When Denny said his goodbyes before driving Susan to the train station, it was clear that he assumed the guests would be gone by the time he got back. But no, there they still were when he returned. Sax Brown and Marge Ellis were arguing about Afghanistan. Elise had got hold of a glass of white wine; she was pinching the stem daintily between her thumb and index finger with all her other fingers splayed out, and her makeup had worn thin and her black eye was re-emerging. Ree Bascomb’s maid was serving crudités in her stocking feet now, and Ree herself, who had maybe had a tad too much to drink, stood with an arm looped around the waist of somebody’s teenage son. Red looked exhausted. His face was gray and sagging. Nora was trying to make him sit down, but he stayed stubbornly upright.
Then suddenly the guests were gone, all of them at once, as if they had heard some secret dog whistle. The living room held no one but family, and it seemed too bright, like outdoors after a daytime movie. A decimated cheese board rested on an ottoman, and cracker crumbs littered the rug, and someone’s forgotten shawl was slung across the back of a chair. Ree Bascomb’s maid tinkled glassware in the kitchen. The toilet flushed in the powder room, and Tommy returned to the living room still hitching up his pants.
“Well,” Red said. He looked around at everyone.
“Well,” Amanda echoed.
They were all standing. They were all empty-handed. They had the look of people waiting for their next assignment, but there wasn’t one, of course. It was over. They had seen Abby off.
It seemed there should be something more—some summing up, some account to deliver. “You wouldn’t believe what Merrick said,” they wanted to report. And “You’d have laughed to see Queen Eula. No sign of Trey, wouldn’t you know, because he had an important meeting, but Queen Eula came. Can you imagine? Remember how she always used to swear you were a Communist?”
But wait. Abby was dead. She would never hear about any of this.
8
IT COULD BE ARGUED that with Abby gone, there was no further need for anyone to stay on in the house with Red. He was more or less able-bodied, after all, and he went right back to work the morning after the funeral. That afternoon, though, he came home early and slipped upstairs to bed, and if Nora hadn’t walked into his room with a stack of folded laundry he might have lain there undiscovered for who knows how long, one hand clamped to his chest and a line of either pain or worry crimping his forehead. He said it was nothing, just a tired spell, but he didn’t object when Nora insisted on Denny’s driving him to the emergency room.
In fact it was nothing—indigestion, the doctors decided six hours later, and he was sent home along with all four of his children, the other three having assembled at the hospital as soon as Nora phoned them. Still, it started his daughters thinking.
They had agreed, till then, that there would be plenty of time to sort out the household arrangements. Let things settle a bit, they told each other. But the rest of that week, both girls seemed to be on Bouton Road more often than they were at home—and generally without their husbands and children, as if to show that they meant business. They would wander in on some errand, Jeannie wanting Abby’s recipe box or Amanda bringing grocery-store cartons to sort Abby’s clothes into, and then they would hang around engaging one or another person in pointed conversation.
“You know we can’t depend on Denny in any permanent way,” Amanda told Nora, for instance. “He might promise us the moon, but one day he’ll up and leave us. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long.” Then Denny walked into the kitchen and she broke off. Had he heard? But even after he’d set his cup in the sink and walked out again, Nora made no reply. She slid cookies off a baking sheet, her expression pleasant and noncommittal, as if Amanda had been talking just to hear herself talk.
And Stem! Maybe it was grief, but he’d become very quiet. “Underneath,” Jeannie tried telling him once, “I think Dad has always assumed that you and Nora would live here forever. Inheriting the house, I mean, after he’s gone.” Then she sent a guilty look toward Denny, who was sitting next to Stem on the couch flicking through TV channels, but Denny merely grimaced. Even he knew it was Stem that Red would have pinned his hopes on. As for Stem himself, he didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen, although there was nothing to watch just then but commercials and more commercials.
After Sunday lunch, while Red was upstairs napping, Amanda told the others, “It’s not like Dad needs a real caretaker. I grant you that. But someone should make sure every morning that he’s made it through the night, at least.”
“A simple phone call could establish that much,” Stem said.
Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other. It was a remark they would have expected from Denny rather than Stem.
Stem wasn’t looking at either of them. He was watching the children playing a board game on the rug.
Denny said, “Ah, well, maybe sooner or later Dad will find himself a lady friend.”
“Oh! Denny!” Jeannie said.
“What?”
“Yes, he could do that,” Amanda said equably. “Part of me wishes he would, by and by. Some nice, nurturing woman. Though another part of me says, ‘But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”
“Dad would never fall for a woman who wore the back of her collar up!” Jeannie said.
Then Red’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs, and everybody fell silent.
Later that same afternoon, when the girls had collected their families and were saying goodbye at the door, Red asked Amanda if he should let their lawyer know about Abby’s death. “Goodness, yes,” Amanda said. “Haven’t you already done that? Who is your lawyer?” and Red said, “I have no idea; it was years ago we made our wills. Your mother was the one who took care of that stuff.”
