A Spool of Blue Thread

9

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, BREEZY, yellow-and-green morning in July of 1959, and Abby Dalton was standing at her front window watching for her ride. She wanted to run out before he could honk his horn. Her mother had a rule that boys should ring the doorbell and step inside the house and hold a polite conversation before they could carry Abby off, but try telling Dane Quinn that! He wasn’t much of a one for small talk.

If her mother complained later, Abby would say, “Oh, didn’t you hear him ring?” Her mother wouldn’t quite believe her, but she would probably let it pass.

Abby was dressed in the new style she’d come home from college with this spring — a flowery, translucent skirt with a black knit leotard, and black nylon stockings even though the morning was already warming up. The stockings gave her a beatnik look, she hoped. (These were her only pair, and when she took them off at the end of the day she knew she’d find startling black splotches here and there on her legs where she had colored in the holes with a felt-tip marker.) Her long fair hair was streaked lighter in places from half a summer’s worth of sun, and her eyes were heavily outlined with a black Maybelline eyebrow pencil but her lips were pale, which her mother said just made it seem she had forgotten something. Dane wasn’t given to compliments — and that was fine; Abby could understand that — but occasionally, when she slid into his car, he would rest his eyes on her for a moment longer than usual, and she was thinking he might do that this morning. She had taken extra care getting ready, dampening her hair to comb it straight and dabbing a drop of vanilla on the insides of her wrists. Some days it was almond extract or rosewater or lemon oil, but today was most definitely a vanilla day, she’d decided.

She heard her mother’s footsteps crossing the upstairs hall and she turned, but the footsteps stopped and her mother said something to Abby’s father. He was shaving at the bathroom sink with the door open; it was Sunday and he’d slept late, for him. “Did you remember to …?” her mother asked, and then something, something. Abby relaxed and turned back to the window. The Vincents from next door were getting into their Chevy. A good thing they were leaving: Mrs. Vincent was the kind of woman who would have asked Abby’s mother, seemingly in innocence, “Now, who was that fella I saw Abby tearing out of the house to meet? Young folks nowadays are so … informal-like, aren’t they?”

All Abby had told her mother was that she was hitching a ride with Dane to help set up for Merrick Whitshank’s wedding. She had made it sound like a chore, not a date. (Although it was a date, in her mind. She and Dane were still at that early stage where even tagging along with him on some humdrum errand, hanging around his edges like a puppy tied outside a grocery store, made her feel especially chosen.) So far, Dane and her mother had come face-to-face only twice, and it hadn’t gone well. Her mother just had a tendency to take against people, sometimes. She wouldn’t say anything outright, but Abby always knew.

The Vincents drove away and a panel truck pounced on their space. Parking was very tight on this block. Almost no one had a garage. What could have been the Daltons’ garage — the basement area at street level, opening onto the sidewalk — was Abby’s father’s hardware store. If Dane were to ring the doorbell for her, he would have had to park who-knows-where and walk from there to her house. So honking was just sensible, really.

Her mother was complaining about something, in her mild way. “… asked you a dozen times if I’ve asked once,” she was saying, and Abby’s father offered some muted response—“Sorry, hon,” maybe, or “… told you I would get to it.” Abby’s cat marched purposefully down the stairs, each paw landing plop, plop, plop, as if he were offended. He leapt into the armchair near Abby and curled up and gave a disgusted sniff.

Some oppressive quality in the room — its small size, or its overstuffed furniture, or its dimness compared to the sunlight out on the street — made Abby feel suddenly desperate to get away. Although she loved her home, really. And loved her family, too, and had thought she couldn’t wait to finish her freshman year and come back to where she was cherished and made much of and admired. But all this summer she had felt so itchy and impatient. Her father told corny jokes and then laughed louder than his audience, “Haw! Haw!” with his mouth wide open, and her mother had this habit of humming a tiny fragment of some hymn every few minutes or so, just a couple of measures under her breath, after which, presumably, the hymn continued playing silently in her head until a few more notes emerged a moment later. Had she always done that? It would have perked things up if Abby’s brother were around, but he was away lifeguarding at a Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania.

Oh, and here came Dane! His two-tone Buick, blue and white, slowed for the stop sign at the corner. Already she could hear the pounding thrum of his radio. She grabbed her purse and tore open the screen door and rushed out lickety-split, so that by the time he’d double-parked in front of the Laundromat across the street she was flying down the stairs at the side of the house and there was no need for him to honk. His arm was dangling out his window — tanned skin, subtly muscled, glinting with gold hairs, she knew — and his face was turned toward her but she couldn’t read his expression because cars kept passing between them. (All of a sudden there was traffic, as if his presence had enlivened the neighborhood.) She waited for a driver who made way too much of a production about having to veer around him, and then she darted across, causing another driver to brake and tap his horn. She circled the Buick’s front end and opened the passenger door and hopped in with a flounce of her skirt. “Johnny B. Goode” was the song that was playing. Chuck Berry, hammering away. She set her purse on the seat between them and turned to meet Dane’s gaze.

