Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was “cool” (“I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger,” she had said), did she not realize that “cool” had been used in Abby’s time, too, not to mention long before?

She didn’t mind looking old. It wasn’t a real concern of hers. Her face had grown slightly puffy and her body had softened and slumped, but when she studied the family album she thought that her younger self seemed unappealingly puny by comparison – pinched and tight, almost starved-looking. And Red seemed downright frail in those photos, with his Adam’s apple poking forth too sharply from his too-long neck. He weighed no more now than he had then, but somehow he gave the impression of greater solidity.

Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her – the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

“I bought a goat,” she sang as she walked. “His name was Jim.” Then she broke off, because she caught sight of someone approaching up ahead. But he turned left at the corner, so Abby resumed singing. “I bought him for …” Clarence trudged next to her in silence, every now and then accidentally or maybe deliberately bumping against her knee.

Wasn’t it interesting how song lyrics stayed in your memory so much longer than mere prose! Not just the songs of her teens—“Tom Dooley” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”—but ditties from her childhood, “White Coral Bells” and “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine” and “We’re Happy When We’re Hiking,” and her mother singing something that began “I’ll come down and let you in,” and even jump-rope chants—“Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea …” Anything that rhymed, it seemed. Rhyme imprinted things in your brain. Dental appointments should be put into rhyme, and important anniversaries. In fact, all of life’s more meaningful events! If you came across any gap, all you had to do was start singing as much as you could remember – embark on the first line, confidently – and the missing part would arrive in your head just in the nick of time.

Abby used to worry about becoming forgetful, because her maternal grandfather had ended up with dementia. But that wasn’t turning out to be her particular problem. She had a better memory than most of her friends, they all agreed. Why, just last week Carol Dunn had phoned, but when Abby answered she had heard only silence. “Hello?” she’d said again, and Carol had said, “I forget who I dialed.” “This is Abby,” Abby said, and Carol said, “Oh, hi, Abby! How are you? Gosh, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t – but anyhow, you aren’t who I meant to call,” and she had hung up.

Or Ree, who kept losing the names of things. “Next summer I think I’ll plant some of those … Maryland flowers,” she said, and Abby said, “Black-eyed Susans?” “Yes, right.” It always seemed to be Abby who had to fill in the blanks. She should tell Dr. Wiss that.

“In some ways,” she should tell him, “my memory’s better now than it was when I was young. The most surprising details suddenly show up again! Tiny things, infinitesimal things. The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present. I got a whole set of CorningWare with one interchangeable handle that you twisted to lock into place. That was almost fifty years ago! I used those for only a little while; they kept scorching things on the bottom. Who else could remember that?”

She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners, back when Abby was a toddler whining with hunger and tiredness and just general five p.m. blues. She might hear the long-ago humming in the wires that the number 29 streetcar made when it sped down Roland Avenue without having to stop. And out of nowhere she pictured her childhood dog, Binky, who used to sleep with both paws folded over his nose to keep himself warm on cold nights. It was exactly like a time trip. She was bobbing along in a time machine gazing out the window at one scene after another in no particular order. At one story after another. Oh, there’d been so many stories in her life! The Whitshanks claimed to have only two; she couldn’t imagine why. Why select just a certain few stories to define yourself? Abby had a wealth of them.

For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.

What street was this? She hadn’t been paying attention.

She stopped at the curb and gazed around her, and Clarence sat down on his haunches. To her left was the Hutchinsons’ house, with that beautiful huge magnolia tree that always seemed freshly enameled. She was surprised that she had walked this far; she’d thought Clarence would have protested by now. She made a clucking sound and he rose with a groan, the weight of the world on his shoulders, his head sagging so that it nearly touched the ground. “We’ll take you home,” she told him, “and you can have a nice long nap.”

