Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

PART TWO. What a World, What a World

9

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, BREEZY, yellow-and-green morning in July of 1959, and Abby Dalton was standing at her front window watching for her ride. She wanted to run out before he could honk his horn. Her mother had a rule that boys should ring the doorbell and step inside the house and hold a polite conversation before they could carry Abby off, but try telling Dane Quinn that! He wasn’t much of a one for small talk.

If her mother complained later, Abby would say, “Oh, didn’t you hear him ring?” Her mother wouldn’t quite believe her, but she would probably let it pass.

Abby was dressed in the new style she’d come home from college with this spring – a flowery, translucent skirt with a black knit leotard, and black nylon stockings even though the morning was already warming up. The stockings gave her a beatnik look, she hoped. (These were her only pair, and when she took them off at the end of the day she knew she’d find startling black splotches here and there on her legs where she had colored in the holes with a felt-tip marker.) Her long fair hair was streaked lighter in places from half a summer’s worth of sun, and her eyes were heavily outlined with a black Maybelline eyebrow pencil but her lips were pale, which her mother said just made it seem she had forgotten something. Dane wasn’t given to compliments – and that was fine; Abby could understand that – but occasionally, when she slid into his car, he would rest his eyes on her for a moment longer than usual, and she was thinking he might do that this morning. She had taken extra care getting ready, dampening her hair to comb it straight and dabbing a drop of vanilla on the insides of her wrists. Some days it was almond extract or rosewater or lemon oil, but today was most definitely a vanilla day, she’d decided.

She heard her mother’s footsteps crossing the upstairs hall and she turned, but the footsteps stopped and her mother said something to Abby’s father. He was shaving at the bathroom sink with the door open; it was Sunday and he’d slept late, for him. “Did you remember to …?” her mother asked, and then something, something. Abby relaxed and turned back to the window. The Vincents from next door were getting into their Chevy. A good thing they were leaving: Mrs. Vincent was the kind of woman who would have asked Abby’s mother, seemingly in innocence, “Now, who was that fella I saw Abby tearing out of the house to meet? Young folks nowadays are so … informal-like, aren’t they?”

All Abby had told her mother was that she was hitching a ride with Dane to help set up for Merrick Whitshank’s wedding. She had made it sound like a chore, not a date. (Although it was a date, in her mind. She and Dane were still at that early stage where even tagging along with him on some humdrum errand, hanging around his edges like a puppy tied outside a grocery store, made her feel especially chosen.) So far, Dane and her mother had come face-to-face only twice, and it hadn’t gone well. Her mother just had a tendency to take against people, sometimes. She wouldn’t say anything outright, but Abby always knew.

The Vincents drove away and a panel truck pounced on their space. Parking was very tight on this block. Almost no one had a garage. What could have been the Daltons’ garage – the basement area at street level, opening onto the sidewalk – was Abby’s father’s hardware store. If Dane were to ring the doorbell for her, he would have had to park who-knows-where and walk from there to her house. So honking was just sensible, really.

Her mother was complaining about something, in her mild way. “… asked you a dozen times if I’ve asked once,” she was saying, and Abby’s father offered some muted response—“Sorry, hon,” maybe, or “… told you I would get to it.” Abby’s cat marched purposefully down the stairs, each paw landing plop, plop, plop, as if he were offended. He leapt into the armchair near Abby and curled up and gave a disgusted sniff.

Some oppressive quality in the room – its small size, or its overstuffed furniture, or its dimness compared to the sunlight out on the street – made Abby feel suddenly desperate to get away. Although she loved her home, really. And loved her family, too, and had thought she couldn’t wait to finish her freshman year and come back to where she was cherished and made much of and admired. But all this summer she had felt so itchy and impatient. Her father told corny jokes and then laughed louder than his audience, “Haw! Haw!” with his mouth wide open, and her mother had this habit of humming a tiny fragment of some hymn every few minutes or so, just a couple of measures under her breath, after which, presumably, the hymn continued playing silently in her head until a few more notes emerged a moment later. Had she always done that? It would have perked things up if Abby’s brother were around, but he was away lifeguarding at a Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania.