Stem made a sudden, sharp sound that resembled a laugh, and everybody looked at him.
“It’s like that old joke,” he told them. “The husband says, ‘My wife decides the little things, like what job I take and which house we buy, and I decide the big things, like whether we should admit China to the U.N.’ ”
Jeannie’s Hugh said, “Huh?”
“Women are the ones in charge,” Stem told him. “Make no mistake about it.”
“Isn’t China already in the U.N.?”
But then Nora stepped in to say, “Don’t worry, Father Whitshank, I’ll track down your lawyer’s name,” and the moment passed.
On Monday, while Red was at work, Amanda arrived with more cartons. You’d think she didn’t have a job. She was dressed in business clothes, though, so she must have been on the way to her office. “Tell me the truth, Nora,” she said as soon as she had set the cartons in a corner of the dining room. “Can you imagine you and Stem staying on here forever?”
“You know we would never leave Father Whitshank if he really needed assistance,” Nora said.
“So, do you think he does need assistance?”
“Oh, Douglas should be the one to answer that.”
Amanda’s shoulders slumped, and she turned without a word and walked out.
In the front hall she met up with Denny, who was coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I wish Stem and Nora weren’t so … virtuous. It’s wearing, is what it is.”
“Is that a fact,” Denny said.
Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.
“How’s it working?” Denny asked.
“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”
Denny passed Stem the screwdriver. They were taking all the screens down, preparing to put the storm windows in for the winter, and Red was supervising. Not that he really needed to, since the boys h
ad done this many times before. He was sitting on the back steps, wearing a huge wool cardigan made by Abby during her knitting days.
“Last night I dreamed about her,” he said. “She had this shawl wrapped around her shoulders with tassels hanging off it, and her hair was long like old times. She said, ‘Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.’ ” He stopped speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Denny and Stem stood with a screen balanced between them and looked at each other helplessly.
“Then I woke up,” Red said after a minute. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I thought, ‘This must mean I miss having her close attention, the way I’ve always been used to.’ Then I woke up again, for real. Have either of you ever done that? Dreamed that you woke up, and then found you’d still been asleep? I woke up for real and I thought, ‘Oh, boy. I see I’ve still got a long way to go with this.’ Seems I haven’t quite gotten over it, you know?”
“Gosh,” Stem said. “That’s hard.”
“Maybe a sleeping pill,” Denny suggested.
“What could that do?” Red asked.
“Well, I’m just saying.”
“You think every one of life’s problems can be solved by taking a drug.”
“Let’s lean this against that tree,” Stem told Denny.
Denny nodded, tight-lipped, and swung around to back toward a poplar tree with the screen.
That evening, Ree Bascomb brought over an apple crumble and stayed to have a piece with them. “There’s rum in it, is why I waited till I thought the little boys would be in bed,” she said. Actually, the little boys were not in bed, although it was nearly nine. (They didn’t seem to have a fixed bedtime, as Abby had often remarked in a wondering tone to her daughters.) But they were occupied with some sort of racetrack they’d constructed to run through the living room, so the grown-ups moved to the dining room—Ree, Stem and Nora, Red and Denny—where Ree set squares of apple crumble on Abby’s everyday china and passed them around the table. She knew Abby’s house as well as she knew her own, she often said. “You don’t have to lift a finger,” she told Nora, although Nora had already started a pot of decaf and rustled up cream and sugar, mugs and silverware and napkins.
Ree sat down at the table and said, “Cheers, everybody,” and picked up her fork. “They say sweets are helpful in times of sadness,” she said. “I’ve always found that to be true.”
“Well, this was nice of you, Ree,” Red said.
“I could use some sweets myself tonight. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but on top of everything else now, Jeeter’s died.”
“Oh, what a pity,” Nora said. Jeeter was Ree’s tabby cat, going on twenty years old. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him.
Red said, “My God!” He set his fork down. “How in the world did that happen?” he asked.
“I just stepped out on the back stoop this morning and there he was, lying on the welcome mat. I hope he hadn’t been waiting there all night, poor thing.”
“My Lord! That’s awful! But surely they’re going to investigate the cause of death,” Red said. He looked shattered. “These things don’t just come about for no reason.”
“They do if you’re old, Red.”
“Old! He wasn’t even in nursery school yet!”
“What?” Ree said.
Everyone stared at him.
“I remember when he was born! It wasn’t but two or three years ago!”
“What are you talking about?” Ree asked.
“Why, I’m … Didn’t you say Peter died? Your grandson?”
“Jeeter, I said,” Ree told him, raising her voice. “Jeeter, my cat. Good gracious!”
“Oh,” Red said. “Excuse me. My mistake.”
“I did wonder why you’d turned into such a cat person, all at once.”
“Ha! Yes,” he said, “and I wondered how you could act so offhand about your only grandchild passing.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle and picked up his fork again. Then he peered across the table at Nora. She had her napkin pressed to her mouth, and her shoulders were heaving and she was making a slight squeaking sound. It seemed at first she might be choking, till it emerged that the tears streaming down her face were tears of laughter. Stem said, “Hon?” and the others stared at her. None of them had ever seen Nora get the giggles before.
