Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“You still have the keys, right?” she asked Red. “You’ll have to go back to the apartment, look for papers. Find Lonesome’s next of kin.”

Red said okay and stood up again, like an obedient child.

Then Peg Brown honked out back, and Abby rose to let Denny in.

That evening when she was in Denny’s room, getting Douglas ready for bed, Denny asked her, “Mama?”

“What.”

“When is that little boy going home?”

“Very soon,” she told him. He was hanging around her in a too-close, insistent way, still fully dressed because it wasn’t quite his bedtime yet. “Go on downstairs,” she told him. “Find yourself something to do.”

“Tomorrow is he going?”

“Maybe.”

She waited till she heard his shoes clopping down the stairs, and then she turned back to Douglas. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, looking very neat and clean. That night he’d had a bath, although she had let him skip it the night before. She sat down on the bed beside him and said, “I know I told you that you’d get to see your daddy today. But I was wrong. He couldn’t come.”

Douglas’s gaze was fixed on some middle distance. He appeared to be holding his breath.

“He wanted to, very much. He wanted to see you, but he couldn’t. He can’t.”

That was it, really – the most a two-year-old would be able to comprehend. She stopped speaking. She placed an arm around him, tentatively, but he didn’t relax against her. He sat separate and erect, with perfect posture. After a while she took her arm away, but she went on looking at him.

He lay down, finally, and she covered him up and placed a kiss on his forehead and turned out the light.

In the kitchen, Denny and Jeannie were bickering over a yo-yo, but Mandy looked up from her homework as soon as Abby walked in. “Did you tell him?” she asked. (She was thirteen, and more in touch with what was going on.)

“Well, as much as I could,” Abby said.

“Did he say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to talk.”

“Oh, he has to know how,” Abby said. “It’s just that he’s upset right now.”

“Maybe he’s retarded.”

“But I know he understands me.”

“Mom!” Jeannie broke in. “Denny says this is his yo-yo, when it’s not. He broke his. Tell him, Mom! It’s mine.”

“Stop it, both of you.”

The back door opened and Red stepped in, carrying another grocery bag. All he had said on the phone was to go ahead and eat without him, so Abby’s first question was “What’d you find?”

He set the bag on the table. “The sitter’s this ancient old lady,” he told her. “Her number was Scotch-taped above the phone. By the sound of her, she was way too old to be in charge of a kid. She doesn’t know if he has any relatives, and she doesn’t know where his mother is and says she doesn’t want to know. He’s better off without her, she says.”

“Weren’t there any other numbers?”

“Doctor, dentist, Whitshank Construction.”

“Not the mother? You’d think at least Lonesome would know how to reach her in case of emergency.”

“Well, if she’s traveling, Ab …”

“Ha,” Abby said. “Traveling.”

Red inverted the grocery bag over the table. More clothes fell out, and two plastic trucks, and a thin sheaf of papers. “Automobile title,” he said, picking up one of the papers. “Bank statement,” picking up another. “Douglas’s birth certificate.”

Abby held out her hand and he gave her the birth certificate. “Douglas Alan O’Brian,” she read aloud. “Father: Lawrence Donald O’Brian. Mother: Barbara Jane Eames.”

She looked up at Red. “Were they not married?”

“Maybe she just didn’t change her name.”

“January eighth, nineteen seventy-seven. So Douglas had it right; he’s two. I don’t know why I thought he was older. I guess it was because he … keeps so much to himself, you know?”

“So what do we do next?” Red asked.

“I have no idea what we do.”

“Call Social Services?”

“Oh, God forbid!”

Red blinked. (Abby used to work for Social Services.)

“Let me warm up your supper,” Abby told him. And from the way she rose, all businesslike, it was clear that she was done talking for now.

The children went to bed one by one, youngest to oldest. Jeannie, as she was saying good night, asked, “Can we keep him?” But she seemed to realize she couldn’t expect an answer. The other two didn’t refer to him. And Red and Abby didn’t, either, once they were alone, although Red did make an attempt, at one point. “You just know Lonesome had to have some kin out there,” he said.

But Abby said, “I am so, so sleepy all of a sudden.”

He didn’t try again.

The next day was a Saturday. Douglas slept later than any of them, later than even Amanda who had reached that adolescent slugabed age, and Abby said, “Let him rest, poor thing.” She fed the others breakfast, not sitting down herself but bustling between stove and table, and as soon as they’d finished eating she said, “Why don’t you kids get dressed and then take Clarence on a walk.”

