Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

6

ABBY FELT NERVOUS AT FIRST about the appointment with Dr. Wiss, but then she thought, “I can do this, because I’m so familiar with my mother’s Wiss pinking shears.” And the exact, clunky weight of those shears instantly came to her mind, along with the too-thick handle loop that pressed uncomfortably against the bone at the base of her thumb, and the initial balkiness as the heavy teeth began chewing into the fabric.

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!

While she was flipping through her mail the other day, she’d grown gradually aware that he was speaking to her. “Hmm?” she’d said absently, slitting an envelope. Then, “ ‘Wealth management,’ ” she had said, biting off the words. “Don’t you hate that phrase?” and Denny had said, “You’re not listening, dammit.”

“I’m listening.”

“When I was a kid,” he told her, “I used to daydream about kidnapping you just so I could have your full attention.”

“Oh, Denny. I paid you a lot of attention! Too much, your dad always says.”

He just cocked his head at her.

Not only had she paid him attention, but she had secretly taken more pleasure in him than in any of the others. He was so full of life, so fierce. (In fact, he sometimes brought Dane Quinn to mind – her renegade ex-boyfriend, killed these many years ago in a one-car accident.) And he could delight her with his unexpected slants of vision. Last month, rolling up the supposedly dusty rug in the little boys’ room, he had paused to ask, “Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn’t forced themselves to mess up!” Abby had laughed aloud.

Maybe when he was grown, she remembered thinking during his childhood, he would finally tell her what used to make him so angry. But then when he was grown she had asked him, and he had said, “I don’t know, to be honest.”

Abby sighed and watched a schoolboy walk past, bowed low beneath an overstuffed backpack.

This porch was not just long but deep – the depth of a smallish living room. In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing – a low table, a settee, and two armchairs – and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch. But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck. Abby thought that summed up her role in this family. She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.

She looked down through the trees and saw a flash of white: Heidi’s mane feathering as she pranced homeward, followed by Nora wheeling the stroller in her sashaying, aimless way. Without even thinking about it, Abby bounded up from the swing like a much younger woman and slipped into the house.

The front hall still smelled of coffee and toast, which ordinarily struck her as cozy but today made her feel claustrophobic. She headed straight for the stairs and climbed them swiftly. She was out of sight by the time she heard the thump-thump of Sammy’s stroller being hauled up the porch steps.

Her study door – Denny’s door now – was shut, and a heavy silence lay behind it. His schedule had not reset itself as she had first imagined it might. He was still the last one to bed every night and the last one up in the morning, emerging at ten or eleven o’clock in his battle-weary outfit of olive-drab T-shirt and none-too-clean khakis, his face creased from his pillow and his hair hanging limp and greasy. Oh, Lord.

“Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ” she’d asked Ree in last week’s pottery class.

“Socrates,” Ree answered promptly.

“Really? I was thinking more along the lines of Michelle Obama.”

“Actually I don’t know who said it,” Ree admitted, “but believe me, it goes a whole lot farther back than Michelle.”

You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child – whichever one is unhappy.

She circled the hall to close the door to the little boys’ room, a distracting welter of clothes and towels and parts of toys. Legos would bite the soles of your feet if you ventured in without your shoes on. She backtracked to her own room, stepped inside, and shut the door soundlessly behind her.

The bed was still unmade, because she’d wanted to get downstairs and eat a peaceful breakfast before Nora and the little boys came down. (Oh, the exhausting enthusiasm of small children hurling themselves into each new day!) Now she pulled up the covers and hung her bathrobe, and she folded Red’s pajamas and tucked them beneath his pillow. On workdays Red dressed in the dark, and he always left a mess behind.

This was the room that had seen the fewest occupants: just Mr. and Mrs. Brill, then Junior and Linnie, then Red and Abby. The armoire in the corner was the Brills’, in fact, because it had been too massive for the downtown apartment they’d moved to. And the other furniture was Junior and Linnie’s, although the decorative objects were Abby’s – the framed color print from her childhood showing a guardian angel hovering behind a little girl, and her mother’s glass-slipper pincushion stuffed with velvet, and the little Hummel fiddler boy Red had given her when they were courting.

