A Spool of Blue Thread (44 page)

“Oh, what do
I
care where my spatulas are kept?” Red asked too suddenly and too loudly.

But he heaved himself to his feet, and Nora stepped forward to press her cheek to his. “We’ll see you tomorrow evening,” she told him. “Don’t forget you promised to come to our house for supper.”

“I remember.”

He lifted his windbreaker from the back of his chair and started to put it on. Then he paused and looked at Denny. “Say,” he said. “That guy with the French horn, was that
your
doing?”

Denny said, “What?”

“Did you arrange it? I can just about picture it. Paying a guy good money, even, just so we’d all start missing you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Red gave a shake of his head and said, “Right.” He chuckled at himself. “That would be too crazy,” he said. He shrugged into his windbreaker and settled the collar. “Still, though,” he said. “How many guys in tank tops listen to classical music?”

Denny looked questioningly at Jeannie, but she was ignoring him. “Got everything, Dad?” she asked.

“Well, no,” he said. “But the others are going to bring it, I guess.”
Then he walked over to Denny and set a palm on his back in a gesture that was halfway between a clap and a hug. “Have a good trip, son.”

“Thanks,” Denny said. “I hope the new apartment works out.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Red turned from Denny and left the dining room, with Jeannie and Nora trailing behind. Denny picked up the bag at his feet and followed.

“See you in a while,” Red told the two Hughs in the front hall. They were just coming in for another load, both of them slightly winded.

Jeannie’s Hugh asked Jeannie, “Are you leaving now? I think we can maybe fit one more box in.”

“Never mind that; just put it on the truck,” she said. “I want to get going.” And she shouldered past him and hurried to catch up with Red, as if she feared he might try to escape. They threaded between the tied-back swags of cheesecloth on the porch; Stem stood aside to let them pass. “We should be over there in an hour or so,” he told Red. Red didn’t answer.

At the bottom of the steps, Red paused and looked back at the house. “It wasn’t a dream per se, as a matter of fact,” he told Jeannie.

“What’s that, Dad?”

“When I had that dream the house burned down, it wasn’t an actual
dream
dream. It was more like one of those pictures you get in your head when you’re half asleep. I was lying in bed and it came to me, kind of—the burnt-out bones of the house. But then I thought, ‘No, no, no, put that out of your mind,’ I thought. ‘It will do okay without us.’ ”

“It will do just fine,” Jeannie said.

He turned and set off down the flagstone walk, then, but Jeannie waited for Denny and Nora, and when they had caught up she reached across Denny’s burden of bags to give him a hug. “Say goodbye to the house,” she told him.

“Bye, house,” he said.

“The last time I missed church, I was in the hospital having Petey,” Nora told Denny as she was driving.

“So, does this mean you’re going to hell?”

“No,” she said in all seriousness. “But it does feel odd.” She flicked on her turn signal. “Maybe I’ll try to make the evening prayer service, if we’re finished moving in by then.”

Denny was gazing out his side window, watching the houses slide past. His left hand, resting on his knee, kept tapping out some private rhythm.

“I guess you’ll be glad to get back to your teaching,” she said after a silence.

He said, “Hmm?” Then he said, “Sure.”

“Will you always just substitute, or do you want a permanent position someday?”

“Oh, for that I’d have to take more course work,” he said. He seemed to have his mind elsewhere.

“I can imagine you’d be really good with high-school kids.”

He swung his eyes toward her. “No,” he said, “the whole thing got me down, it turns out. It was kind of depressing. Everything you’re supposed to teach them, you know it’s only a drop in the bucket—and not all that useful for real life anyhow, most of the time. I’m thinking I might try something else now.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I was thinking of making furniture.”

“Furniture,” she said, as if testing the word.

“I mean, work that would give me something … visible, right? To show at the end of the day. And why fight it: I come from people who build things.”

Nora nodded, just to herself, and Denny returned to looking out his side window. “That thing about the French horn,” he said to a passing bus. “What
was
that, do you know?”

Nora said, “I have no idea.”

“I hope he’s not losing it.”

“He’ll be all right,” Nora said.
“We’ll make sure to keep an eye on him.”