Oh, and here came Dane! His two-tone Buick, blue and white, slowed for the stop sign at the corner. Already she could hear the pounding thrum of his radio. She grabbed her purse and tore open the screen door and rushed out lickety-split, so that by the time he’d double-parked in front of the Laundromat across the street she was flying down the stairs at the side of the house and there was no need for him to honk. His arm was dangling out his window – tanned skin, subtly muscled, glinting with gold hairs, she knew – and his face was turned toward her but she couldn’t read his expression because cars kept passing between them. (All of a sudden there was traffic, as if his presence had enlivened the neighborhood.) She waited for a driver who made way too much of a production about having to veer around him, and then she darted across, causing another driver to brake and tap his horn. She circled the Buick’s front end and opened the passenger door and hopped in with a flounce of her skirt. “Johnny B. Goode” was the song that was playing. Chuck Berry, hammering away. She set her purse on the seat between them and turned to meet Dane’s gaze.

He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you.”

Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.

He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.

In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.

“I wish I were asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”

“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.

“Oh, they’re paying you?”

“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”

But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.

Although it was probably true that he was short of cash. A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job. His family was well off – better off than hers, at least – but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie. He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies. Should she offer to pay her own way from now on? But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship. And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.

They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“Kicked me out of the house.”

“Oh, my goodness!”

“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”

Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”

“Oh, what about?”

Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.

“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”

It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.

“We’re cutting up a tree.”

“A tree!”

“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”

“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”

“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”

“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.

“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head. He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk! He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos. He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo. And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her. That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house. Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go.”

“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”

“He says it was already dying.”

“Hmm.”

“Merrick and her bridesmaids have to get dressed at crack of dawn on her wedding day because taking those two photos is going to use up so much time,” Dane said. “Mrs. Whitshank says he’ll make Merrick late for her own wedding.”

“And those full-length skirts! They’ll get all leafy and twiggy!”

“Mr. Whitshank claims they won’t. He’s laying white carpet down the whole walk, and then extra on the sides near the house where the bridesmaids are going to stand.”

Abby looked at Dane with her mouth open. Behind his dark glasses, he gave no hint what he thought of this plan.

“I’m surprised Merrick’s going along with it,” she told him.

“Oh, well, you know Mr. Whitshank,” Dane said.

Abby didn’t, in fact, know Mr. Whitshank at all. (Mrs. Whitshank was the one she was fond of.) She had the impression, though, that he was a man of strong opinions.

They passed the church where the wedding would take place in six more days. People were heading toward it in clusters, perhaps for Sunday school or an early service – the women and girls in pastels and flower-laden hats and white gloves, the men and boys in suits. Abby looked for Merrick, but she didn’t see her. It was Dane’s church too, not that he ever seemed to attend.

Abby had known Dane, at least by sight, since her early teens, but they hadn’t gotten together till this past May, her first week home from college. She’d run into Red Whitshank one evening in the ticket line at the Senator, and he had two of his friends with him, one of them Dane Quinn. And Abby was with two of her friends; it had all worked out very neatly. Possibly Red had been hoping to sit next to her in the theater (it was common knowledge that he had a little crush on her), but she took one glance at Dane, at his forbidding scowl and his defensively hunched shoulders, and then stepped between him and her friend Ruth like the most brazen hussy (as Ruth said teasingly later). Something just came over her; she felt pulled to him. She liked his edginess, his wariness, his obvious grudge against the universe. Not to mention his good looks. Well, everyone knew his story. He’d been a standard-issue Gilman boy who went on to Princeton, like his father and both grandfathers before him, but just this past September – the start of his junior year – his mother had up and left his father and gone to live in Hunt Valley with the man who boarded her quarter horse. And as soon as Dane heard about it, he’d dropped out of school and come home. First he moped around the house but eventually, at his father’s insistence, he got a job of some sort at Stephenson Savings & Loan. (Bertie Stephenson had been his father’s college roommate.) He never talked about his mother; he iced over at any mention of her, but that just proved to Abby how deeply hurt he must be. Abby had a special fondness for people who tried to hide the damage. He became her newest worthy cause. She flung herself at him, worked to bring him out of himself, zeroed in on him at every gathering, wouldn’t take no for an answer. But no was his answer, at first. He stood around separate from the others and drank too much and smoked too much and made sullen one-word responses to her most sympathetic remarks. Then one evening – on Red Whitshank’s front porch, as it happened – he turned on her almost threateningly and backed her against the wall and said, “I want to know why you keep hanging around me.”

She could have offered any number of good reasons. She could have said it was because of his obvious unhappiness, or her conviction that she could make a difference in his life. But what she said was, “Because of that up-and-down groove between your nose and your upper lip.”

He said, “What?”

“Because your hair falls down all shaggy as if you’re a little bit crazy.”

He blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t have to know what I mean,” she told him, and then, completely out of character, she moved toward him and raised her face to him and saw him begin to believe her.

