A Spool of Blue Thread (17 page)

“How long are you here for?” Merrick asked Denny.

“I’ve come to help out,” he said.

This didn’t exactly answer her question, but before she could press him, Abby broke in to say, “What have you been up to, Merrick? We haven’t seen you all summer!”

“You know I hate to come here in hot weather,” Merrick said. “It’s barbaric, not to have air conditioning in this day and age.” She set the carton on the kitchen table with a thump. “Why, Norma,” she said.

Nora barely turned from the pot she was stirring. “Nora,” she said coolly.

“Does this mean Stem is here, too?” Merrick asked Abby. “Stem
and
Denny, both at the same time?”

“Yes, isn’t that lovely?” Abby said in a sort of cheerleader tone.

“Wonders never cease.”

“He’s upstairs showering just now. I’m sure he’ll be down in a minute.”

“Why is he showering
here
?”

Abby was saved from having to answer this by Red’s sudden “Excuse me?”

“Why here, I said.”

“Why what here?”

“Honestly, Redcliffe. Give up and get a hearing aid.”

“I have a hearing aid. I have two.”

“Get some that work, then.”

The three little boys arrived on the back porch, piling against a screen that was already starting to bulge. They yanked the door open and tumbled inside, breathless and overheated-looking. “Is it supper yet?” Petey asked.

“Boys, you remember your Great-Aunt Merrick,” Abby said.

“Hi,” Petey said uncertainly.

“How do you do,” Merrick said, extending her hand. He studied it a moment and then raised his own hand to give her a high five, which didn’t quite work out. He ended up accidentally slapping the backs of her fingers. His brothers didn’t attempt even that much. “We’re hungry!” one of them said. “When’s supper?”

“It’s all ready,” Nora told them. “Go wash up and we can sit down.”

“What: now?” Merrick asked. “Don’t I get a drink?”

Everyone looked at Abby. Abby said, “Oh. Would you like one?”

“I don’t suppose you have any vodka,” Merrick said happily.

There was a moment when it seemed that Abby might say no, but then some sort of hostess instinct must have kicked in, and she
said, “Of course.” (They had it because of Merrick.) Red and Denny slumped. “Will you see to the drinks, dear?” Abby asked Denny. “Let’s the rest of us go to the living room.”

As she and Red and Merrick left the kitchen, Petey was heard to say, “But we’re starving!” and Nora murmured something in reply.

“I haven’t had a chance to sit down all day,” Merrick told Abby as they crossed the hall. “It’s exhausting, getting ready for a trip.”

“Where are you off to?”

“We’re taking a cruise down the Danube.”

“How nice.”

“Wouldn’t you know, Trey is being a bore about it. He’d rather go golfing somewhere. Oh! Brenda! There you are! God, she looks dead, the poor darling. What happened to Father’s clock?”

Abby glanced from Brenda, stretched out on the cooling hearthstones, to the clock on the mantel above. A crack ran across the glass of its case. “There was a little mishap with a baseball,” she said. “Won’t you have a seat?”

“Boys are so hard on houses,” Merrick said, folding herself into an armchair. She had been shadowed by Heidi, who settled expectantly at her knee. “And why are there so many of them? Did I count three?”

“Oh, yes,” Abby said. “There are three, all right.”

“Was the third one planned?” Merrick asked. “Oh. Stem. Hello. Had you
planned
on a third child?”

“Not really,” Stem said cheerfully. He gave off the scent of Dial soap as he crossed the room to a chair. “How’re you doing, Aunt Merrick?”

“I’m exhausted, I was just saying,” Merrick told him. “It seems preparing for a trip gets more tiring every year.”

“Why not stay home, then?”

“What!” she said in horror. Then she sat up straighter; Denny was bringing the drinks. In one hand he held a tumbler tinkling with ice and filled to the brim with vodka, and in the other a glass
of white wine. Three cans of beer were tucked perilously under his left arm. “
Here
we go,” he said. He placed the tumbler on the lamp table next to her. He crossed to give Abby the wine and then handed a can of beer each to Red and Stem, after which he sat down on the couch with the third can and popped the tab. “Cheers,” he said.

Merrick took a deep swig of her drink and breathed out a long “Ahh.” She asked Denny, “Is Sarah here too?”

“Who’s Sarah?”