“Let Jeannie and Denny do it,” Amanda said. “I told Patricia she could come over.”

“No, you go too,” Abby said. “Patricia can come later.”

Amanda started to speak but changed her mind, and she followed the others out of the room.

That left Red, who was reading the sports section over his second cup of coffee. When Abby sat down across from him, he glanced at her uneasily and then ducked behind his paper again.

“I think we should keep him,” Abby said.

He slapped the paper down on the table and said, “Oh, Abby.”

“We’re the only people he’s got, Red. Clearly. That mother: even if we managed to track her down, what are the odds she’d want him? Or take proper care of him if she did want him, or stick by him through thick and thin?”

“We can’t go around adopting every child we run into, Ab. We’ve got three of our own. Three is all we can afford! More than we can afford. And you were going back to work once Denny starts first grade.”

“That’s okay; I’ll go back when Douglas starts.”

“Plus, we have no rights to him. Not a court in this land would let us keep that kid; he’s got a mother somewhere.”

“We just won’t tell the courts,” Abby said.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“We’ll say we’re just looking after him till his mother can come and get him. In fact, that really is what we’ll be doing.”

“And besides,” Red said. “How do we know for sure he’s even normal?”

“Of course he’s normal!”

“Does he talk?”

“He’s shy! He’s feeling anxious! He doesn’t know us!”

“Does he react?”

“Yes, he reacts. He’s reacting just the way any child would who’s had his world turned upside down with no warning.”

“But it could be that something’s wrong with him,” Red said.

“Well, and what if it were? You’d just throw a child to the wolves if he’s not Einstein?”

“And would he fit in with our family? Would he get along with our kids? Is he our kind of personality? We don’t know the first damn thing about him! We don’t know him! We don’t love him!”

“Red,” Abby said.

She rose to her feet. She was fully, crisply dressed, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. Which was, come to think of it, not her usual weekend custom. Her hair was already pinned up in its topknot. She looked uncharacteristically imposing.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed last night in his pajamas,” she said, “and I saw the back of his neck, this fragile, slender stem of a neck, and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere, any place on this planet, who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is? And that will never again happen to Douglas. He has nobody left on earth who thinks he’s special.”

“Dammit, Abby—”

“Don’t you curse at me, Red Whitshank! I need this! I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can’t! I’d rather die!”

Mandy and Jeannie and Denny were standing in the kitchen doorway. At the same moment, both Red and Abby became aware of that. None of the three had dressed yet, and all of them wore the same wide-eyed look of alarm.

Then a soft, padding sound came from behind them, and when the children turned, Douglas walked up to stand at their center.

“I wet the bed,” he told Abby.

They didn’t adopt him. They didn’t notify Social Services. They didn’t even make an announcement to their friends. Everything went on as before, and Douglas went on being Douglas O’Brian – although, since Abby developed a habit of calling him “my little stem,” he did acquire a nickname. And sometimes the neighbors referred to him as Stem Whitshank, but that was just absentmindedness.

Outsiders had the impression that he was only staying till his mother got her affairs sorted out. (Or was it some other relative? Stories differed.) But most people, after a while, just assumed he was one of the family.

In a matter of weeks he took to calling Red and Abby “Dad” and “Mom,” but not because they told him to. He was merely echoing the other children, in the same way that he echoed Abby and addressed even grown-ups as “sweetheart,” till he got old enough to know better.

He grew more talkative, though so gradually that nobody could recall what specific day he became a normal, chattery youngster. He wore clothes that fit him, and he slept in a room of his own. It had once been Jeannie’s room, but they moved Jeannie in with Mandy because Stem certainly couldn’t continue sharing with Denny. Denny was sort of prickly about Stem. It all worked out, though. Mandy more or less put up with Jeannie’s presence, and Jeannie was thrilled to be living in a teenager’s room with cosmetics crowding the bureau top.

Above Stem’s bed hung a framed black-and-white photo of Lonesome holding a Budweiser, snapped by one of Red’s workmen the day they finished a building project. Abby believed very strongly that Stem should be encouraged to cherish his memories of his father. Of his mother too, if he’d had any memories, but he didn’t seem to. The reason his mother had gone away was, she was unhappy, Abby always told him. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She loved him very much, as he would see if she ever came back. And Abby showed him the page in the phone book where his own name was listed year after year, “O’Brian Douglas A,” along with the Whitshanks’ number so his mother could easily find him. Stem listened to all this closely, but he said nothing. And in time it seemed he lost his memories of even his father, because when Abby asked Stem on his tenth birthday whether he ever thought about him, he said, “I maybe remember his voice.”