Just then, though – how could this happen? – a little mosquito of a chihuahua minced past on the sidewalk across the street. No owner anywhere to be seen, and no leash and not even a collar. Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby’s hand. Somehow she had time to see his entire life streaming by: his soft, pudgy belly and giant paws when he was a pup, his old fondness for playing fetch with tennis balls gone soppy with spit, his pure, delirious joy when the children used to come home from school. “Clarence!” she shrieked, but he paid no attention, so she tore after him into the street, while something she couldn’t quite place – something huge and sleek and metallic that she hadn’t been expecting – came speeding toward her.

“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”

And then no more.

7

WHITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE, was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Linnie had died. But that had been so long ago; Red was the only one left alive with any firsthand memory of it. (Nobody counted Merrick.) And Red was not himself right now. He was just a shell of himself. He walked around in his slippers, unshaven, with a vacant look in his eyes. For one whole day it appeared that he had lost his powers of speech, till it was discovered that he’d once again neglected to put his hearing aids in.

Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.

Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo. They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty – an iffy business in the best of times – and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”

“I want him to come back from Jesus.”

“Her,” Nora said. “You want her to come back. But she’s happier where she is.”

“She was old, buddy,” Stem said.

An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Luckily, though, Sammy failed to make the obvious connection. He hadn’t mentioned Abby once, although she used to spend hours at a time reading him his favorite, unutterably boring dinosaur book over and over and over.

She’d been singing, Louisa Hutchinson said. Louisa was the one who had rushed out to the street when she heard the crash, and then called 911 and later had phoned the family. Thank heaven, because Abby hadn’t been carrying any identification. “She walked toward our house singing,” Louisa said, “and I went to our front window and I said to Bill, I said, ‘Somebody’s in a good mood.’ I don’t know as I’d ever heard Abby singing before.”

“Singing!” Jeannie and Stem said at exactly the same time. Then Jeannie asked, “What was the song?”

“Something about a goat; I don’t know.”

Jeannie looked at Stem. He shrugged.

Louisa said, “The dog lay so far from where Abby lay, I guess he must have been thrown. The driver found him, poor woman. The driver was beside herself. She found him lying close to where her car had knocked the lamppost over. I’m just thankful Abby didn’t have to see him.”

“Her,” Jeannie said.

“Pardon?”

“The dog was a her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“She was old,” Jeannie said. “The dog, I mean. She’d had a good long life.”

“Still, though,” Louisa said.

Then she held up the casserole she’d brought and told them it was gluten-free, in case anybody cared.

And how did it happen, pray tell, that Abby had chanced to be off serenading the neighborhood with none of the family any the wiser? Amanda was the only one who came right out and asked, once Louisa was gone, but no doubt the others were wondering too. They sat around the living room listlessly, with the light coming in all wrong – sunshine filtering through the rear windows on a weekday morning, when most of the family should have been at work. “Don’t look at me,” Denny told Amanda. “I wasn’t even up yet”—interrupting Nora, who was wearing a troubled expression and had started to speak also.

“I’ve asked myself and asked myself,” Nora said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve asked. When the boys and I left for school, she was sitting on the porch. When I came back she was gone. But Brenda was in the house still, so where was Mother Whitshank? Was she up in her room? Was she in the backyard? How did she leave for a walk without my knowing?”

“Well, you couldn’t keep an eye on her every single minute,” Jeannie said.

“I should have, though! It turns out I should have. I am so, so sorry. The two of us had a very special bond, you know. I’m never going to forgive myself.”

“Hey,” Stem said. “Hon.”

Which was about as far as Stem could ever go when it came to offering comfort. Nora seemed grateful, however. She smiled at him, her eyes brimming.

“We’re not mind readers,” Denny said. “She should have told us she wanted a walk. She had no business taking off like that!”

Oh, everybody was true to form – Denny angry, Nora remorseful, Amanda looking for someone to blame. “How could she have told you,” Amanda asked Denny, “when you were snoring away in bed?”

“Whoa!” he said, and drew back in his chair, holding up both hands.

“Anybody would think you’d worn yourself out with hard work,” Amanda said.

“Well, it’s not as if you’ve been over here slaving away.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Jeannie said. “We’re getting off the subject.”