She heard Nora’s voice downstairs, low and unintelligible, and a crowing sound from Sammy. A moment later there was a scratching at her door. She opened her door and Clarence slipped in. “I know, sweetie,” Abby said. “It’s very noisy down there.” He circled on the rug a few times and then lay down. Good old Clarence. Brenda. Whoever. Abby did know this was Brenda if she bothered to stop and think about it.

“It’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a gear sort of slips in your head,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Have you ever had that happen? You’re having this very clear thought, but then all at once you’re on this totally other illogical, unconnected thought and you can’t trace it back to the first one. It’s just tiredness, I imagine. I mean, once about five or ten years ago – oh, long before I was old – I had to drive home alone from the beach late at night to keep an appointment the next morning, and I suddenly found myself in this very scary neighborhood in Washington, D.C. And I could swear I’d managed to do it without crossing the Bay Bridge! I don’t know how I did it. To this day I don’t know. I was tired, was all. That was all it was.”

Or last December, when the McCarthys had invited her and Red to a Christmas concert along with a bunch of their other friends, and she had been so chatty and confiding with the man who happened to be seated next to her but then discovered, by and by, that he was a total stranger, had nothing to do with the McCarthys and no doubt thought she was a lunatic. Just a skip in the record, that was. You can see how it might happen.

“And time,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you’re little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you’re grown. Well, now it’s just a blur. I can’t keep track of it anymore! But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”

She heard Nora climbing the stairs. She heard her say, “No, silly-billy. Cookies are for dessert.” Her footsteps proceeded at a stately pace toward the boys’ room, followed by Sammy’s little sneakers.

Was there something wrong with Abby, that she didn’t fall all over herself to spend every waking minute with her grandchildren? She did love them, after all. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them – an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next. Petey was the worrier, bossing his brothers around not out of meanness but from a protective, herding instinct; Tommy had his father’s sunny nature and his peacemaking skills; and Sammy was her baby, still smelling of orange juice and urine, still happy to cuddle up and let her read to him. And then the older ones: Susan so serious and dear and well-behaved – was she all right? – and Deb who was Abby herself at that age, a wiry knot of inquisitiveness, and poor clumsy, effortful Alexander who could wrench her heart, and finally Elise who was just so different from Abby, so completely other, that Abby felt privileged to be granted this close-up view of her.

But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.

The upstairs hall was quiet again. Abby turned her doorknob by degrees, opened the door a bare minimum, and slipped out. The dog shoved the door wider open with his nose and plodded after her, snuffling noisily and causing Abby to wince and glance toward the boys’ room.

Down the stairs to the front door she went, and out onto the porch. Then she stopped short, struck by an idea. She reached back into the house for the leash that hung on a hook just inside. Clarence made a glad moaning sound and shambled onto the porch behind her, while somewhere in the depths of the house Heidi gave a yelp of envy. Eat your heart out, Heidi. Abby was not a fan of overexcitable dogs.

She paused on the flagstone walk to clip the leash to Clarence’s collar. This was the old-fashioned, short kind of leash, not the permissive retractable kind that people nowadays favored. Strictly speaking, Clarence didn’t need a leash; he was so slow and stodgy and mindlessly obedient. But he did have a willful streak when it came to very small dogs. They seemed to bring out all the old feistiness of his puppy days. He never could resist pouncing on a toy terrier.

“We’re not going far,” Abby told him. “Don’t get your hopes up.” From the stiff-jointed way he moved, she suspected he wasn’t up to more than a block or two in any case.