“His voice!” Abby said. “Saying what?”

“I think he used to sing me a song when I was going to sleep. Or some guy did.”

“Oh, Stem, how nice. A lullaby?”

“No, it was about a goat.”

“Oh. And nothing else? No recollection of his face? Or something you two did together?”

“I guess not,” Stem said, without sounding too concerned about it.

He was an old soul, Abby told people. He was the kind of person who adapted and moved on, evidently.

He went through school without a fuss, earning only average grades but fulfilling all his assignments. You could imagine him as the butt of school bullies, since he was small for his age in the early years, but actually he did fine. It may have been his friendly expression, or his general unflappability, or his tendency to assume the best in people. At any rate, he got along. He graduated from high school and went straight into Whitshank Construction, where he’d been working part-time ever since he was old enough; he said he didn’t see the need for college. He married the only girl he had ever shown any real interest in, had his children one-two-three, seemed never to look around and wonder if he might be better off someplace else. In this last respect, he was the one most like Red. Even his walk was Red’s – loping, leading with his forehead – and his lanky frame, though not his coloring. You could say that he looked like a Whitshank who’d been left out to bleach in the open too long: hair not black but light brown, eyes not sapphire but light blue. Faded, but still a Whitshank.

More of a Whitshank than Denny was, Denny had remarked when he heard that Stem had joined the firm.

Although once, back when Denny was a teenager still living at home, he’d asked Abby, “What’s this kid doing here? What did you think you were up to? Did you ever consider asking our permission?”

“Permission!” Abby said. “He’s your brother!”

Denny said, “He is not my brother. He is not remotely related to me, and for you to tell me he is is like … like those pretend-to-be liberals who claim they never notice whether a person is black or white. Don’t they have eyes? Don’t you? Were you so keen on doing good in the outside world that you didn’t stop to wonder if this would be good for us?”

Abby just said, “Oh, Denny.”

Oh, Denny.

4

ON SUNDAY MORNING the study door was closed – Denny’s door – and everyone tried to keep the little boys from making too much noise. “Go play in the sunroom,” Nora told them when they’d finished breakfast. “Quietly, though. Don’t wake your uncle.” But even on their best behavior, exaggeratedly tiptoeing as they left the kitchen, they seemed to radiate disruption. They jostled and elbowed and poked one another and tripped over their own pajama cuffs, while Heidi ran frenzied circles around them. On the floor in the corner, Brenda raised her head to watch them leave and then groaned and settled her chin on her paws again.

Red was sleeping late too, so the others had no way of knowing how things had gone at the train station. “I tried to stay awake till the two of them got home,” Abby said, “but I must have nodded off. I can’t seem to read in bed anymore! I should have sat up for them downstairs. Another cup of coffee, Nora?”

“I can do that, Mother Whitshank. You sit still.”

It was going to be a while, evidently, before the two women settled just who was in charge of what. This morning Abby had put out toast and cereal as usual, and then Nora had come down and scrambled an entire carton of eggs without so much as a by-your-leave.

Stem was in his pajamas and Abby in her bathrobe, but Nora wore one of her dresses, white cotton with navy sprigs, and sandals that showed her smooth, tanned feet. For breakfast she had eaten more than all the rest of them put together, but so slowly and so gracefully that it seemed she hardly ate at all.

“I was thinking,” Abby said, “we might invite the girls and their families to lunch. I know they’ll want to see Denny.”

“Could we make it a late lunch?” Nora asked. “The children and I have church.”

“Oh, certainly. Yes, we could start at … one o’clock, would you say? I believe I’ll do a rolled roast.”

“If you put the roast in the oven for me,” Nora said, “I can see to the rest of the meal when I get back.”

“Well, I’m still able to manage a simple family meal, Nora.”

“Yes, of course,” Nora said serenely.

Stem said, “I’ll pick up whatever you need in the way of groceries.”

“Oh, Dad can do that,” Abby told him.

“Mom. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Well … but go to Eddie’s, then, where you can charge it to our account.”

“Mom.”

Luckily for Abby, Red walked in at that moment. (Abby disliked money discussions.) He was wearing his ratty old bathrobe and his mules that made a whisk-broom sound, and he was carrying his Fred Flintstone glass that he used for his nighttime water. “Morning, all,” he said.

“Well, hi!” Abby said, sliding her chair back, but Nora was already up and fetching the coffeepot. “Did Denny get in all right?” Abby asked.