“What is the subject?” Amanda’s Hugh asked.

“I have this really, really awful feeling that Mom wanted us to play ‘Good Vibrations’ at her funeral.”

“What?” Hugh said.

“She used to say as much. Didn’t she, Mandy?”

Amanda couldn’t answer because she had started crying, so Denny stepped in. He said, “I don’t know if she meant that literally, though.”

“We need to find her instructions. I remember she wrote some.”

“Dad?” Stem asked. “Do you know where her instructions could be?”

Red was staring into space, both of his hands on his knees. He said, “Eh?”

“Mom’s instructions for her funeral. Did she tell you where she put them?”

Red shook his head.

“We should check her study,” Stem told the others.

“They wouldn’t be in her study,” Nora said. “She cleared out those shelves when Denny moved in. She said she was going to borrow some desk space from Father Whitshank.”

“Oh!” Red said. “She did. She asked if she could put her stuff in one of my drawers.”

Amanda sat up straighter and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “We’ll look there,” she said briskly. “And, Jeannie, I’m sure she didn’t really want ‘Good Vibrations.’ Not when it came right down to it.”

“You must not know Mom, then,” Jeannie said.

“My only fear is, she’s requested ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

“I like ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Stem said mildly.

“So did I, till it got to be a cliché.”

“It’s not a cliché to me.”

Amanda raised her eyes to the ceiling.

At lunchtime they just foraged in the fridge instead of cooking. “I can’t find a thing in here but casseroles,” Denny complained, and Amanda said, “Isn’t it interesting: people never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles, and who eats casseroles nowadays?”

“I eat casseroles,” Nora told her. “I serve them several times a week.”

Amanda sent Denny a guilty glance and said no more.

“I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the next-door people,” Jeannie said musingly. “The people at the beach. They’ll tell each other next summer, they’ll say, ‘Oh, look at that! They don’t have their mother anymore!’ ”

“Will we still go to the beach?” Stem wondered.

“Of course we’ll go,” Amanda told him. “Mom would expect us to. It would kill her if we didn’t go!”

There was a silence. Then Jeannie gave a wail and buried her face in her hands.

Nora stood up and walked around the table, Sammy straddling her hip, to stroke Jeannie’s shoulder. Sammy hung out at an angle and gazed down at her with interest. “There, there,” Nora told her. “This will get easier, I promise. God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Jeannie only cried harder.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Denny said in an informative tone of voice. He was leaning back against the fridge with his arms folded.

Nora glanced at him, still smoothing Jeannie’s shoulder.

“He gives people more than they can handle every day of the year,” Denny told her. “Half of the world is walking around just … destroyed, most of the time.”

The others turned to Nora for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to take offense. She just said, “Douglas, could you find Sammy’s juice cup, please?”

Stem rose and left the room. The others stayed as they were. There was something disjointed about all of them, something ragged and out of alignment.

Stem was the one who searched Red’s desk for the funeral instructions, while Red just watched from the couch with his hands resting slack on his knees. It turned out that Abby had taken over his bottom drawer. Her papers filled it to the brim – her poems and journals, letters from needy orphans and old friends, photos of long-ago classmates and her parents and various strangers.

All of these Stem leafed through in a desultory way and then handed over to Red, who took longer with them. The photos alone consumed several minutes. “Why, there’s Sue Ellen Moore!” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in years.” And he gazed lingeringly at a laughing young Abby hanging on to the arm of a sullen boy smoking a cigarette. “I fell for her the first time I saw her,” he told Stem. “Oh, she was always talking about the day she fell for me, I know. ‘It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,’ she’d say, but that was when she was almost grown, she was grown, whereas I, now … I had been mooning over Abby all along. That’s my friend Dane you see her with there; Dane was the one she liked first.”