They had reached the top of St. Paul Street now. It would be a straight shot south to Penn Station. Nora sat back in her seat, her fingers loose on the bottom of the wheel. Even driving, she gave the impression of floating. She said, “I would just like to say, Denny—Douglas and I would both like to say—that we appreciate your coming to help out. It meant a lot to your mom and dad. I hope you know that.”

He looked her way again. “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, you’re welcome. Well, thank
you
both, too.”

“And it was nice of you not to tell about his mother.”

“Oh, well, it’s nobody’s business, really.”

“Not to tell Douglas, I mean. When he was younger.”

“Oh.”

There was another silence.

“You know what happened?” he asked suddenly. There was something startled in his tone, as if he hadn’t intended to speak until that instant. “You know when I was mending Dad’s shirt?”

“Yes.”

“His dashiki kind of thing?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I was thinking I would never find the right shade of blue, because it was such a
bright
blue. But I went to the linen closet where Mom always kept her sewing box, and I opened the door, and before I could even reach for the box this spool of bright-blue thread rolled out from the rear of the shelf. I just cupped my hand beneath the shelf and this spool of thread dropped into it.”

They were stopped for a red light now. Nora sent him a thoughtful, remote look.

“Well, of course that can be explained,” he said. “First of all, Mom
would
have that shade, because she was the one who had made the dashiki in the first place, and you don’t toss a spool of thread just because it’s old. As for why it was out of the box like that … well, I did spill a bunch of stuff out earlier when I was sewing on a button. And I guess the rolling had to do with how I opened the closet door. I set up a whoosh of air or something; I don’t know.”

The light turned green, and Nora resumed driving.

“But in the split second before I realized that,” he said, “I almost imagined that she was
handing
it to me. Like some kind of, like, secret sign. Stupid, right?”

Nora said, “No.”

“I thought, ‘It’s like she’s telling me she forgives me,’ ” Denny said. “And then I took the dashiki to my room and I sat down on my bed to mend it, and out of nowhere this other thought came. I thought, ‘Or she’s telling me she knows that
I
forgive
her
.’ And all at once I got this huge, like, feeling of relief.”

Nora nodded and signaled for a turn.

“Oh, well, who can figure these things?” Denny asked the row houses slipping past.

“I think you’ve figured it just right,” Nora told him.

She turned into Penn Station.

In the passenger drop-off lane, she shifted into park and popped her trunk. “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” she told him.

“Oh, sure. I’d never just disappear; they need me around for the drama.”

She smiled; her two dimples deepened. “They probably do,” she said. “I really think they do.” And she accepted his peck on her cheek and then gave him a languid wave as he stepped out of the car.

The clouds overhead were a deep gray now, churning like muddy waters stirred up from the bottom of a lake, and inside the station, the skylight—ordinarily a kaleidoscope of pale, translucent aquas—had
an opaque look. Denny bypassed the ticket machines, which had lines that wound back through the lobby, and went to stand in the line for the agents. Even there some ten or twelve people were waiting ahead of him, so he set down his bags and shoved them along with his foot as the line progressed. He could sense the anxiety of the crowd. A middle-aged couple standing behind him had apparently not thought to reserve, and the wife kept saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, they’re not going to have any seats left, are they?”

“Sure they are,” her husband told her. “Quit your fussing.”

“I knew we should have called ahead. Everybody’s trying to beat the hurricane.”

“Hurkeen,” she pronounced it. She had a wiry, elastic Baltimore accent and a smoker’s rusty voice.

“If there’s not any seats for this one we’ll catch the next one,” her husband told her.

“Next one! Watch there not
be
a next one. They’ll stop running them after this one.”

The husband made an exasperated huffing sound, but Denny sympathized with the wife. Even with his own reserved seat, he didn’t feel entirely confident. What if they shut down the trains before his train arrived? What if he had to turn around and go back to Bouton Road? Stuck in his family, trapped. Ingrown, like a toenail.

The man in front of him was called to a window, and Denny shoved his bags farther up. He was going to get the elderly agent with the disapproving face; he just knew it. “Sorry, sir …” the agent would say, not sounding sorry in the least.