He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you.”

Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.

He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.

In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.

“I wish I were asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”

“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.

“Oh, they’re paying you?”

“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”

But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.

Although it was probably true that he was short of cash. A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job. His family was well off — better off than hers, at least — but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie. He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies. Should she offer to pay her own way from now on? But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship. And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.

They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“Kicked me out of the house.”

“Oh, my goodness!”

“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”

Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”

“Oh, what about?”

Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.

“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”

It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.

“We’re cutting up a tree.”

“A tree!”

“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”

“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”

“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”

“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.

“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head. He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk! He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos. He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo. And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her. That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house. Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go.”

“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”

“He says it was already dying.”

“Hmm.”

“Merrick and her bridesmaids have to get dressed at crack of dawn on her wedding day because taking those two photos is going to use up so much time,” Dane said. “Mrs. Whitshank says he’ll make Merrick late for her own wedding.”

“And those full-length skirts! They’ll get all leafy and twiggy!”

“Mr. Whitshank claims they won’t. He’s laying white carpet down the whole walk, and then extra on the sides near the house where the bridesmaids are going to stand.”

Abby looked at Dane with her mouth open. Behind his dark glasses, he gave no hint what he thought of this plan.

“I’m surprised Merrick’s going along with it,” she told him.

“Oh, well, you know Mr. Whitshank,” Dane said.

Abby didn’t, in fact, know Mr. Whitshank at all. (Mrs. Whitshank was the one she was fond of.) She had the impression, though, that he was a man of strong opinions.

They passed the church where the wedding would take place in six more days. People were heading toward it in clusters, perhaps for Sunday school or an early service — the women and girls in pastels and flower-laden hats and white gloves, the men and boys in suits. Abby looked for Merrick, but she didn’t see her. It was Dane’s church too, not that he ever seemed to attend.

Abby had known Dane, at least by sight, since her early teens, but they hadn’t gotten together till this past May, her first week home from college. She’d run into Red Whitshank one evening in the ticket line at the Senator, and he had two of his friends with him, one of them Dane Quinn. And Abby was with two of her friends; it had all worked out very neatly. Possibly Red had been hoping to sit next to her in the theater (it was common knowledge that he had a little crush on her), but she took one glance at Dane, at his forbidding scowl and his defensively hunched shoulders, and then stepped between him and her friend Ruth like the most brazen hussy (as Ruth said teasingly later). Something just came over her; she felt pulled to him. She liked his edginess, his wariness, his obvious grudge against the universe. Not to mention his good looks. Well, everyone knew his story. He’d been a standard-issue Gilman boy who went on to Princeton, like his father and both grandfathers before him, but just this past September — the start of his junior year — his mother had up and left his father and gone to live in Hunt Valley with the man who boarded her quarter horse. And as soon as Dane heard about it, he’d dropped out of school and come home. First he moped around the house but eventually, at his father’s insistence, he got a job of some sort at Stephenson Savings & Loan. (Bertie Stephenson had been his father’s college roommate.) He never talked about his mother; he iced over at any mention of her, but that just proved to Abby how deeply hurt he must be. Abby had a special fondness for people who tried to hide the damage. He became her newest worthy cause. She flung herself at him, worked to bring him out of himself, zeroed in on him at every gathering, wouldn’t take no for an answer. But no was his answer, at first. He stood around separate from the others and drank too much and smoked too much and made sullen one-word responses to her most sympathetic remarks. Then one evening — on Red Whitshank’s front porch, as it happened — he turned on her almost threateningly and backed her against the wall and said, “I want to know why you keep hanging around me.”

She could have offered any number of good reasons. She could have said it was because of his obvious unhappiness, or her conviction that she could make a difference in his life. But what she said was, “Because of that up-and-down groove between your nose and your upper lip.”

He said, “What?”

“Because your hair falls down all shaggy as if you’re a little bit crazy.”

He blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t have to know what I mean,” she told him, and then, completely out of character, she moved toward him and raised her face to him and saw him begin to believe her.

Now it was more or less accepted that they were a couple, although she could tell that their friends were surprised. She didn’t explain herself to them. She became, in a way, a little like Dane; she grew cagey and evasive. She began to notice how stodgy their friends were, and although she had assumed, till now, that her ultimate goal in life was a husband and four children and a comfortable house with a yard, all at once she began biting off the words “domestic” and “suburban” with her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Who wants to go to the Club for dinner?” someone would say, and Dane would say, “Gosh, the Club, what an unspeakable thrill.” Everybody would look sideways at Abby, but she would just smile tolerantly and take another sip of her Coke. She was the only one who knew him, she was saying — who divined that he was nowhere near as bad as he pretended to be.