Now it was more or less accepted that they were a couple, although she could tell that their friends were surprised. She didn’t explain herself to them. She became, in a way, a little like Dane; she grew cagey and evasive. She began to notice how stodgy their friends were, and although she had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house with a yard, all at once she began biting off the words “domestic” and “suburban” with her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Who wants to go to the Club for dinner?” someone would say, and Dane would say, “Gosh, the Club, what an unspeakable thrill.” Everybody would look sideways at Abby, but she would just smile tolerantly and take another sip of her Coke. She was the only one who knew him, she was saying – who divined that he was nowhere near as bad as he pretended to be.

Although every now and then, for a flash of a second, she wondered if his badness was precisely what attracted her. Not that he was really bad, but there was something risky about him, something contrary and outrageous. After he was fired, for instance, he had left the building with twenty-four boxes of staples. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred staples; later he’d done the math. (His glee when he told her this had made her smile.) And he didn’t even own a stapler! He had once driven out to where his mother was living with Horse Guy, as Dane called him, and duct-taped all the doors shut in the middle of the night. That escapade had made Abby laugh aloud. “Why in the world …?” she had asked, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain; it was almost the only time he had let the word “mother” cross his lips, and maybe he already regretted it.

Also his drinking, while it was deplorable, lent him a certain shambling, reckless, juvenile-delinquent quality that touched her heart even while she was shaking her head over him. You could see this boy coming half a block away and know him by his rolling walk, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face half hidden by his shank of hair and his back a brooding C shape. Oh, it wasn’t only the disadvantaged who needed compassion! He was leading a life just as hard, in some ways, as the lives of those poor little Negro children she was tutoring this summer. He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her.

She looked over at his profile, the slant of his cheek below the dark glasses, and sent him a small, warm smile even though he didn’t see it.

“But. So. Anyhow. I was saying,” he said, lifting his arm to signal a turn. “About my cousin.”

“Your cousin,” she repeated.

“George. The one I’m staying with.”

“Oh, have I met him?”

“No, he’s older. He’s got a career and all. He’s going away next weekend to visit his girlfriend in Boston.”

The Buick tilted slightly as it swerved onto Bouton Road, and Abby grabbed her purse before it could slide off the seat.

“I’ll have the place to myself,” Dane said. He parked in front of the Whitshanks’ and took his key from the ignition. The music stopped short but he went on sitting there, gazing through the windshield. “I was thinking you could come over Friday evening. Maybe tell your mom you were spending the night with a friend.”

She had foreseen that something like this would arise, sooner or later. It was where they’d been heading all along. It was where she wanted to head.

So she couldn’t explain what she said next. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.

He turned and looked at her, although his expression was still a blank behind the dark glasses. “Don’t know what?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure what friend I could tell her, and besides, I might be busy that night, I might have to do something with my parents; I’m not sure.”

She wasn’t handling this very smoothly. She was cross with herself for sounding so flustered. “I’ll have to see,” she told him, and she yanked open her door and all but fell out of the car in her haste to leave the moment behind.

Walking in front of him toward the house, though, she was conscious of her slim waist, and the sway of her skirt, and the swing of her hair down her back. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

Red Whitshank and another friend of his, Ward Rainey, stood talking with two workmen at the lower edge of the lawn. One of the workmen had a chainsaw, and Red and the other workman were carrying axes. All around them, in a massive tangle, lay thick branches and cross sections of trunk. That tulip poplar must have been gigantic. (And nowhere near dying, if you judged by all the green leaves.) The remainder of the trunk, some ten feet tall, still towered near the front porch, as flat-topped and perfectly cylindrical as an architectural column.

“… figure when Mitch gets here he can tell us how much he wants left,” Red was saying, and the man with the chainsaw said, “Well, I can’t see as he’ll want any left, because he’s not going to haul it out roots and all, is he? That would leave too big of a hole.”

“What, you’re thinking he’ll bring in a stump grinder?”

“Seems like that would make more sense.”

Abby called, “Hi, everybody.”

They turned, and Red said, “Hi, Abby! Hi, Dane.”

“Red,” Dane said, impassively.

Abby had always thought Red’s looks didn’t go with his name. He should have had red hair and that pinkish skin that went with it; he should have been freckled and doughy. Instead, he was all black-and-white, lean and lanky, with a boyishly prominent Adam’s apple and wrist bones as distinct as cabinet knobs. Today he was wearing a T-shirt that was more holes than fabric, and khakis with dirty knees. He could have been one of his father’s workmen. “These here are Earl and Landis,” he was saying. “They’re the guys who took this thing down.”

Earl and Landis nodded without smiling, and Ward lifted a palm.