“Yep,” Red said, sitting down.

Stem said, “Train on schedule?”

Either Red didn’t hear him or he felt the question wasn’t worth answering. He reached for the platter of scrambled eggs.

“There’s toast,” Abby told him. “Whole wheat.”

He dished out a large pile of eggs and passed the platter to Nora, who took another helping.

“If I have to see that statue one more dad-blamed time,” he said, “I’m going to hire myself a wrecking ball. It’s embarrassing! Other cities’ train stations have fountains, or hunks of metal or something. We have a giant tin Frankenstein with a heart that pulses pink and blue.”

“How was Denny?” Abby asked him.

“Fine, as far as I could tell.” He peered into the cream pitcher. “Is there more cream?”

Nora rose and went to the fridge.

“All we talked about was the Orioles,” he said, giving in at last to his audience. “Neither one of us believes they can keep this up till postseason.”

“Oh.”

“He brought three bags with him.”

“Three!”

“I asked him,” Red said, stirring his coffee. “I asked why so much luggage, and he said it was summer clothes and winter clothes.”

“Winter!”

“Winter took most of the room, he said. Thicker material.”

“How’d he carry all that?” Stem asked.

“Boarding, he used a redcap, he told me. But getting off again … Have you tried finding a redcap in Baltimore? After midnight? He managed okay, though. If I’d known, I would have parked the car and come inside the station.”

“Winter clothes!” Abby said to herself in a trailing voice.

“Good eggs,” Red told her.

“Oh, Nora made those.”

“Good eggs, Nora.”

“Thank you.”

“I guess I should empty the study closet,” Abby said. “But already I’ve had to find space for the things from the bunk-room closet, and the one in Stem and Nora’s room.” She was looking a little panicked.

“Relax,” Red told her, without looking up from his eggs.

“I hate it when you tell me to relax!”

Nora said, “I can empty that closet.”

“You wouldn’t know where to put things.”

“Nora’s a whiz at organizing storage space,” Stem said.

“Yes, I’m sure she is, but—”

“Hey, everybody,” Denny said, walking into the kitchen.

He was wearing paint-stained khakis and a String Cheese Incident T-shirt, and his hair was very shaggy, fringing the tops of his ears. (As a rule, the men in the family were fanatic about keeping their hair short.) He seemed healthy, though, and cheerful. Abby said, “Oh, sweetheart! It’s so good to see you!” and she rose to hug him. He returned her hug briefly and then bent to pet Brenda, who had struggled to her feet and shambled over to nuzzle him. Stem lifted one hand from where he sat, and Nora smiled and said, “Hello, Denny.”

“Any breakfast left?”

“There’s plenty,” Abby said. Nora stood up again to fetch the coffeepot.

“Where’re the kids?” Denny asked when he was seated.

“In the sunroom,” Abby said. “I hope they didn’t wake you.”

“Never heard a thing.”

“How was your trip?”

“Not too bad.” He helped himself to the eggs.

“You could have waited till this morning, you know. The train’s empty on Sunday mornings.”

“It was empty last night,” he said.

Stem asked, “You still working with those kitchen people?”

“Naw, I quit that job.”

“So what are you doing now?”

“I’m here now,” Denny said, and he sent Stem a level gaze.

Nora said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have to get the boys ready for church.”

Denny transferred his gaze to her for a moment, and then he picked up his fork and started eating.

The little boys were thrilled to hear that Denny was awake. They swarmed back into the kitchen and climbed all over him and pelted him with questions and demands – had he brought his baseball glove? would he take them down to the creek? – while Heidi barked and jittered around them and tried to insert herself into their midst. Denny shrugged them away good-naturedly and promised they’d do something later, and then Nora herded them upstairs, Stem following close behind with Sammy on his back, and Red went off to the sunroom with the morning paper.

That left just Abby and Denny. As soon as they were alone, she poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down again. “Dennis,” she said.

“Oh-oh.”

“What?”

“Gotta watch out if you’re calling me ‘Dennis,’ ” he said. He spooned some jam onto his plate.

“Denny, I know what Jeannie must have told you. How I’m so dithery nowadays I need a keeper.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“Well, whatever she said, I just want to explain my side of it.”

He cocked his head.

