Chapter 6 #2
It was possible that in her heart of hearts, she was thinking that the world couldn’t go on without her.
Oh, weren’t human beings self-deluding! Because the plain fact was that no one needed her anymore.
Her children were grown up, and her clients had vanished into thin air the moment she retired.
(And anyhow, toward the last it had seemed that her clients’ needs were bottomless—that society was falling apart faster than she could patch it together.
She was getting out just in time, she had felt.) Even her “orphans,” as her family called them, were all but gone.
B. J. Autry was dead of drugs and old Mr. Dale of a stroke, and the various foreign students had either returned to their own countries or else assimilated so successfully that they cooked Thanksgiving dinner for themselves now.
In the past, she had been at the center of things.
She’d known everybody’s secrets; everyone confided in her.
Linnie had told her—swearing her to silence—that she and Junior were their families’ black sheep; and Denny had told her (offhandedly, when she marveled at Susan’s brown eyes) that Susan was not his.
Nothing she heard had Abby relayed to anybody else, not even to Red.
She was a woman of her word. Oh, people would have been amazed at all she knew and didn’t say!
“You owe your job to me,” she could have said to Jeannie. “Your father was dead set against having a woman on the construction site, but I persuaded him.” What a temptation to let that slip! But she didn’t.
And now she was so unnecessary that her children thought she should move to a retirement community—she and Red both, neither one of them nearly old enough yet.
Thank God that had come to nothing. It was worth putting up with Nora, even, in order to dodge the retirement community.
It had even been worth putting up with Mrs. Girt. Or almost worth it.
Abby felt bad now about Mrs. Girt. They had let her go without a thought! And she’d probably had some very sad story. It wasn’t at all like Abby to pass up a chance to hear someone’s sad story. “Amanda,” she had said recently, “did we give that Mrs. Girt any severance pay?”
“Severance pay! She was with you nine days!”
“Still,” Abby said, “she meant well. And you all meant well to arrange for her; I hope you don’t think I’m ungrateful.”
“Well, since both you and Dad were dead set against a retirement community, for some reason …”
“But you can see our side of it, can’t you? Why, I bet those places have social workers to deal with the inmates. We’d be the objects of social work! Can you imagine?”
To which Amanda had said, “The ‘inmates’? And the ‘objects,’ Mom? Goodness. What does that say about your attitude to your own profession, all these years?”
Amanda could be so sharp-edged, sometimes.
Of the two girls, Jeannie was easier. (Abby knew she should stop calling them “the girls,” but it would feel so silly to say “the women” and “the men.”) Jeannie was biddable and unassuming; she lacked Amanda’s acidity.
She didn’t confide in Abby, though. It had been such a blow when Jeannie had asked Denny to help out during that bad spell after Alexander was born.
She could have asked Abby. Abby was right there in town!
And then Denny: why had he never mentioned that he had finished college?
He must have been taking courses for years, working them in around his various jobs, but he hadn’t said a thing, and why not?
Because he wanted her to go on worrying about him, was why.
He didn’t want to let her off the hook. So when he sprang it like that—just announced it after lunch that day: yes, he had his degree—it had felt like a slap in the face.
She knew she should have been pleased for him, but instead she had felt resentful.
One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?
Although Denny might not be okay, even now.
Abby wasn’t entirely at ease about him. Shouldn’t he be looking for work?
Maybe substitute teaching? Or even really teaching!
He surely couldn’t be thinking that helping out around the house was enough of an occupation, could he?
Or that the odd bits of money she slipped him—a couple of twenties any time he ran an errand for her, never requesting change—could be called a living wage.
Yesterday, she had asked him, “How about your other belongings? You must have more than what you brought down. Did you put them into storage?”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” he’d said. “They’re stashed in my old apartment.”
“So you still have to pay rent?”
“Nah. It’s just one room above a garage; my landlady doesn’t care.”