They turned to the left when they reached the street – the opposite direction from Ree’s house. Not that Abby wouldn’t love to see Ree, but after Abby’s little lapse that time, Ree would have been distressed to find her walking alone. And Abby loved walking alone. Oh, it felt so good to set out like this, free as a bird, no “What’ll we do about Mom?” hanging unspoken over her head! She hoped she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.

Sometimes on her walks it would strike her that of all her original family, she was the only one left. Who would ever have dreamed that she’d be traveling through the world without them? She thought again of the framed picture in her bedroom: the solitary child threading a path beneath giant, looming trees, the guardian angel following protectively behind. Except that Abby didn’t believe in angels, and hadn’t since she was seven. No, she was truly on her own.

She used to have at least one of her children with her everywhere she went. It was both comforting and wearing. “Hand? Hand?” she used to say before she crossed a street. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.

Clarence eyed a squirrel but kept on heeling, not even tempted. “I agree,” Abby told him. “Squirrels are beneath you.” Then she gave a testing pat to the cushiony space above her breasts. Had she thought to hang the house key around her neck before she set out? No, but never mind; the lock was set to manual. And there was always Nora to let her back in if need be.

Another secret she knew, but this wasn’t something anyone had told her: it had occurred to her just recently that the song Stem remembered his father’s singing him to sleep with could very well have been “The Goat and the Train.” Burl Ives used to sing that on a children’s record she had owned when she was small. Should she suggest it to Stem? It could be a transporting moment for him, hearing that song again after all these years. But he might think she was tactlessly reminding him that he was not a Whitshank. Or maybe her reason for keeping silent was more selfish. Maybe she just wanted him to forget that she wasn’t his first and only mother.

He and Denny had treated each other with artificial politeness ever since their fight at the beach. You would think they were barely acquainted. “Denny, are you going to want that last piece of chicken?” Stem would ask, and Denny would say, “Be my guest.” They didn’t fool her for a minute. They could have been two strangers in a waiting room, and she was beginning to lose hope that that would ever change.

Oh, always lately it seemed that some crisis arose at the beach house. No wonder she dreaded vacations! Not that she ever let on.

“What’s gone wrong with us?” she’d asked Red on the ride home from this year’s trip. “We used to be such a happy family! Weren’t we?”

“Far as I can recall,” Red had answered.

“Remember that time we all got the giggles at the movies?”

“Well, now …”

“It was a Western, and the hero’s horse was staring straight at us, head-on, chewing oats, with these two little balls of muscle popping out at his jaws when he chomped down. He looked so silly! Remember that? We burst out laughing, all of us at once, and the rest of the audience turned toward us just mystified.”

“Was I there?” Red asked her.

“You were there. You were laughing too.”

Maybe the reason he’d forgotten was that he took their happiness for granted. He didn’t fret about it. Whereas Abby … oh, she fretted, all right. She couldn’t bear to think that their family was just another muddled, discontented, ordinary family.

“If you could have one single wish,” she had asked Red one night in bed when neither of them could sleep, “what would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I would wish wonderful lives for our children,” Abby said.

“Yeah, that’s good.”

“How about you?”

“Oh,” he said, “maybe that Harford Contractors would go bankrupt and quit underbidding me.”

“Red! Honestly!”

“What?”

“How can you not put your children’s welfare first?” Abby asked him.

“I do put it first. But you already took care of that with your wish.”

“Huh,” Abby said, and she had flounced over to her left side so she was lying with her back to him.

He was getting old, too. She wasn’t the only one! He wore reading glasses that slipped down his nose and made him look like his father. And that “Eh?” of his when he hadn’t heard right: where had that come from? It was almost as if he were acting a part. He thought that was how a person was supposed to sound at his age. And sometimes what he said landed oddly off the mark—“scarlet teenager,” for instance, referring to a red bird he saw perched on their feeder. Which probably had to do with his hearing, again, but still, she couldn’t help worrying. She saw the way salesclerks treated him lately, how condescendingly, speaking to him too loudly and using words of fewer syllables. They took him for just another doddery old man. It made her chest ache when she saw that.