A desiccated violet flattened in waxed paper made him first frown in perplexity and then smile, but without saying why, and he spent some time studying a typewritten list of what must have been New Year’s resolutions. “ ‘I will make myself count to ten before I speak to the children in anger,’ ” he read out. “ ‘I will remind myself daily that my mother is getting old and will not be with us forever.’ ” The folder of Abby’s poems, though, he laid aside without a glance, as if fearing he would find them too painful, and he didn’t so much as crack open any of her little black-and-red bound journals.

Some of the items were mystifying. A wrinkled, flattened Hershey’s-bar wrapper; a piece of tree bark in a tiny brown paper bag; a yellowing two-page newsletter from a nursing home in Catonsville. “ ‘Five Tasks for Dying,’ ” Stem read aloud from the newsletter.

“For dieting?”

“Dying.”

“Oh, what’s it say?”

“Nothing to do with a funeral service,” Stem said, passing it over. “Telling people you love them, telling them goodbye …”

“Just – please, God – don’t let her ask for a ‘celebration,’ ” Red said. “I don’t much feel like celebrating just now.” He let the newsletter drop unread onto the couch beside him. Stem didn’t seem to have heard him, though. He was studying a sheet of onionskin covered with blurred typewriting – a carbon copy, obviously; the one and only item in an unmarked manila envelope.

“Found it?” Red asked.

“No, just …”

Stem went on reading. Then he raised his head. His lips had gone white; he had a drawn, almost dehydrated look. “Here,” he said, and he handed the paper to Red.

“ ‘I, Abigail Whitshank,’ ” Red read out, “ ‘hereby agree that—’ ” He stopped. His eyes went to the bottom of the page. He cleared his throat and continued, “ ‘—hereby agree that Douglas Alan O’Brian will be raised like my own child, with all attendant rights and privileges. I promise that his mother will be granted full access to him whenever she desires, and that she may reclaim him entirely for her own as soon as her life circumstances permit. This agreement is contingent upon his mother’s promise that she will never, ever, for any reason, reveal her identity to her son unless and until she assumes permanent responsibility for him; nor will I reveal it myself.’ ” He cleared his throat again. He said, “ ‘Signed, Abigail Dalton Whitshank. Signed, Barbara Jane Autry.’ ”

“I don’t understand,” Stem said.

Red didn’t answer. He was staring down at the contract.

“Is that B.J. Autry?” Stem asked.

Red still didn’t speak.

“It is,” Stem said. “It’s got to be. Barbara Jane Eames, she started out, and then at some point she must have married someone named Autry. She was right there in front of us all along.”

“I guess she found your listing in the phone book,” Red said, looking up from the contract.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Stem demanded. “You had an obligation to tell me! I don’t care what you promised!”

“I didn’t promise,” Red said. “I knew nothing about this.”

“You had to know.”

“I swear it: your mom never said word one.”

“You’re claiming she knew the truth all these years and kept it from her own husband?”

“Evidently,” Red said. He rubbed his forehead.

“That’s not possible,” Stem told him. “Why on earth would she do that?”

“Well, she … maybe she was worried I would make her give you up,” Red said. “I’d tell her she would have to hand you over to B. J. And she was right: I would have.”

Stem’s jaw dropped. He said, “You’d have handed me over.”

“Well, face it, Stem: this was a crazy arrangement.”

“But still,” Stem said.

“Still what? You were B. J.’s legal offspring.”

“I guess it’s a good thing she’s not around anymore, then,” Stem said bitterly. “She died, right?”

“Yes, I seem to remember she did,” Red said.

“You ‘seem to remember,’ ” Stem said, as if it were an accusation.

“Stem, I swear to God I had no knowledge of any of this. I barely knew the woman! I can’t even figure how your mom could get a lawyer to go along with it.”

“She didn’t get a lawyer. Look at the language. Oh, she tried to sound legal—‘attendant rights and privileges,’ ‘unless and until’—but what lawyer writes ‘never, ever’? What official document is a single paragraph long? She cooked it up herself, she and B. J. between them. They didn’t even have it notarized!”

“I have to say,” Red said, looking down at the contract again, “I’m a little bit … annoyed by this.”

Stem gave a humorless snort.