“You took it down just the two of you?” Abby asked the men.

“Naw, Red helped plenty,” Earl said.

“Only with the muscle power,” Red told her. “It was Earl and Landis who knew how not to take everything else with it.”

“Laid her in place like a baby,” Landis said with satisfaction.

Abby lifted her eyes to study the canopy of leaves above them. So many trees remained that she couldn’t detect any change in the filtering of the light, but still, the loss of the poplar seemed a pity. The cross sections strewn about looked perfectly sound, and the sap filled the air with a scent as vital and sharp as fresh blood.

The men had returned to the subject of stump removal. Earl was of the opinion that they ought to just go ahead and cut the last of the trunk level with the ground, while Landis suggested waiting for Mitch. “Meantime we can strip these branches,” he said, and he set a foot on the nearest branch and gave one of its shoots an experimental tap with his axe. Abby liked hearing workmen discuss logistics. It made her feel like a small child again, sitting on her father’s counter swinging her feet and breathing in the smells of metal and machine oil.

Earl yanked the cord of his chainsaw and set up a deafening roar. He lowered the blade to the thickest part of a branch while Ward bent to grab another branch and haul it out of the way. “I don’t guess you brought an axe,” Red shouted to Dane.

Dane, who was lighting a cigarette, shook out his match and said, “Now, how would I ever have gotten my hands on an axe?”

“I’ll fetch another from the basement,” Red said. He propped his own axe against a dogwood. “Come on, Ab, I’ll take you up to the house.”

“You’re sure I can’t do something here?” she asked. It seemed a shame to go off and leave Dane.

But Red said, “You can help my mom fix lunch, if you like.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dane cocked an eyebrow at her in a silent goodbye, and then she and Red turned to climb the flagstone walk. Leaving behind the din of the chainsaw, she felt as if her ears had gone numb. “You really think this will take until lunchtime?” she asked Red.

“Oh, longer than that,” he said. “We’re lucky if we’re done before dark.”

She supposed that was just as well. She would have more time to reassemble her composure in front of Dane. By evening she’d be a whole different person, self-possessed and mature.

They arrived at the porch steps, but instead of leaving her there, Red came to a stop. “Say,” he said. “I was wondering. You want a ride to the wedding?”

“I’m not sure I’m going to the wedding,” Abby said.

She had about decided not to, in fact. The invitation (on paper so thick it had required two postage stamps) had come as a surprise; she and Merrick weren’t close. Besides, Dane wasn’t invited. Merrick barely knew Dane. So Abby had been meaning for weeks now to send her regrets.

But Red said, “You aren’t going? Mom was counting on it.”

Abby wrinkled her forehead.

“I was, too,” he told her. “Because who else will I know in that crowd?”

She said, “Don’t you have to be an usher or something?”

“It never even came up,” he said.

“Well, thank you, Red. You’re nice to offer. I’ll let you know if I decide to go, okay?”

He hesitated a moment, as if there were more he wanted to say, but then he smiled at her and split off toward the rear of the house.

Crossing the porch in three long strides, tall and craggy as Abraham Lincoln and dressed not all that differently from Lincoln, Junior Whitshank inclined his head a quarter-inch in Abby’s direction and then swiftly descended the steps. “Morning, young lady,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Whitshank.”

“Merrick’s not up yet, I don’t believe.”

“Well, I was looking for Mrs. Whitshank.”

“Mrs. Whitshank is in the kitchen.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Whitshank veered off the flagstone walk toward where the men were working. Abby, gazing after him, wondered where on earth he bought his shirts. They were white, always, and unfashionably high in the collar, so that a tall band of white encased his skinny neck. She often had the feeling that he might be modeling himself after some ideal – some illustrious figure from his past that he had admired. But his narrow black trousers looked empty in the seat, and the Y of his suspenders accentuated the weary, burdened posture of an ordinary laboring man.

“Mitch here yet?” she heard him call, and a murmur of answers rose above the buzz of the chainsaw like bees humming in a log.

Abby climbed the steps, crossed the porch, opened the screen door, and tootled, “Yoo-hoo!” It was something Linnie Whitshank would have done. Automatically, Abby seemed to have switched to Mrs. Whitshank’s language and to her tone of voice – thin and fluty.

“Back here!” Mrs. Whitshank called from the kitchen.