“Sorry,” she said when she could speak, but then she clapped her napkin to her mouth again. “I’m sorry!” she said between gasps.
“Glad to know you find me so amusing,” Red said stiffly.
“I apologize, Father Whitshank.”
She lowered the napkin and sat up straighter. Her face was flushed and her cheeks were wet. “I think it must be stress,” she said.
“Of course it is,” Ree told her. “You’ve all been through a world of stress! I should have thought before I came traipsing over here with my piddly little news.”
“No, really, I—”
“Funny, I never noticed before how the two names rhymed,” Ree said thoughtfully. “Peter, Jeeter.”
Red said, “You were nice to come, Ree, and the crumble’s delicious, honest.” He didn’t seem to realize that he hadn’t taken a bite of it yet.
“I used Granny Smith apples,” Ree told him. “All the other kinds fall apart, I find.”
“These are not falling apart in the least.”
“Yes, they’re great,” Denny said, and Stem chimed in with a not-quite-intelligible murmur. His eyes were still on Nora, although she seemed to have composed herself.
“Well!” Ree said. “Now that we’ve got the fun and games out of the way, let’s talk about you all. What are your plans, everybody? Stem? Denny? Will you be staying on with your dad?”
It could have been an awkward moment—people were bracing for it around the table, clearly—except that Red said, “Nah, they’ll be moving out shortly. I’m going to get myself an apartment.”
“An apartment!” Ree said.
The others grew very still.
“Well, the kids have their regular lives, after all,” Red said. “And there’s no point in me rattling around alone here. I’m thinking I could just rent something, one of those streamlined efficiencies that wouldn’t need any upkeep. It could have an elevator, even, in case I get old and doddery.” He gave one of his chuckles, as if to imply how unlikely that was.
“Oh, Red, that’s so adventurous of you! And I know just the place, too. Remember Sissy Bailey? She’s moved into this new building in Charles Village, and she loves it. You remember she had that big house on St. John’s, but now, she says, she doesn’t have to give a thought to mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow, putting up the storm windows …”
“The boys were putting up our storm windows just this afternoon,” Red said. “Do you know how many times I’ve been through that, in my life? Put them up in the fall, take them down in the spring. Put them up, take them down. Put them up, take them down. Is there no end? you have to ask.”
“Very, very sensible to ditch all that,” Ree said. She sent a bright look around the table. “Don’t you all agree?”
After a brief hesitation, Denny and Stem and Nora nodded. None of them wore any expression whatsoever.
Amanda said it was sort of like when you’re playing tug of war and the other side drops the rope with no warning. “I mean, it’s almost a letdown,” she said.
And Jeannie said, “Of course we want to take him off our worry list, but has he thought this through? Moving to some teeny modern place without crown moldings?”
“He’s acting too meek,” Amanda said. “This is too easy. We need to find out what’s behind it.”
“Yes, you have to wonder why he’s in such a hurry.”
They were talking to each other on their cell phones—Jeannie against a background of electric drills and nail guns, Amanda in the quiet of her office. Shockingly, no one had let them know right away about Red’s announcement. They’d had to hear it the next
morning. Stem happened to mention it at work, while he and Jeannie were dealing with a cabinetry issue.
“You did tell him we should talk this over,” Jeannie had said immediately.
“Why would I tell him that?”
“Well, Stem?”
“He’s a grown-up,” Stem said, “and he’s doing what you’ve hoped for all along. Anyhow: whatever he does, Nora and I are leaving.”
“You are?”
“We’re just waiting till her church can find a new home for our tenants.”
“But you never said! You never discussed this with us!”
“Why should I discuss it?” Stem asked. “I’m a grown-up, too.”
Then he rolled up his blueprints and walked out.
“It’s like Stem’s a different person lately,” Jeannie told Amanda on the phone. “He’s almost surly. He was never like this before.”
“It must have to do with Denny,” Amanda said.
“Denny?”
“Denny must have said something to hurt his feelings. You know Denny’s never gotten over Stem moving back home.”
“What could he have said to him, though?”
“What could he have said that he hasn’t already said, is the question. Whatever it was, it must have been a doozie.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jeannie said. “Denny’s been on fairly good behavior lately.”
But as soon as she hung up, she phoned him. (Wasn’t it typical that even now, when he was living on Bouton Road again, she had to call his cell phone if she wanted to talk to him?)
It was past ten in the morning, but he must not have been fully awake yet. He answered in a muffled-sounding voice: “What.”
“Stem says Dad is going to move to an apartment,” Jeannie told him.
“Yeah, seems like he is.”
“Where did that come from?”
“Beats me.”
“And Stem and Nora are just waiting till their tenants find a new place and then they’re leaving too.”
Denny yawned aloud and said, “Well, that makes sense.”