Denny laughed, but none of the others did.
“That would have to be a very rich traveler,” Jeannie’s Hugh said.
“Well, I admit it’s not going to be cheap.”
“Very rich and very crazy, both at once. Wrapped up in one single person. How many of those could be living here in Baltimore?”
“Sheesh, man! Way to encourage a guy!”
“Oh, but I love the name,” Abby said hastily. “Did you think it up yourself, Hugh?”
“I did.”
“And is it … When you say ‘Do Not Pass Go,’ do you mean …?”
“You don’t have to wade through all the usual planning and fuss at the start, is what I mean.”
“I see. So it’s got nothing to do with jail.”
“Jail! God, no.”
“And what about your restaurant?” Jeannie asked.
“I’m going to sell it.”
“Oh, will anyone want to buy it?”
“Sheesh, people!”
“I was only wondering,” Jeannie said.
Mrs. Angell said, “Have you all noticed that lately the birds have started sounding more conversational? It’s like they’re talking, these days, not singing. Can you hear?”
They took a moment to listen.
“Maybe on account of the heat,” Abby suggested.
“I worry they’ve given up music. Turned to prose.”
“Oh, I can’t believe they’d do that,” Abby said. “More likely they’re just tired. They’ve decided to let the crickets take over.”
“When my California grandchildren come every summer to visit,” Mrs. Angell said, “they always ask, ‘What is that noise?’ ‘What noise?’ I say. They say, ‘That chirping and that whirring, that scritch-scritch-scritching noise.’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I believe you must be talking about the crickets or the locusts or whatever. Isn’t it funny? I don’t even hear them.’ ‘But they’re deafening!’ they say. ‘How can you not hear them?’ ”
And once she had spoken it seemed they all heard them, although no one had before—the steady racket of them. They made a rhythmic, jingling sound, like the chink-chink of old-fashioned sleigh bells.
Amanda said, “Well, I, for one, think Hugh’s idea is brilliant.”
“Thank you, hon,” Hugh told her. “I’m glad you believe in me.”
Mrs. Angell said, “Well, of course! We all do! And how about you, Denny?”
“Do I think Hugh is brilliant?”
“What are you working at, I meant.”
“Well, nothing,” Denny told her. “I’m down here helping my folks out.” He tipped his head back against the back of the swing and laced his fingers across his chest.
“It’s so nice having him home,” Abby told Mrs. Angell.
“Oh, I can imagine!”
“You still with that kitchen outfit?” Jeannie’s Hugh asked him.
“Not anymore,” Denny said. Then he said, “I’ve been substitute teaching.”
Abby said, “What?”
“Substitute teaching. Well, this past spring I was.”
“Don’t you need a college degree for that?”
“No, as a matter of fact. Although I have one.”
Everyone looked at Abby, waiting for her next question. It didn’t come. She sat staring across at the Nelsons’ house with something tense and set about her mouth. Finally, Jeannie asked it: “You’ve finished college?”
“Yes,” Denny said.
“How did you do that?”
“Same way anyone does it, I guess.”
They looked again at Abby. She stayed silent.
“Well, you never did much like building things,” Stem said after a moment. “I remember from back when you were working with Dad in the summers.”
“I’ve got nothing against building things; I just couldn’t stand the customers,” Denny said, sitting up straight again. “All those trendy homeowners wanting wine cellars in their basements.”
“Wine cellars! Ha!” Stem said. “And dog-washing stations in their garages.”
“Dog-washing stations?”
“Lady up in Ruxton.”
Denny snorted.
“Mother Whitshank?” Nora asked. “Can I get you anything? A little more iced tea?”
“No, thanks,” Abby said shortly.
The grandchildren were migrating now from the backyard to the front, and Sammy even invaded the porch, climbing the steps to throw himself in his mother’s lap and complain about his brothers. “Somebody needs his nap,” Nora told him, but she sat on limply, gazing out over Sammy’s head to where the other children were debating the rules of their game. “The bushes by the house are safe, but not the ones in the side yard,” one was saying.
“But the ones in the side yard are the best places! You can hide underneath them.”
“So why would we use them as safes?”
“Oh.”
Jeannie’s son, Alexander, was It, which was painful to watch because he was the first Whitshank in known history to show a tendency toward pudginess. When he ran, he cast his legs out clumsily and paddled the air with both hands. Ironically, his sister, Deb, was the family’s best athlete—a wiry girl with muscular, mosquito-bitten legs—and she beat him to the biggest azalea bush and sang out, “Ha-ha! Safe!”
“Can somebody please call Heidi?” Alexander asked the grown-ups. “She keeps getting in my way.”
Heidi was nowhere near him—she was racing around the perimeter with her usual exuberance—but Stem whistled and she came bounding up the porch steps. “Down, girl,” he said. He tousled her mane affectionately, and she gave a resigned whimper and curled herself at his feet.
“Brenda must be getting old,” Denny told his sisters. “She’d have been out here chasing Heidi, once upon a time.”
Jeannie said, “It kills me to think she’s old. Can you imagine this house without a dog?”