“Sometimes your mother could be … I mean, Abby could be …” Red trailed off.

“Look,” Stem said. “Just promise me this. Promise you won’t tell people.”

“What, not tell anyone? Not even Denny and the girls?”

“No one. Promise you’ll keep it quiet.”

“How come?” Red asked him.

“I just want you to.”

“But you’re grown now. It couldn’t change anything.”

“I mean this: I need you to forget you ever saw it.”

“Well,” Red said. And he leaned forward and handed it over.

Stem folded the contract and put it in his shirt pocket.

It emerged that not even Red’s bottom desk drawer had provided quite enough space for Abby’s papers. Where her funeral directive showed up, finally, was the cupboard beneath the window seat, interleaved with programs from other people’s funerals – her parents’ and her brother’s and a “ceremony of remembrance” for someone named Shawanda Simms whom none of the rest of the family had heard of. And no, she did not request “Good Vibrations,” or “Amazing Grace,” either, for that matter. She wanted “Sheep May Safely Graze” and “Brother James’s Air,” both to be sung by only the choir, thank goodness; and then the congregation should join in on “Shall We Gather at the River?” Friends and/or family could give testimonials, supposing they cared to (this wording struck her daughters as pathetically tentative), and Reverend Stock could say something brief and – if it wasn’t asking too much—“not too heavy on the religion.”

The mention of Reverend Stock threw everyone into a tizzy. First, they couldn’t even think who he was. Then Jeannie figured out that he must be the pastor at Hampden Fellowship – the little church that Abby had gone back to from time to time, having belonged to it in her childhood. But the Whitshanks’ official place of worship, at least on Christmas Eve and Easter, was St. David’s, and St. David’s was what Amanda had booked for eleven o’clock Monday morning. Did it really, really make any difference? she wondered aloud. Red said it did. Perhaps reasoning that Nora was their expert on religious matters, he commissioned her to place the necessary calls to St. David’s and to Reverend Stock. Nora went off to the sunroom phone and came back some time later to report that Reverend Stock had retired several years ago, but Reverend Edwin Alban was saddened to hear of their loss and would pay a visit that afternoon to discuss the particulars. Red blanched at the mention of a visit, but he thanked her for arranging it.

By now, everybody in the family was unraveling around the edges. The three little boys kept waking at night and crossing the hall to climb into bed with Stem and Nora. Stem forgot to cancel an appointment with a Guilford woman who was thinking of adding a major extension to her house. Jeannie and Amanda got into a quarrel after Amanda said that while Alexander might indeed have held a special place in Abby’s heart, it was only to be expected because “Alexander is so … you know.” “He’s so what? What?” Jeannie had demanded, and Amanda had said, “Never mind,” and made a big show of clamping her mouth shut. Not ten minutes later, Deb gave Elise a black eye for claiming that their grandma had once confided that she loved Elise the best. “Now, how to amuse them today?” Red asked – a line from a Christopher Robin poem that Abby used to quote whenever some new family catastrophe arose. Then he got a stricken look, no doubt at the sound of Abby’s merry voice echoing in his head. Meanwhile Denny, true to form, started spending long periods shut away in his room doing no one knew what, although occasionally he could be heard talking on his cell phone. But to whom? It was a mystery. Even Heidi was acting up. She kept raiding the garbage container under the kitchen sink and leaving disgusting knots of chewed foil beneath the dining-room table.

“You girls have to tell me if I start looking seedy,” Red told his daughters. “I don’t have your mother around anymore to keep me up to par.” But as the week wore on, and his shirts developed food stains and he never got out of those slippers, he shrugged off any suggestion they made. “You know, Dad,” Jeannie said, “I believe those pants of yours are ready for the rag bag,” and he said, “What are you talking about? I’ve just now got them properly broken in.” When Amanda offered to take his suit to the cleaner’s in preparation for the funeral, he told her there was no need; he’d be wearing a dashiki. “A what?” Amanda asked him. He turned and walked out of the sunroom, leaving his daughters staring at each other in dismay. A few minutes later he came back carrying a blousy sort of smock in a teal blue so brilliant, so electrically vibrant, that it was painful to the eyes. “Your mother made this for our wedding,” he said, “and I thought it would be appropriate if I wore it to her funeral.”