This was puzzling. What kind of landlady didn’t charge rent unless her tenant was physically present? Oh, so much of his life seemed … irregular, somehow.
Or maybe it was perfectly regular, and Abby had just been sensitized by too many past experiences with Denny—too many evasions and semi-truths and suspect alibis.
Last week she’d knocked on his bedroom door to ask if he could take her to buy some greeting cards, and she’d thought she heard him tell her to come in, but she was mistaken; he was talking on his cell phone.
“You know I do,” he was saying. “How’m I going to make you believe me?
” and then he’d looked over at Abby and his expression had altered. “What do you want?” he had asked her.
“I’ll just wait till you’re off the phone,” she had said, and he’d told his caller, “I’ve got to go,” and snapped his phone shut too quickly.
If it was a girl he’d been speaking to—a woman—Abby was truly glad.
Everyone should have someone. Still, a part of her couldn’t help feeling hurt that he hadn’t mentioned this person.
Why did he have to turn everything into such a mystery?
Oh, he just took an active pleasure in going against the grain!
No, the current, she meant. Going against the current. It was like a hobby for him.
Sometimes it seemed to her that with all her fretting over Denny, she had let her other children slip through her fingers unnoticed.
Not that she had neglected them, but she certainly hadn’t screwed up her eyes and focused on them the way she had focused on Denny.
And yet it was Denny who complained of feeling slighted!
While she was flipping through her mail the other day, she’d grown gradually aware that he was speaking to her.
“Hmm?” she’d said absently, slitting an envelope.
Then, “ ‘Wealth management,’ ” she had said, biting off the words.
“Don’t you hate that phrase?” and Denny had said, “You’re not listening, dammit. ”
“I’m listening.”
“When I was a kid,” he told her, “I used to daydream about kidnapping you just so I could have your full attention.”
“Oh, Denny. I paid you a lot of attention! Too much, your dad always says.”
He just cocked his head at her.
Not only had she paid him attention, but she had secretly taken more pleasure in him than in any of the others.
He was so full of life, so fierce. (In fact, he sometimes brought Dane Quinn to mind—her renegade ex-boyfriend, killed these many years ago in a one-car accident.) And he could delight her with his unexpected slants of vision.
Last month, rolling up the supposedly dusty rug in the little boys’ room, he had paused to ask, “Did you ever think how conceited those Oriental rug weavers are, to believe they have to try and make a mistake so as not to compete with God? Like they would have done it perfectly otherwise, if they hadn’t forced themselves to mess up! ” Abby had laughed aloud.
Maybe when he was grown, she remembered thinking during his childhood, he would finally tell her what used to make him so angry. But then when he was grown she had asked him, and he had said, “I don’t know, to be honest.”
Abby sighed and watched a schoolboy walk past, bowed low beneath an overstuffed backpack.
This porch was not just long but deep—the depth of a smallish living room.
In her early years here, when she was a gung-ho young housewife, she had ordered an entire suite of wicker furniture varnished the same honey-gold as the swing—a low table, a settee, and two armchairs—and arranged them in a circular “conversational group” at one end of the porch.
But nobody wanted to sit facing away from the street, and so gradually the chairs had migrated to either side of the settee and people once again sat in a straight line gazing outward, not at each other, like passengers on a steamship deck.
Abby thought that summed up her role in this family.
She had her notions, her ideas of how things ought to be, but everyone proceeded as he or she liked, regardless.
She looked down through the trees and saw a flash of white: Heidi’s mane feathering as she pranced homeward, followed by Nora wheeling the stroller in her sashaying, aimless way. Without even thinking about it, Abby bounded up from the swing like a much younger woman and slipped into the house.
The front hall still smelled of coffee and toast, which ordinarily struck her as cozy but today made her feel claustrophobic. She headed straight for the stairs and climbed them swiftly. She was out of sight by the time she heard the thump-thump of Sammy’s stroller being hauled up the porch steps.