A Spool of Blue Thread (20 page)

But wait. Really, the one kind of Wiss had nothing to do with the other.

It was Nora who made the appointment. She had called her pastor for the name of a gerontologist, and then she phoned Dr. Wiss’s office without consulting Abby. Meddlesome! She must have discussed it first with Red, though, because when Abby complained to him he didn’t seem surprised, and he told her it wouldn’t hurt to hear what a doctor had to say.

Abby was finding that Nora had started to get on her nerves. Why, for instance, did she persist in calling Abby “Mother Whitshank”? It made Abby sound like an old peasant woman in wooden clogs and
a headscarf. Abby had offered all her children’s spouses a choice of “Mom” or “Abby” when they first joined the family. “Mother Whitshank” hadn’t so much as crossed her lips.

Also, Nora stacked the plates on top of each other when she was clearing the table, instead of carrying one in each hand as Abby had been taught was polite. All the plates arrived in the kitchen with food stuck to their backs. Yet she criticized Abby’s housekeeping! Or that was her implication, at least, when she blamed the dust in the rugs for Sammy’s allergies. And she cooked fatty fried foods that were bad for Red’s heart, and she was much too lax with her children, and that queen bed she had requested completely filled Stem’s little room, barely allowing space for a person to edge around it.

Oh, well, this was just roommate-itis, Abby told herself. It was rubbing elbows at too-close quarters; that was why she felt so irritable.

She told herself this several times a day.

She also reminded herself that some of our connections are brand-new connections, unrelated to our past incarnations—new experiences to broaden our horizons. Maybe Nora’s role in Abby’s life was to deepen and enrich Abby’s soul; could that be true?

It wasn’t as if Abby were a difficult mother-in-law. Why, look at how well she got along with Amanda’s Hugh! A challenge, as Amanda herself admitted, but Abby found him entertaining. And Jeannie’s Hugh, of course, was a sweetheart. Some of Abby’s friends had a terrible time with their children-in-law. Daughters-in-law more than sons-in-law, all of them agreed. Some were not on speaking terms. Abby was doing way better than they were.

If only she didn’t feel so pushed aside. So extraneous, so unnecessary.

She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally. But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl. And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded—how
empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom.

What on earth had happened to her?

Her appointment with Dr. Wiss wasn’t till November. (Long waiting line of problem oldsters, evidently.) Everything might have changed by November. Maybe her minor little inconsequential glitches—her “brain jumping the track,” as she thought of it—would have disappeared on their own. Or maybe she would be dead! No, shelve that thought.

It was only mid-September now. Still summery, the leaves barely starting to turn, the mornings crisp but not truly cold. She could sit out on the porch after breakfast in just a sweater, gently toeing the swing back and forth and watching the parents and children walk past on their way to school. You could tell it was early in the school year because the children were so nicely dressed. Another month and they would be making less effort. And some of the older children would have shed their parents, although Petey and Tommy were too young for that, of course. They had set out with Nora several minutes ago—Sammy leaning forward in his stroller like a sea captain watching for landfall, Heidi prancing in front on her ridiculous great long leash. Three little towheads glimmering away through the trees; so non-Whitshank-like. Although Stem had been a towhead, so it was only to be expected.

The boys seemed to have settled easily into the neighborhood, zipping their scooters up and down the sidewalk out front and bringing playmates in for snacks. They told her that the other children called their house “the porch house.” Abby liked that. She could remember her own first sight of the house, back when she was a freckle-faced middle-schooler from Hampden and snooty Merrick Whitshank was her designated Big Sister. That enormous, wonderful porch glimpsed from the street, Merrick and two teenaged friends lounging in this
very swing so casually, so stylishly, wearing rolled-up blue jeans and gaily patterned neckerchiefs tied in jaunty knots. “Oh, Gawd, it’s the midgets,” Merrick had drawled, because Abby had two of her classmates with her, Little Sisters to Merrick’s two friends. They were supposed to spend a companionable, fun-filled Saturday afternoon learning the words to the school song and baking cookies together. But that part Abby couldn’t remember now—just her awe at the sight of this porch and the impressive flagstone walk leading up to it. Oh, and Merrick’s mother: sweet Linnie. (Or Mrs. Whitshank, as Abby called her then.) It had probably been Linnie who supervised the cookie baking, because Abby couldn’t picture Merrick doing that.