“Easily,” Denny said. “Dogs are hell on houses.”
“Oh, Denny.”
“What? They scratch the woodwork, they scuff the floors …”
Amanda made a tch-ing sound of amusement.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her.
“Listen to you! You sound like Dad. You’re the only one of us who doesn’t have a dog, and Dad claims he wouldn’t have one, either, if it were up to him.”
“Oh, that’s just talk,” Abby told them. “Your dad loves Clarence as much as we do.”
Her four children exchanged glances.
In the hammock, Red groaned and sat up. “What are you saying?” he asked, rummaging through his hair.
“Just talking about how you love dogs, Dad,” Jeannie called.
“I do?”
Amanda tapped Denny’s wrist. “When will we be seeing Susan?” she asked him.
“Well, she can’t visit till we’ve got a room free to put her up in,” Denny said.
Till Stem and his family moved out, was his implication, but Amanda sidestepped that by saying, “She could always share the bunk room with the little boys. Would she mind?”
“Or wait for the beach trip,” Jeannie suggested. “That’s coming up very soon, and the beach house has tons of beds.”
Denny let the subject drop. His eyes followed the children playing in the yard—Petey tussling with Tommy, Elise pulling them apart and chiding them in her thin, bossy voice.
“Think I’m going to have to call the Petronelli brothers and have them repair the front walk again,” Red said, ambling down the porch to join them. On his way, he grabbed a rocker by one of its ears. He set it next to Abby.
“Every time I come here, you’re doing something to that walk,” Denny told him.
“The trouble goes back to your grandfather’s time. He wasn’t happy with how it was laid.”
“It did seem he was always fiddling with it,” Abby said.
“One of my first memories after we moved in was, he had all the mortar ripped out and the stones reset. But still he wasn’t satisfied. H
e claimed it was graded wrong.”
“What’s that got to do with now, though?” Stem asked. “It’s been graded several times over, since then. In order to fix that walk once and for all, you’d have to cut down all the poplars with their roots that burrow beneath it, and I don’t see you doing that.”
“Oh, you men, stop talking shop!” Abby said. “It’s too nice a day for that. Isn’t it, Lois?”
“Goodness, yes,” Mrs. Angell said. “It’s a lovely day. I believe I feel a bit of a breeze starting up.”
It was true that the leaves had begun rustling overhead, and Heidi’s petticoats of fur were stirring on her haunches.
“Weather like this always takes me back to the day I fell in love with Red,” Abby said dreamily.
The others smiled. They knew the story well; even Mrs. Angell knew it.
Sammy was sound asleep against his mother’s breast. Elise was spinning and spinning under a dogwood tree, with her head tipped back and her arms flung out.
“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon …” Abby began. Which was the way she always began, exactly the same words, every single time. On the porch, everybody relaxed. Their faces grew smooth, and their hands loosened in their laps. It was so restful to be sitting here with family, with the birds talking in the trees and the crosscut-sawing of the crickets and the dog snoring at their feet and the children calling, “Safe! I’m safe!”
5
ON MONDAY, Denny slept till almost eleven. “Will you look at Mr. Sleepyhead!” Abby said when he finally came downstairs. “What time did you get to bed?”
He shrugged and took a box of cereal from the cupboard. “One thirty?” he said. “Two?”
“Oh, no wonder, then.”
“If I stay up late enough, I have some hope of sleeping through,” he said. “All those middle-of-the-night thoughts swarming in on me; I hate that.”
“Your dad gets up and reads when that happens,” Abby told him.
Denny didn’t bother answering her. The Whitshanks held two opposing opinions about what to do with their wakeful hours, and they had long ago argued the subject into the ground.
After breakfast, as if to make up for lost time, he became a whirlwind of activity. He vacuumed the whole downstairs, oiled the hinges on the backyard gate, and trimmed the backyard hedge. He skipped lunch to scrub the charcoal grill, and then he borrowed Abby’s car and drove to Eddie’s to buy steaks to barbecue for supper. Abby told him to charge the steaks to her account, and he didn’t argue.
The house seemed invisibly partitioned between Nora and Abby—Nora busying herself in the kitchen or tending her children, Abby up in her bedroom or reading in the living room. They were courteous to each other but wary, clearly trying not to get in each other’s way. The only time all day that they engaged in a real conversation was when Denny was at the grocery store. Nora, carrying Sammy upstairs for his afternoon nap, met Abby coming down the stairs with a stack of papers. “Oh, Mother Whitshank,” Nora said. “Is that something I can help you with?”
“No, thank you, dear,” Abby said. “I just thought while Denny was out of the house I’d collect the last of my things from his room. Though heaven knows where I’ll put them.”
“Couldn’t you pack them into a box and store them in the back of his closet?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”
“I could bring up a box from the basement. I saw some near the washing machine.”
“I don’t think so,” Abby said more firmly, and then she sighed and patted the spiral-bound notebook on the top of her stack. “I never feel quite comfortable leaving my belongings where Denny can get at them,” she said.
“Oh,” Nora said. She hitched Sammy higher on her hip, but she didn’t continue up the stairs.