“Sarah your daughter.”

“Susan, you mean.”

“Susan, Sarah … Is
Susan
here too?”

“She’s coming down for the beach trip.”

“Oh, God, not that everlasting beach trip,” Merrick said. “You’re like lemmings about that beach! Or spawning salmon, or something. Don’t you all ever think about vacationing any place else?”

“We
love
the beach,” Abby told her.

“Really,” Merrick said, and she drew her sharp purple fingernails languidly across the top of Heidi’s head. “Sometimes it amazes me that our ancestors had the gumption to make it to America,” she told Red.

“Excuse me?”

“America!” she shouted.

Red looked confused.

“Mother and Father never traveled at all, if you’ll remember,” she told him.

“Well, you have certainly made up for that,” Red said. “You seem to need more than one house, even.”

“What can I say? I hate winter.”

“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”

“Are you calling Baltimore summers the
easy
part?” Merrick asked. Then, as if to prove her point, she said “Whew!” and left off
petting Heidi to bat a hand in front of her face. “Can somebody turn that fan up a notch?”

Stem rose and gave the fan cord a tug.

“
I
can see why you might want two houses,” Denny spoke up. “Or even more than two. I get that. I bet sometimes when you wake in the morning you don’t know where you are for a moment, am I right? You’re completely disoriented.”

“Well … I guess,” Merrick said.

“Before you open your eyes you think, ‘Why does it feel like the light is coming from my left? I thought the window was on my right. Which house is this, anyway?’ Or you get out of bed at night to go pee and you walk into a wall. ‘Whoa!’ you say. ‘Where’s the bathroom gone?’ ”

Merrick said, “Well …” and Abby took on a worried look. Evidently Denny was having one of his unexpectedly confiding moments.

“I
love
that feeling,” he said. “You don’t know your place in the world; you’re not pegged; you’re not nailed into this one single same old never-ending spot.”

“I suppose,” Merrick said.

“You think that might be the reason people travel?” he asked. “I’ll bet it could be. Is that why
you
travel?”

“Oh, well, it’s more like I’m just trying to get as far as possible from Trey’s mother,” Merrick said. She swirled the ice in her glass. “The old bat just celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday,” she told Red. “Can you believe it? Queen Eula the Immortal. I swear, I think she’s staying alive just to spite me. It’s not only that she’s a pill herself; I blame her for making Trey such a pill. She spoiled that man rotten, I tell you. Gave him every little thing he ever wanted: the Prince of Roland Park.”

Red put a hand to his forehead and said, “This is so eerie! Is it déjà vu? Why do I feel like I’ve heard this someplace before?”

“And the older he gets, the worse he gets,” she went on obliviously. “Even when he was young he was a hopeless hypochondriac, but now! Believe me, it was a dark day in the universe when the Internet started letting people research their medical symptoms.”

She might have gone on (she usually did), but at that moment Petey came into the room. “Grandma,” he said, “can we have the last of that fudge ripple?”

“What: before supper?” Abby asked.

“We’re already eating our supper.”

“Yes, you can have it. And take Heidi when you go, will you? She’s sneezing again.”

It was true that Heidi had started sneezing—a whole fit of sneezes, light but spattery. “Gesundheit,” Merrick told her. “What’s the trouble, honeybunch? Coming down with something?”

“She does this all day long,” Abby said. “You wouldn’t suppose sneezing would be such an irritation, but it is.”

Petey said, “Mom thinks it’s on account of she’s allergic to Grandma’s rugs.”

“Well, I wouldn’t bring her to visit, then, poor baby,” Merrick said.

“She’s got to visit. She lives here.”

“Heidi lives here?”

“She lives here with us.”

“
You
live here?”

“Yes, and Sammy’s allergic, too. All night he breathes dramatically.” Merrick looked at Abby.

“Take Heidi to the kitchen, Petey,” Abby said. “Yes,” she told Merrick, “they’ve moved in to help out; isn’t that nice?”

“Help out with what?”

“Well, just … you know. We’re getting older!”

“I’m getting older too, but I haven’t turned my house into a commune.”

“To each his own, I guess!” Abby sang out merrily.

“Wait,” Merrick said. “Is there something someone’s not telling me? Has one of you been diagnosed with some terminal disease?”

“No, but after Red’s heart attack—”

“Red had a heart attack?”