“But, Dad,” Amanda said, “your wedding was in the sixties.”

“So?”

“Maybe in the sixties people wore these, although I can’t quite … but that was almost half a century ago! All the seams are fraying, just look. There’s a rip under one arm.”

“So we’ll fix it,” Red said. “It’ll be just as good as new.”

Amanda and Jeannie exchanged a look, which Red caught. He turned abruptly to Denny, who was lounging on the couch cycling through TV channels. “This is easy to fix,” Red told him, holding up the dashiki on its wire hanger. “Right? Am I right?”

Denny said “Huh?” and flicked his eyes over. “Oh, sure, I can fix that,” he said. “If I can find the same color thread.”

The girls groaned, but Denny stood up and took the dashiki from Red and left the room. “Thanks,” Red called after him. Then he turned back to his daughters and said, “I’ve got some corduroys I could wear with it, kind of a light gray. Gray goes good with blue, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Dad,” Amanda said.

“At our wedding I wore bell-bottoms,” he said. “Your grandma Dalton had a conniption.”

There’d been no photos of their wedding, because Abby had claimed that a photographer would ruin the mood. So Amanda and Jeannie perked up, and Jeannie asked, “What did Mom wear?”

“This long sort of flowy, I forget what they call it,” Red said. “A Kaplan?”

“A caftan?”

“That’s it.” His eyes filled with tears. “She looked nice,” he said.

“Yes, I bet she did.”

“I know I can’t ask, ‘Why me?’ ” he said. The tears were running down his face now, but he didn’t seem to realize it. “We had forty-eight good years together. That’s way more than a lot of folks get. And I know I should be glad she went first, because she never could have managed without me. She couldn’t even fix a leaky spigot!”

“Right, Dad,” Jeannie said, and she and Amanda were crying too now.

“But sometimes I just have to ask anyhow. You know?”

“Yes, Dad. We know.”

Carla wasn’t happy about letting Susan miss school for the funeral. Everybody heard Denny arguing with her on the phone. “She was my mother’s favorite grandchild,” he said. “You’re telling me the kid can’t skip one measly math test for her sake?” In the end it was agreed that she could come but not stay over, in order to be back in school on Tuesday morning. So immediately after breakfast on the morning of the funeral Denny drove down to the train station to meet her. The child he returned with was a much more solemn, more dignified version of the Susan who’d gone to the beach with them. She wore a charcoal knit dress with a demure white collar, and black tights and black suede pumps. Some sort of training bra appeared to be crumpled around her chest. Stem’s three boys eyed her shyly at first and wouldn’t speak, but she herded them into the sunroom and in a few minutes chattery voices began drifting toward the kitchen, where the grown-ups were still sitting around the breakfast table.

Red wore floppy gray corduroys and his dashiki, which was even more startling off its hanger. The sleeves ballooned extravagantly over elasticized cuffs, giving him a buccaneer air, and the slit at the neck was deep enough to expose a whisk broom of gray chest hair. But Nora said, “Oh, didn’t Denny do a nice job of mending!” and Red looked satisfied, not appearing to notice that she hadn’t said a word about the overall effect.

When the doorbell rang and Heidi started barking, they all gathered themselves together. That would be Ree Bascomb’s maid, who had agreed to babysit the three boys. Once she’d been given her instructions, they all filed out the back door – Stem and Nora, Red, Denny and Susan – and climbed into Abby’s car. Denny drove. Red sat next to him. During the ten-minute trip to the church Red said nothing at all, just gazed out the side window. In the rear, Nora made small talk with Susan. How was school this year? How was her mother? Susan answered politely but briefly, as if she felt it would be disrespectful not to keep her mind on the funeral. Denny drummed his fingers on the steering wheel every time they stopped for a light.