he could put it back together again, too, which most other little boys can’t. Oops, watch what you’re doing, Abby. I
see
how you’re twisting that glass!”

She meant the glass that Abby was using to cut out the biscuits. “Clamp it straight down on the dough, remember?” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Let me fetch you the skillet.”

Abby wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The kitchen was heating up, and she was swathed in one of Mrs. Whitshank’s bib aprons.

If it was true, Abby thought, that she represented a recurring figure in Mrs. Whitshank’s life—the “sympathizer”—it was equally true that Mrs. Whitshank’s type had shown up before in Abby’s life: the instructive older woman. The grandmother who had taught her to knit, the English teacher who had stayed late to help her with her poems. More patient and softer-spoken than Abby’s brisk, efficient mother, they had guided and encouraged her, like Mrs. Whitshank saying now, “Oh, those are looking good! Good as any I could have made.”

“Maybe Red could join his dad’s company full-time after college,” Abby said. “Then it could be Whitshank and
Son
Construction. Wouldn’t Mr. Whitshank like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “He’s hoping the law for Red. Law or business, one. Red’s got a fine head for business.”

“But if he wouldn’t be happy …” Abby said.

“Junior says happiness is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. “He says Red should just make up his
mind
to be happy.”

Then she stopped hunting through the utensil drawer and said, “I’m not trying to make him sound mean.”

“Of course not,” Abby said.

“He only wants what’s best for his family, you know? We’re all he’s got.”

“Well, of course.”

“Neither one of us has to do with our own families, anymore.”

“Why is that?” Abby asked.

“Oh, just, you know. Circumstances. We kind of fell out of touch with them,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “They’re clear down in North Carolina, and besides, my side were never in favor of us being together.”