“I know he doesn’t mean any harm, but I have poems and private journals and little thoughts I’ve jotted down. I’d feel silly if anyone saw them.”
“Well, of course,” Nora said.
“So I figured I’d haul it all to the sunroom and do some pruning. Then I’ll see if Red will lend me one of his desk drawers.”
“I’d be happy to bring down what’s left,” Nora said.
“Oh, I think I’ve got everything, dear.”
And the two of them went their separate ways.
For supper they had Denny’s grilled steaks and Nora’s homemade succotash. Nora cooked in a sort of country style; succotash wasn’t something the rest of them were accustomed to. And she did that modern thing of preparing a whole different dish for the children when they wouldn’t eat their steaks. She went out to the kitchen without complaint and fixed macaroni and cheese from a box. Abby told the boys, “Oh, your poor mother! Isn’t she nice to get up from her meal and make you something special,” which was her way of saying that her own children used to eat what was set before them. But the boys had heard this before, and they just gazed at her expressionlessly. Only Red seemed to read her meaning. “Now, hon,” he told her. “That’s how things are done these days.”
“Well, I know that!”
The boys had spent the latter part of the afternoon at the neighborhood pool with Nora, and they were pink-faced and slick-haired and puffy-eyed. Sammy’s head kept drooping over his plate; he hadn’t slept during his nap. “Early bedtime for all of you,” Stem told them.
“Can’t we play catch with Uncle Denny first?” Petey asked.
Stem glanced over at Denny.
“Fine with me,” Denny said.
“Yippee!”
“How was work today?” Abby asked Red.
Red said, “Work was a pain in the ass. Got this lady who’s—”
“Excuse me,” Abby said, and she stood up and went out to the kitchen, calling, “Nora, please come eat your supper! Let me do the macaroni.”
Red rolled his eyes and then, taking advantage of her absence, reached for the butter and added a giant dollop to his succotash.
“I knew that lady was trouble when she brought out her four-inch binder,” Stem told Red.
“Pick, pick, pick,” Red agreed. “Niggle, niggle, niggle.”
Nora emerged from the kitchen with a saucepan and a serving spoon, Abby following. “Great succotash, Nora,” Red said.
“Thank you.”
She dished macaroni onto Tommy’s plate, then Petey’s, then Sammy’s. Abby resettled herself in her chair and reached for her napkin. “So,” she told Red. “You were saying?”
“Pardon?”
“You were saying about work?”
“I forget,” Red said huffily.
“He was saying about Mrs. Bruce,” Stem told her. “Lady who’s getting her kitchen updated.”
“I warned her about that grout,” Red said. “I told her more than once, I said, ‘Ma’am, you go for that urethane grout and you’re adding on two days’ work time. Cleanup is a bitch.’ ”
Then he said, “Oh, pardon me,” because Nora was sending him a sorrowful look from under her long, heavy lashes.
“Cleanup’s hell,” he said. “I mean, difficult. Major hazing problem. Didn’t I tell her that, Stem?”
“You told her.”
“And what does she do? Goes for urethane. Then throws a hissy fit over how much time the guys are taking.”
He paused a moment and frowned, perhaps wondering if the word “hissy” were something Nora could object to.
“I don’t know why you put up with people like that,” Denny said.
“Comes with the territory,” Red said.
“I wouldn’t stand for it.”
“You might not,” Red told him, “but we don’t have that luxury. Half our men were idle for the first two weeks in April. You think that’s any picnic? We take what jobs we can get, nowadays, and thank our lucky stars.”
“You were the one who was griping,” Denny said.
“I was explaining how work is, is all. But what would you know about that?”
Denny bent over his steak and sliced off a piece in si
lence.
“Well!” Abby said. “I don’t know when I’ve eaten such a lovely meal, Nora.”
“Yes, it’s good, sweetheart,” Stem said.
“Denny grilled the steaks,” Nora said.
“Good steaks, Denny.”
Denny said nothing.
“Now can we play catch?” Tommy asked him.
Stem said, “Let him finish his supper, son.”
“No, I’m done,” Denny said. “Thanks, Nora.” And he pushed back his chair and stood up, even though most of his steak remained and he had barely touched his succotash.
On Tuesday, Denny slept till noon. Then he mopped all the bathroom floors and the floor in the kitchen. He swept the front porch, wiped down the porch furniture, and tightened a loose baluster he discovered in the porch railing. He repaired the clasp on a string of Abby’s beads and swapped out the battery in a smoke detector. Later that afternoon, while Nora and the children were at the pool, he put together an elaborate vegetable lasagna to serve for supper that night. Nora had been planning to serve hamburgers and corn on the cob, as she told him when she returned, but Denny said they could have those the next night.
“Or we could have your lasagna the next night,” Nora said, “because hamburgers and corn on the cob ought to be eaten fresh.”
“Oh, you two!” Abby cried. “Neither one of you needs to trouble yourself about supper. I’m capable of that much.”
“My lasagna should be eaten fresh too,” Denny said. “Look. Nora. I’m just trying to keep busy here. I don’t have enough to do.”