Linnie Mae Whitshank was pale and subdued, dressed in a wan flowered shift that could have been bought in a country store, but something about the tracery of smile lines at the corners of her eyes told Abby she might be taking in more than she let on. Long after the Big Sister charade had petered out, Abby thought of Linnie fondly. And then years later, when Abby started dating Red’s friend Dane, there was Linnie, as openhearted as ever, stepping out on the porch night after night to offer homemade lemonade to all the neighborhood gang. Sometimes Junior put in an appearance, too—“Why, hey there! Boys. Girls.” He’d hang around talking, talking, telling the girls they looked mighty pretty this evening and rehashing Colts games with the boys, till Linnie touched his sleeve and said, “Come away, now, Junior. Time to leave these young folks to their socializing.”

Both of them dead and gone now; oh, my. Wiped off the face of the earth by a freight train, leaving not even bodies to mourn, just two closed caskets, and no one but the police to break the news. So unsatisfying, so inconclusive. That bothered Abby more than it did Red.
Red was of the opinion that instantaneous death was a mercy, but Abby wanted goodbyes. She would have liked to say, “Linnie, you were a good, good woman, and I’ve always felt sorry you led such a lonely life.”

Abby had been visited, lately, by thoughts of all the people whose deaths she had been present for. Two grandparents, her mother, her beloved older brother who’d died young. Not her father, though. For her father, she had arrived just minutes too late. But she had hoped, as she bent and laid her face against his, that there was some lingering vestige of him that would register her presence. Even now, sitting on the porch and gazing down at Bouton Road, she felt her eyes tear up at the memory of his dear, whiskery cheek already cooling. We should all go out
attended
by someone! That was what she wanted for herself, certainly: Red’s large hand enclosing hers as she lay dying. But then she reflected that this meant he would be without her when his own time came, and she couldn’t endure the thought of that. How would Red survive, if she were the one to go first?

He always held her whole hand, rather than interlacing his fingers with hers. When she was in her early teens, hearing from her more forward friends about the boys who reached for their hands at the movies, it was that enfolding clasp that she had envisioned, and the first date who surreptitiously threaded his fingers through hers had convinced her that hand-holding was not all it was cracked up to be. Till Red.

Maybe she and Red could die at the same time. Say, on a plane. They could have a few minutes’ warning, a pilot’s announcement that would give them a chance to trade last words. Except that they never flew anywhere, so how was
that
going to happen?

“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”

“But, Mom, there
is
no ending,” Jeannie said.

“Well, I know that,” Abby said.

In theory.

It was possible that in her heart of hearts, she was thinking that the world couldn’t go on without her. Oh, weren’t human beings
self-deluding! Because the plain fact was that no one needed her anymore. Her children were grown up, and her clients had vanished into thin air the moment she retired. (And anyhow, toward the last it had seemed that her clients’ needs were bottomless—that society was falling apart faster than she could patch it together. She was getting out just in time, she had felt.) Even her “orphans,” as her family called them, were all but gone. B. J. Autry was dead of drugs and old Mr. Dale of a stroke, and the various foreign students had either returned to their own countries or else assimilated so successfully that they cooked Thanksgiving dinner for themselves now.

In the past, she had been at the center of things. She’d known everybody’s secrets; everyone confided in her. Linnie had told her—swearing her to silence—that she and Junior were their families’ black sheep; and Denny had told her (offhandedly, when she marveled at Susan’s brown eyes) that Susan was not his. Nothing she heard had Abby relayed to anybody else, not even to Red. She was a woman of her word. Oh, people would have been amazed at all she knew and didn’t say!