“This thing that got them all worried,” she said, “I mean the reason Stem and Nora thought they should move in with us: it wasn’t the way it sounds. I didn’t … wander off and get lost like some mental defective or something. What happened was, it was the night of that terrible storm, the one they’re calling a ‘derecho,’ remember that? Oh, Lord, ‘derecho,’ ‘El Niño’… all these words we throw around these days. Tell me that’s not global warming! But anyhow, this storm knocked over one of the Ellises’ giant trees, right on the line between our two properties. That’s not to mention the hundreds of other trees, as well as shutting down half the city’s electrical power, including ours.”

“Bummer,” Denny said. He bit into his toast.

“You should have seen that tree, Denny. It looked like a huge stalk of broccoli lying on its side, only with roots. And the hole it left! A hole as deep as a basement. You can understand why a person would be curious about it.”

“What are you saying: you went out to look at the hole?”

“Well, probably.”

“Probably?”

“I mean, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what I did.”

“Mom. It was a storm the strength of a hurricane. You must remember if you went out in it.”

“I do remember. I mean, I remember I was out in it; I just don’t remember going out. See, sometimes my mind skips across a few minutes, like a needle on a record. I’ll be doing something ordinary, but then all at once it’s later, you know? Maybe five or ten minutes later; I’m not sure. And there’s a completely empty gap between the last minute and the current minute. It’s not like when you phase out doing some routine chore but you’re still aware that time has passed. This is more like … waking after surgery.”

“That sounds like a mini stroke or something,” Denny said. “Or maybe a seizure.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Have you mentioned it to a doctor?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But it could be there’s some easy fix.”

“No fix I’d want at my age,” Abby said. “And besides, it doesn’t happen very often. Not often at all.”

“So, okay, you’re telling me you just found yourself out in a rainstorm, looking down into a hole.”

“Well, it wasn’t a rainstorm anymore. The rain had stopped. But otherwise, yes, that’s it exactly. And I was in my nightgown and slippers, and I didn’t have my house key. Well, why should I? Usually, that lock is set on manual. Oh, I despise an automatic lock! It must have been your father’s doing; he’s always going around fiddling with things. And then naturally he couldn’t hear me when I called; he was sound asleep by then, and you can see how deaf he’s grown. I called, I knocked … I couldn’t ring the doorbell, of course, because the power was out, and anyhow he doesn’t hear the doorbell most of the time. I even tried throwing pebbles at our bedroom windows, but that doesn’t work as well in real life as it does in books. So finally I thought, well, I would just settle in the hammock and wait till morning. It wasn’t so bad, really. It was kind of nice. All the lights were out, the streetlights and people’s house lights, and the only sounds were the leaves dripping and the tree frogs peeping. I curled up in the hammock and went to sleep, and in the morning when I woke it was still too early for your dad to be up, so I figured I’d walk down the block a ways to see the damage. The whole neighborhood was a disaster zone, Denny! Enormous trunks and branches lying clear across the street, electrical lines draped everywhere, a car smushed in front of the Browns’ place … And that’s when Sax Brown saw me, when I went to check the smushed car to make sure nobody was trapped inside. Oh, I know what it must have looked like: I was half a block from home in a nightgown with a muddy hem. Not very confidence-inspiring!” And she gave a little laugh.

Denny said, “Okay …”

“But it’s no reason to call in the nursemaids.”

“No, it doesn’t sound like it,” Denny said.

“Oh, good.”

“It sounds more like, say, a confluence of circumstances outside of your control. I can certainly relate to that.”

“So you agree that none of you needs to be here,” Abby said. “Not that I don’t love having you, of course, each and every one of you. But I certainly don’t need you.”

“Why didn’t you tell Stem all this?”

“Stem? Well, I did. I tried to. I tried to tell everyone.”

“Why don’t you ask him to leave? Why ask me and not him?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not asking you to leave. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. I’m just saying I don’t need a babysitter. You understand that. Stem just … doesn’t. He’s more on your father’s wavelength, you know? He and Dad put their heads together sometimes and develop these notions, you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Denny said.

But then just as Abby was sitting back in her seat with an expression of relief, her forehead finally losing its tightness, he said, “Same old same old,” and stood up and walked out of the kitchen.

It was a piece of bad luck that one of Abby’s orphans showed up for Sunday lunch. Atta, her name was, and some complicated last name – a recent immigrant in her late fifties or so, overweight and putty-skinned, wearing a heavy, belted dress and stockings that looked like Ace bandages. (It was ninety-two degrees out, and stockings had not been seen in Baltimore for months.) The first anybody knew of her, she was standing outside the front screen door rat-tat-tatting and calling, “Hello? I have come to the right place?”