But no, he got the cheery-looking African-American lady, and her first words when he gave her his confirmation number were “Aren’t
you
the lucky one!” He signed for his ticket gladly, without his usual muttering at the price. He thanked her and lugged his bags to the Dunkin’ Donuts to buy coffee and, on second thought, a pastry as well, to celebrate. He was going to make it out of here after all.

The few tables outside the Dunkin’ Donuts were occupied, and
so were all the benches in the waiting room. He had to eat standing against a pillar with his bags piled at his feet. More passengers were milling around than at Christmas or Thanksgiving, even, all wearing frazzled expressions. “No, you can’t buy a candy bar,” a mother snapped at her little boy. “Stick close to me or you’ll get lost.”

A mellifluous female voice on the loudspeaker announced the arrival of a southbound train at gate B. “That’s B as in Bubba,” the voice said, which Denny found slightly odd. So did the young woman next to him, apparently—an attractive redhead with that golden tan skin that was always such an unexpected pleasure to see in a redhead. She quirked her eyebrows at him, inviting him to share her amusement.

Sometimes you glance toward a woman and she glances toward you and there is this subtle recognition, this moment of complicity, and anything might happen after that. Or not. Denny turned away and dropped his paper cup in the waste bin.

The train at gate B-for-Bubba was traveling to D.C., where nobody seemed to want to go, but when Denny’s northbound train was announced there was a general surge toward the stairs. Denny thought of what Jeannie’s Hugh had said the night before; shouldn’t all these people be heading
away
from the hurricane? But north was where home was, he’d be willing to bet—drawing them irresistibly, as if they were migratory birds. They pressed him forward, down the stairs, and when he reached the platform he felt a twinge of vertigo as they steered him too close to the tracks. He pulled ahead, making his way to where the forward cars would board. But he didn’t want the quiet car. Quiet cars made him edgy. He liked to sit surrounded by a sea of anonymous chatter; he liked the living-room-like coziness of mixed and mingled cell-phone conversations.

The train curved toward them from a distance, almost the same shade of gray as the darkened air it moved through, and a number of cars flashed past before it shrieked to a stop. There didn’t appear to be a quiet car, as far as Denny could tell. He boarded through the
nearest door and chose the first empty seat, next to a teenage boy in a leather jacket, because he knew he had no hope of sitting by himself. First he heaved his luggage into the overhead rack, and only then did he ask, “This seat taken?” The boy shrugged and looked away from him, out the window. Denny dropped into his seat and slipped his ticket from his inside breast pocket.

Always that “Ahh” feeling when you settle into place, finally. Always followed, in a matter of minutes, by “How soon can I get
out
of here?” But for now, he felt completely, gratefully at rest.

People were having trouble finding seats. They were jamming the aisle, bumbling past with their knobby backpacks, calling to each other in frantic-sounding voices. “Dina? Where’d you go?” “Over here, Mom.” “There’s room up ahead, folks!” a conductor shouted from the forward end.

The train started moving, and those who were still standing lurched and grabbed for support. A woman arguably old enough to be offered a seat loomed above Denny for a full minute, and he studied his ticket with deep concentration till another woman called to her and she moved away.

Row houses passed in a slow, dismal stream—their rear windows drably curtained or blanked out with curling paper shades, their back porches crammed with barbecue grills and garbage cans, their yards a jumble of rusty cast-off appliances. Inside the car, the hubbub gradually settled down. Denny’s seatmate leaned his head against the window and stared out. As imperceptibly as possible, Denny slid his phone from his pocket. He hit the memory dial and then bent forward till he was almost doubled up. He didn’t want this conversation overheard.

“Hey, there. It’s Alison,” the recording said. “I’m either out or unavailable, but you can always leave me a message.”

“Pick up, Allie,” he said. “It’s me.”

There was a pause, and then a click.

“You act like saying ‘It’s me’ will make me drop everything and come running,” she said.

Another time, he might have asked, “And didn’t it?” Three months ago he might have asked that. But now he said, “Well, a guy can always hope.”