“You owe your job to me,” she could have said to Jeannie. “Your father was dead set against having a woman on the construction site, but I persuaded him.” What a temptation to let
that
slip! But she didn’t.

And now she was so unnecessary that her children thought she should move to a retirement community—she and Red both, neither one of them nearly old enough yet. Thank God that had come to nothing. It was worth putting up with Nora, even, in order to dodge the retirement community. It had even been worth putting up with Mrs. Girt. Or almost worth it.

Abby felt bad now about Mrs. Girt. They had let her go without a thought! And she’d probably had some very sad story. It wasn’t at all like Abby to pass up a chance to hear someone’s sad story. “Amanda,” she had said recently, “did we give that Mrs. Girt any severance pay?”

“Severance pay! She was with you nine days!”

“Still,” Abby said, “she meant well. And
you
all meant well to arrange for her; I hope you don’t think I’m ungrateful.”

“Well, since both you and Dad were dead set against a retirement community, for some reason …”

“But you can see our side of it, can’t you? Why, I bet those places have social workers to deal with the inmates. We’d be the objects of social work! Can you imagine?”

To which Amanda had said, “The ‘inmates’? And the ‘objects,’ Mom? Goodness. What does that say about your attitude to your own profession, all these years?”

Amanda could be so sharp-edged, sometimes.

Of the two girls, Jeannie was easier. (Abby knew she should stop calling them “the girls,” but it would feel so silly to say “the women” and “the men.”) Jeannie was biddable and unassuming; she lacked Amanda’s acidity. She didn’t confide in Abby, though. It had been such a blow when Jeannie had asked Denny to help out during that bad spell after Alexander was born. She could have asked Abby. Abby was right there in town! And then Denny: why had he never mentioned that he had finished college? He must have been taking courses for years, working them in around his various jobs, but he hadn’t said a thing, and why not? Because he wanted her to go on worrying about him, was why. He didn’t want to let her off the hook. So when he sprang it like that—just announced it after lunch that day: yes, he had his degree—it had felt like a slap in the face. She knew she should have been pleased for him, but instead she had felt resentful.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?

Although Denny might
not
be okay, even now. Abby wasn’t entirely at ease about him. Shouldn’t he be looking for work? Maybe substitute teaching? Or even
really
teaching! He surely couldn’t be
thinking that helping out around the house was enough of an occupation, could he? Or that the odd bits of money she slipped him—a couple of twenties any time he ran an errand for her, never requesting change—could be called a living wage.

Yesterday, she had asked him, “How about your other belongings? You must have more than what you brought down. Did you put them into storage?”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” he’d said. “They’re stashed in my old apartment.”

“So you still have to pay rent?”

“Nah. It’s just one room above a garage; my landlady doesn’t care.”

This was puzzling. What kind of landlady didn’t charge rent unless her tenant was physically present? Oh, so much of his life seemed … irregular, somehow.

Or maybe it was perfectly regular, and Abby had just been sensitized by too many past experiences with Denny—too many evasions and semi-truths and suspect alibis.

Last week she’d knocked on his bedroom door to ask if he could take her to buy some greeting cards, and she’d thought she heard him tell her to come in, but she was mistaken; he was talking on his cell phone. “You know I do,” he was saying. “How’m I going to make you believe me?” and then he’d looked over at Abby and his expression had altered. “What do you want?” he had asked her.

“I’ll just wait till you’re off the phone,” she had said, and he’d told his caller, “I’ve got to go,” and snapped his phone shut too quickly.

If it was a girl he’d been speaking to—a woman—Abby was truly glad. Everyone should have someone. Still, a part of her couldn’t help feeling hurt that he hadn’t mentioned this person. Why did he have to turn everything into such a mystery? Oh, he just took an active pleasure in going against the grain! No, the current, she meant. Going against the current. It was like a hobby for him.

Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed.
Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn’t screwed up her eyes and
focused
on them the way she had focused on Denny. And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!