Abby loved the Whitshanks’ house. Even on a hot July day it was cool and dim, with the ceiling fan revolving high above the center hall and another fan gently stirring in the dining room. A folded tablecloth had been placed at one end of the table with a clutch of silverware resting on top, waiting to be distributed. She continued through to the kitchen, where Mrs. Whitshank stood at the sink rinsing okra pods. Mrs. Whitshank was slight and frail-looking, but an incongruously deep, low bosom filled out the top of her gingham housedress. Her pale hair hung limply almost to her shoulders. It was a young girl’s hairstyle, and her face when she turned to Abby seemed young as well – unlined and plain and guileless. “Hey, there!” she said, and Abby said, “Hi.”

“Don’t you look pretty today!”

“I came to see how I could help,” Abby said.

“Oh, honey, you don’t want to spoil those nice clothes. Just sit and keep me company.”

Abby pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and settled on it. She had learned not to argue with Mrs. Whitshank, who was a force of nature when it came to cooking and would only find Abby a hindrance.

“How’s that tree coming along?” Mrs. Whitshank asked her.

“They’re starting to cut up the branches now.”

“Did you ever hear of such a thing? Bringing down a whole poplar for the sake of a photograph.”

“Photy-graph,” she pronounced it. She had a country way of talking, and unlike her husband, she made no attempt to alter it.

“Dane says the tree was already dying, according to Mr. Whitshank,” Abby said.

“Oh, sometimes Junior will just get this sort of vision about how he wants things to be,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. She shut off the faucet and wiped her hands on her apron. “He’s already bought frames for the photos, isn’t that something? Two big frames, wooden. I asked him, I said, ‘You going to hang those over the mantel?’ He said, ‘Linnie Mae.’ ” She made her voice go deep and gruff. “Said, ‘People don’t hang family photos in their living rooms.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Did you know that?”

“My mom’s got photos all over the living room,” Abby said.

“Well, then. See there?”

Mrs. Whitshank took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and poured some into a bowl. “I’m fixing okra and sliced tomatoes,” she told Abby. “And fried chicken, with some of my biscuits. Oh, later on you might help with the biscuits, now that you know how. And peach cobbler for dessert.”

“That sounds delicious.”

“Did Red tell you he would give you a ride to the wedding?”

“He did,” Abby said, “but I’m not sure yet if I’m going.”

She felt embarrassed now about waiting so long to make up her mind. If her mother had known, she would have been horrified. But all Mrs. Whitshank said was, “Oh, I wish you would! I need someone to prop me up.”

Abby laughed.

“Merrick had me buy this yellow dress at Hutzler’s,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It makes me look like I’ve got the jaundice, but Merrick was real set on it. She’s like her daddy; she takes these notions.” She was spooning cornmeal into a second bowl.

Abby said, “I’m just afraid I wouldn’t know anybody. Merrick’s crowd is all older than me.”

“Well, I won’t know them, either,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It’ll be her college friends, mostly – not many from around here.”

“Who all in your family is coming?” Abby asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, grandparents? Aunts and uncles?”

“Oh, we don’t have any of those,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

She didn’t sound very regretful about it. Abby waited for her to elaborate, but she was measuring out salt now.

“Well, I told Red I appreciate the offer,” Abby said finally. “It’s good to know I’ve got a ride if I need one.”

Really she should just say yes and be done with it. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her. It was only half a Saturday, a tiny chunk of her life.

The Saturday after she spent the night with Dane. If she spent the night.

She imagined how he might say, “Aw, you don’t want to leave me all by myself, the morning after we …”

After we …

She looked down at her skirt and smoothed it across her knees.

“How’s your job going?” Mrs. Whitshank asked her. “You still liking those little colored kids?”

“Oh, I’m loving them.”

“I hate to think of you going down into that neighborhood, though,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

“It’s not a bad neighborhood.”

“It’s a poor neighborhood, isn’t it? The people there are poor as dirt, and they’d as lief rob you as look at you. I swear, Abby, sometimes you don’t show good sense when it comes to knowing who to be scared of.”

“I could never be scared of those people!”

Mrs. Whitshank shook her head and dumped the colander of okra onto a cutting board.

“Oh, what a world, what a world,” Abby said.

“How’s that, honey?”

“That’s what the wicked witch says in The Wizard of Oz. Did you know that? They’re showing a revival downtown and I went to see it last night with Dane. The witch says, ‘I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world,’ she says.”

“I remember the part about ‘I’m melting,’ ” Mrs. Whitshank said. “I took Red and Merrick to see that movie when they were little bitty things.”

“Yes, well, and then she talks about ‘what a world.’ I told Dane afterward, I said, ‘I never heard that before! I had no idea she said that!’ ”

“Me neither,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “In a way, it sounds kind of pitiful.”

“Exactly,” Abby said. “All at once I started feeling sorry for her, you know? I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”