“Khello” was how she pronounced it, and “have” sounded like “khev.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Abby said. She was descending the stairs behind Stem, both of them carrying stacks of papers they were hoping to find space for in the sunroom. “Atta, isn’t it? Why, how nice to …”

She turned to pile her papers on top of Stem’s, and then she opened the screen door for Atta. “I am early?” Atta asked as she clomped in. “I think not. You said twelve thirty.”

“No, of course not. We’re just … This is my son Stem,” Abby said. “Atta’s new to Baltimore, Stem, and she doesn’t know a soul yet. I met her at the supermarket.”

“How do you do,” Stem said. He wasn’t able to shake hands, but he nodded at Atta over his armload of papers. “Excuse me; I’ll just go set these down someplace.”

“Come and have a seat,” Abby told Atta. “Did you have any trouble finding us?”

“Of course not. But you did say twelve thirty.”

“Yes?” Abby said uncertainly. Maybe the problem was her outfit; she was wearing a sleeveless blouse with a chain of safety pins dangling from the tip of one breast, and wide aqua pants that stopped just below the knee. “We’re pretty informal here,” she said. “We tend not to dress up much. Oh, here’s my husband! Red, this is Atta. She’s come to have Sunday lunch with us.”

“How do you do,” Red said, shaking hands. In his other hand he carried a screwdriver. He’d been fiddling with the cable box again.

“I do not eat red meat,” Atta told him in a loud, flat voice.

“Oh, no?”

“In my own country I eat meat, but here they put hormones.” (“Khormones.”)

“Huh,” Red said.

“Sit down, both of you,” Abby told them, and then, as Stem re-emerged from the sunroom, “Stem, sit down and keep Atta company while I go see to lunch.”

Stem sent her a look of distress, but Abby gave him a brilliant smile and left the room.

In the kitchen, Nora stood at the counter slicing tomatoes. “What am I going to do?” Abby asked her. “We have an unexpected guest for lunch and she doesn’t eat red meat.”

Without turning, Nora said, “How about some of that tuna salad Douglas got at the grocery?”

“Oh, good idea. Where’s Denny?”

“He’s playing catch with the boys.”

Abby went to the screen door and looked out. In the backyard, Sammy was chasing a missed ball while Denny stood waiting, idly pounding his glove. “Maybe I’ll just let him be,” Abby said, and then she said, “Oh, my,” on a long, sighing breath and went to the fridge for the iced tea.

In the living room, Atta was telling Red and Stem what was wrong with Americans. “They act extremely warm and open,” she said, “extremely hello-Atta-how-are-you, but then, nothing. I have not one friend here.”

“Oh, now,” Red said, “I’m sure you’ll have friends by and by.”

“I think I will not,” she said.

Stem asked, “Will you be joining a church?”

“No.”

“Because Nora, my wife, she belongs to a church, and they’ve got a whole committee just to welcome new arrivals.”

“I will not be joining a church,” Atta said.

A silence fell. Red finally said, “I didn’t quite catch that last bit.”

Stem and Atta looked at him, but neither spoke.

“Here we are!” Abby caroled, breezing in with a tray. She set it on the coffee table. “Who’d like a glass of iced tea?”

“Oh, thanks, hon,” Red said in a heartfelt way.

“Has Atta been telling you about her family? She has the most unusual family.”

“Yes,” Atta said, “my family was exceptional. Everybody envied us.” She plucked a packet of NutraSweet from a bowl and held it close to her eyes, her lips twitching slightly as she read the fine print. She replaced the packet in the bowl. “We came from a distinguished line of scientists on both sides, and we had many intellectual discussions. Other people wished they could be members.”

“Isn’t that unusual?” Abby said, beaming.

Red sank lower in his chair.

At lunch, there was such a crowd that the grandchildren had to eat in the kitchen – all but Amanda’s Elise, age fourteen, who considered herself an adult. Twelve people sat in the dining room: Red and Abby, their four children and the children’s three spouses, Elise, Atta, and Mrs. Angell, Jeannie’s live-in mother-in-law. The dinner plates were practically touching, with the silverware bunched between them, and people kept saying, “I’m sorry; is this your glass or mine?” Abby, at least, seemed to find the situation exhilarating. “What a multitude!” she told her children. “Isn’t this fun?” They eyed her morosely.

Earlier there had been a little huddle in the kitchen, where most of them had retreated soon after being introduced to Atta. When Abby made the mistake of walking in on them, they drew apart to glare at her. “Mom, how could you?” Amanda asked, and Jeannie said, “I thought you’d promised to stop doing this.”