“You knew that. You sent him a fruit basket in the hospital.”

“Oh,” Merrick said. “Yes, maybe I did.”

“And I’m not so spry either, lately.”

“This is ridiculous,” Merrick said. “Two people get a bit wobbly and their entire family moves in with them? I never heard of such a thing.”

Denny cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “Stem is not here on a permanent basis.”

“Well, thank heaven.”

“
I
am.”

Merrick looked at him, waiting for him to go on. The others stared down at their laps.

“I’m the one who’s staying,” Denny said.

Stem said, “Well, not—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, why is
anyone
staying?” Merrick asked. “If your parents are really so decrepit—and I must say I find that hard to believe; they’re barely in their seventies—they should move to a retirement community. That’s what other people do.”

“We’re too independent for a retirement community,” Red told her.

“Independent? Bosh. That’s just another word for selfish. It’s stiff-backed people like you who end up being the biggest burdens.”

Stem rose to his feet. “Well,” he said, “I guess Nora must be fretting about her supper getting cold,” and he stood waiting in the center of the room.

Everyone looked at him in surprise. Finally Merrick said, “Oh,
I
see. Clear that tiresome woman out of here; she tells too many home truths.” But she was standing up as she spoke, draining the
last of her drink as she moved toward the front hall. “I know, I know,” she said. “I see how it is.”

The others rose to follow her. “Here,” Merrick said at the door, and she thrust her empty glass at Abby. “And by the way,” she told Denny. “You’re supposed to have a life by now. You’re only putting things off, scurrying back home on the slightest excuse.”

She left, clicking across the porch with a brisk, energetic stride, like someone triumphant in the knowledge that she had set everybody straight.

“What is she
talking
about?” Denny asked after a moment.

Abby said, “Oh, you know how she is.”

“I can’t abide that woman.”

Ordinarily Abby would have tut-tutted, but now she just sighed and headed for the kitchen.

The men went into the dining room and settled at the table, none of them speaking, although Red did say, as he dropped onto his chair, “Ah, me.” They waited in a kind of drained silence. From the kitchen they could hear the burble of the little boys’ voices and a clatter of utensils. Then Nora emerged through the swinging door, carrying a casserole. Abby came behind with a salad. “You should see Merrick’s leftovers,” she told the men. “A smidgen of store-bought pasta sauce in the bottom of a jar. A wedge of Brie completely hollowed out inside the rind. And … what else, Nora?” she asked.

“A cold broiled lamb chop,” Nora said, setting the casserole on the table.

“A lamb chop, yes, and a Chinese take-out carton of rice, and one single, solitary pickle in a bottle of scummy brine.”

“We should put her in touch with Hugh,” Denny said.

“Hugh?” Abby asked.

“Amanda’s Hugh. Do Not Pass Go. She could call him before every trip.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Abby said. “They’re made for each other!”

“He’d tell her he knows a soup kitchen that’s
dying
to have her leftovers, and he’d come by her house and collect them and take them off to the trash.”

This made the others laugh—even Nora, a little. Red said, “Oh, now. You folks,” but he was laughing too.

“What?” Tommy asked. He’d cracked open the door from the kitchen. “What’s so funny?”

None of them wanted to say; they just smiled and shook their heads. To a child, they must have looked like some happy, cozy club that only grown-ups could belong to.

It took a total of five vehicles to carry them all to the beach. They could have managed with fewer, but Red insisted, as usual, on driving his pickup. How else could they bring everything they needed, he always asked—the rafts and boogie boards, the sand toys for the children, the kites and the paddle-ball racquets and the giant canvas shade canopy with its collapsible metal frame? (In the old days, before computers, he used to include the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.) So he and Abby made the three-hour trip in the pickup, while Denny drove Abby’s car with Susan in the passenger seat and the food hampers in the rear. Stem and Nora and the three little boys came in Nora’s car, and Jeannie and Jeannie’s Hugh started out separately from their own house with their two children, though not with Hugh’s mother, who always spent the beach week visiting Hugh’s sister in California.

Amanda and Amanda’s Hugh and Elise traveled on a whole different day—Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon, since Amanda always had trouble getting away from her law office—and they stayed in a different cottage, because Amanda’s Hugh couldn’t tolerate what he called the hurly-burly.