A Spool of Blue Thread

“The point is, what reputation you get. What opinion your community has of you. Now, you may not feel that a savings and loan is your be-all and your end-all …”

How could this man have been the hero of Mrs. Whitshank’s romance? Whether you found it dashing or tawdry, at least it had been a romance, complete with intrigue and scandal and a wrenching separation. But Junior Whitshank was dry as a bone, droning on relentlessly while the other diners ate their food in dogged silence. Only his wife was looking at him, her face alight with interest as he discussed the value of hard labor, then the deplorable lack of initiative in the younger generation, then the benefits conferred by having lived through the Great Depression. If young folks today had lived through a depression the way he had lived through a depression — but then he broke off to call, “Ah! Going out with your buddies?”

It was Merrick he was addressing. She was crossing the hall, heading toward the front door, but she stopped and turned to face him. “Yup,” she said. “Don’t wait supper.” Her hair had become a mass of bubbly black curls that bounced all over her head.

“Merrick’s fiancé, now; he’s gone into his family’s business,” Mr. Whitshank told the others. “Doing a fine job too, I gather. Course we couldn’t call him a practical fellow — doesn’t know how to change his own oil, even; can you believe it?”

“Well, toodle-oo,” Merrick said, and she trilled her fingers at the table and left. Her father blinked but then picked up his thread — the “spoiledness” of the rich and their complete inability to do for themselves — but Abby had stopped listening. She felt suddenly hopeless, defeated by his complacent, self-relishing drawl, his not-quite-right “I and your dad” and his trying-too-hard Northern i’s, his greedy attention to the details of class and privilege. But Mrs. Whitshank went on smiling at him, while Red just helped himself to another slice of tomato. Earl was stacking biscuits three high on the rim of his plate, as if he pla

“All of which,” Mr. Whitshank was saying, “shows why you would never. Ever. Under any circumstances. Knuckle under to these people. I’m talking to you, Redcliffe.”

Red stopped salting his tomato slice and looked up. He said, “Me?”

“Why you would not kowtow to them. Butter them up. Soft-soap them. Tell them, ‘Yes, Mr. Barkalow,’ and, ‘No, Mr. Barkalow,’ and, ‘Whatever you say, Mr. Barkalow. Oh, we wouldn’t want to discommode you, Mr. Barkalow.’ ”

Red was cutting into his tomato slice now, not meeting his father’s eyes or even appearing to hear him, but his cheekbones had a raw, scratched look as if they’d been raked by someone’s fingernails.

“ ‘Oh, Mr. Barkalow,’ ” Mr. Whitshank said in a simpering voice. “ ‘Is this mutually agreeable to you?’ ”

“We got that trunk down, boss,” Landis said. “Got her just about flat to the ground.”

Abby wanted to hug him.

Mr. Whitshank was preparing to say more, but he paused and looked over at Landis. “Oh,” he said. “Well, good. Now all’s we have to do is wait for Mitch to finish lunch at his durn mother-in-law’s.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath, boss. You ever met his mother-in-law? Woman is a cooking fiend. Seven children, all of them married, all with children of their own, and every Sunday after church they all get together at her house and she serves three kinds of meat, two kinds of potato, salad, pickles, vegetables …”

Abby sat back in her chair. She hadn’t realized how tightly she had been clenching her muscles. She wasn’t hungry anymore, and when Mrs. Whitshank urged another piece of chicken on her she mutely shook her head.

“Another thing,” Red said.

He had paused next to Abby as the men were leaving the dining room. Abby, collecting a fistful of dirty silverware, turned to look at him.

“If you’re thinking you shouldn’t come to the wedding because it’s too short of a notice,” he said, “that wouldn’t be a problem, I promise. A lot of people Merrick invited are staying away. All those friends of Pookie Vanderlin’s, and their moms and dads too — they’ve mostly said no. We’re going to end up with way too much food at the reception, I bet.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Abby told him, and she gave him a quick pat on the arm as if to thank him, but what she really meant to convey was that she had already put his father’s tirade out of her mind and she hoped that he would do the same.

Dane, waiting for Red in the doorway, sent her a wink. He liked to poke fun at Red’s devotion sometimes, referring to him as “your feller.” Usually this made her smile, but today she just went back to her table clearing, and after a moment he and Red walked on out to join the others.

She set the silverware next to the kitchen sink where Mrs. Whitshank was washing glasses, and then she returned to the dining room. There stood Mr. Whitshank, scooping a gooey chunk of peach cobbler from the baking dish with his fingers. He froze when he saw Abby, but then he lifted his chin defiantly and popped the chunk into his mouth. With showy deliberation, he wiped his fingers on a napkin.

Abby said, “It must be hard to be you, Mr. Whitshank.”

His fingers stilled on the napkin. He said, “What’s that you say?”

“You’re glad your daughter’s marrying a rich boy but it irks you rich boys are so spoiled. You want your son to join the gentry but you’re mad when he’s polite to them. I guess you just can’t be satisfied, can you?”

“Missy, you’ve got no business taking that tone with me,” he said.

Abby felt as if she were about to run out of breath, but she stood her ground. “Well?” she asked. “Can you?”

“I’m proud of both my children,” Mr. Whitshank said in a steely voice. “Which is more than your daddy can say for you, I reckon, with that disrespectful tongue of yours.”

“My father is very proud of me,” she told him.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering where you come from.”

Abby opened her mouth but then closed it. She snatched up the cobbler dish and marched out to the kitchen with it, her back very straight and her head high.

Mrs. Whitshank had left off washing dishes to start drying some of those that were sitting on the drain board. Abby took the towel from her, and Mrs. Whitshank said, “Why, thank you, honey,” and returned to the sink. She didn’t seem to notice how Abby’s hands were shaking. Abby felt bitterly triumphant but also wounded in some way — cut to the quick.

How dare he say a word about where she came from? He of all people, with his shady, shameful past! Her family was very respectable. They had ancestors they could brag about: a great-great-grandfather, for instance, who had once rescued a king. (Granted, the rescue was merely a matter of helping to lift a carriage wheel out of a rut in the road, but the king had nodded to him personally, it was believed.) And a great-aunt out west who’d gone to college with Willa Cather, although it was true that the great-aunt hadn’t known at the time that Willa Cather existed. Oh, there was nothing lower-class about the Daltons, nothing second-rate, and their house might be on the smallish side but at least they got along with their neighbors.

Mrs. Whitshank was talking about dishwashing machines. She just didn’t see the need, she was saying. She said, “Why, some of my nicest conversations have been over a sinkful of dishes! But Junior thinks we ought to get a machine. He’s all for going out and buying one.”

“What does he know about it?” Abby demanded.

Mrs. Whitshank was quiet a moment. Then, “Oh,” she said, “he just wants to make my life easier, I guess.”

Abby fiercely dried a platter.

“People don’t always understand Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “But he’s a better man than you know, Abby, honey.”