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Junior told Red he was imagining things. After the situation blew up, after the truth came bursting out and nearly all of Baltimore stopped speaking to Trey and Merrick, Red said, “I knew this would happen! I saw it coming. Merrick pla
But Junior said, “Boy, what are you talking about? Human beings can’t be stolen. Not unless they want to be.”
“I swear, she started plotting last summer and damned if she didn’t go through with it. She flattered Trey to his face and she ran him down to Pookie behind his back and she curtsied and kowtowed to his mother till I thought I was going to puke.”
“Well, it’s not like he was Pookie’s property,” Junior said.
Then he said, “And anyhow, he’s Merrick’s now.”
And two lines deepened at the corners of his mouth, the way they always did when he had settled some piece of business exactly to his liking.
An outside observer might say that these weren’t stories at all. Somebody buys a house he’s admired when it finally comes on the market. Somebody marries a man who was once engaged to her friend. It happens all the time.
Maybe it was just that the Whitshanks were such a recent family, so short on family history. They didn’t have that many stories to choose from. They had to make the most of what they could get.
Clearly they couldn’t look to Red for stories. Red just went ahead and married Abby Dalton, whom he had known since she was twelve — a Hampden girl, coincidentally, from the neighborhood where the Whitshanks used to live. In fact, he and she lived in Hampden themselves, during the early days of their marriage. (“Why’d we even bother moving,” his father asked him, “if you were going to head back down there the very first chance you got?”) Then after his parents died — killed by a freight train in ’67 when their car stalled on the railroad tracks — Red took over the house on Bouton Road. Certainly Merrick didn’t want it. She and Trey had a much better place of their own, not to mention their Sarasota property, and besides, she said, she had never really liked that house. It didn’t have en suite bathrooms, and when Junior had finally added one to the master bedroom, reconfiguring the giant cedar-lined storeroom back in the 1950s, she’d complained that she was jolted awake every time the toilet flushed. So there Red was, in the house he’d grown up in, where he pla
The neighborhood referred to it as “the Whitshank house” now. Junior would have been happy to know that. One of his major a
There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. None of them was famous. None of them could claim exceptional intelligence. And in looks, they were no more than average. Their lea
Their family firm was well thought of, but then so were many others, and the low number on their home-improvement license testified to nothing more than mere longevity, so why make such a fuss about it? Staying put: they appeared to view it as a virtue. Three of Red and Abby’s four children lived within twenty minutes of them. Nothing so notable about that!
But like most families, they imagined they were special. They took great pride, for instance, in their fix-it skills. Calling in a repairman — even one of their own employees — was looked upon as a sign of defeat. All of them had inherited Junior’s allergy to ostentation, and all of them were convinced that they had better taste than the rest of the world. At times they made a little too much of the family quirks — of both Amanda and Jea
Patience, in fact, was what the Whitshanks imagined to be the theme of their two stories — patiently lying in wait for what they believed should come to them. “Biding their time,” as Junior had put it, and as Merrick might have put it too if she had been willing to talk about it. But somebody more critical might say that the theme was envy. And someone else, someone who had known the family intimately and forever (but there wasn’t any such person), might ask why no one seemed to realize that another, unspoken theme lay beneath the first two: in the long run, both stories had led to disappointment.
Junior got his house, but it didn’t seem to make him as happy as you might expect, and he had often been seen contemplating it with a puzzled, forlorn sort of look on his face. He spent the rest of his life fidgeting with it, altering it, adding closets, resetting flagstones, as if he hoped that achieving the perfect abode would finally open the hearts of those neighbors who never acknowledged him. Neighbors whom he didn’t even like, as it turned out.
Merrick got her husband, but he was a cold, aloof man unless he was drinking, in which case he grew argumentative and boorish. They never had children, and Merrick spent most of her time alone in the Sarasota place so as to avoid her mother-in-law, whom she detested.
The disappointments seemed to escape the family’s notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.
3
ON THE VERY FIRST DAY OF 2012, Abby began disappearing.
She and Red had kept Stem’s three boys overnight so that Stem and Nora could go to a New Year’s Eve party, and Stem showed up to collect them around ten o’clock the next morning. Like everyone else in the family, he gave only a token knock before walking on into the house. “Hello?” he called. He stopped in the hall and stood listening, idly ruffling the dog’s ears. The only sounds came from his children in the sunroom. “Hello,” he said again. He walked toward their voices.
The boys sat on the rug around a Parcheesi board, three stair-step towheads dressed scruffily in jeans. “Dad,” Petey said, “tell Sammy he can’t play with us. He doesn’t add the dots up right!”
“Where’s your grandma?” Stem asked.
“I don’t know. Tell him, Dad! And he rolled the dice so hard, one went under the couch.”
“Grandma said I could play,” Sammy said.
Stem walked back into the living room. “Mom? Dad?” he called.
No answer.
He went to the kitchen, where he found his father sitting at the breakfast table reading the Baltimore Sun. Over the past few years Red had grown hard of hearing, and it wasn’t till Stem entered his line of vision that he looked up from his newspaper. “Hey!” he said. “Happy New Year!”