Although every now and then, for a flash of a second, she wondered if his badness was precisely what attracted her. Not that he was really bad, but there was something risky about him, something contrary and outrageous. After he was fired, for instance, he had left the building with twenty-four boxes of staples. Fifty-seven thousand six hundred staples; later he’d done the math. (His glee when he told her this had made her smile.) And he didn’t even own a stapler! He had once driven out to where his mother was living with Horse Guy, as Dane called him, and duct-taped all the doors shut in the middle of the night. That escapade had made Abby laugh aloud. “Why in the world …?” she had asked, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain; it was almost the only time he had let the word “mother” cross his lips, and maybe he already regretted it.

Also his drinking, while it was deplorable, lent him a certain shambling, reckless, juvenile-delinquent quality that touched her heart even while she was shaking her head over him. You could see this boy coming half a block away and know him by his rolling walk, his hands jammed in his pockets, his face half hidden by his shank of hair and his back a brooding C shape. Oh, it wasn’t only the disadvantaged who needed compassion! He was leading a life just as hard, in some ways, as the lives of those poor little Negro children she was tutoring this summer. He could shoot a splinter of sadness straight through her.

She looked over at his profile, the slant of his cheek below the dark glasses, and sent him a small, warm smile even though he didn’t see it.

“But. So. Anyhow. I was saying,” he said, lifting his arm to signal a turn. “About my cousin.”

“Your cousin,” she repeated.

“George. The one I’m staying with.”

“Oh, have I met him?”

“No, he’s older. He’s got a career and all. He’s going away next weekend to visit his girlfriend in Boston.”

The Buick tilted slightly as it swerved onto Bouton Road, and Abby grabbed her purse before it could slide off the seat.

“I’ll have the place to myself,” Dane said. He parked in front of the Whitshanks’ and took his key from the ignition. The music stopped short but he went on sitting there, gazing through the windshield. “I was thinking you could come over Friday evening. Maybe tell your mom you were spending the night with a friend.”

She had foreseen that something like this would arise, sooner or later. It was where they’d been heading all along. It was where she wanted to head.

So she couldn’t explain what she said next. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.

He turned and looked at her, although his expression was still a blank behind the dark glasses. “Don’t know what?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure what friend I could tell her, and besides, I might be busy that night, I might have to do something with my parents; I’m not sure.”

She wasn’t handling this very smoothly. She was cross with herself for sounding so flustered. “I’ll have to see,” she told him, and she yanked open her door and all but fell out of the car in her haste to leave the moment behind.

Walking in front of him toward the house, though, she was conscious of her slim waist, and the sway of her skirt, and the swing of her hair down her back. He must have been thinking about this ahead of time. He must have consciously decided he wanted her, and imagined how it would be. The knowledge made her feel mysterious and desirable and grown-up.

Red Whitshank and another friend of his, Ward Rainey, stood talking with two workmen at the lower edge of the lawn. One of the workmen had a chainsaw, and Red and the other workman were carrying axes. All around them, in a massive tangle, lay thick branches and cross sections of trunk. That tulip poplar must have been gigantic. (And nowhere near dying, if you judged by all the green leaves.) The remainder of the trunk, some ten feet tall, still towered near the front porch, as flat-topped and perfectly cylindrical as an architectural column.

“… figure when Mitch gets here he can tell us how much he wants left,” Red was saying, and the man with the chainsaw said, “Well, I can’t see as he’ll want any left, because he’s not going to haul it out roots and all, is he? That would leave too big of a hole.”

“What, you’re thinking he’ll bring in a stump grinder?”

“Seems like that would make more sense.”

Abby called, “Hi, everybody.”

They turned, and Red said, “Hi, Abby! Hi, Dane.”

“Red,” Dane said, impassively.

Abby had always thought Red’s looks didn’t go with his name. He should have had red hair and that pinkish skin that went with it; he should have been freckled and doughy. Instead, he was all black-and-white, lean and lanky, with a boyishly prominent Adam’s apple and wrist bones as distinct as cabinet knobs. Today he was wearing a T-shirt that was more holes than fabric, and khakis with dirty knees. He could have been one of his father’s workmen. “These here are Earl and Landis,” he was saying. “They’re the guys who took this thing down.”

Earl and Landis nodded without smiling, and Ward lifted a palm.

“You took it down just the two of you?” Abby asked the men.

“Naw, Red helped plenty,” Earl said.

“Only with the muscle power,” Red told her. “It was Earl and Landis who knew how not to take everything else with it.”

“Laid her in place like a baby,” Landis said with satisfaction.

Abby lifted her eyes to study the canopy of leaves above them. So many trees remained that she couldn’t detect any change in the filtering of the light, but still, the loss of the poplar seemed a pity. The cross sections strewn about looked perfectly sound, and the sap filled the air with a scent as vital and sharp as fresh blood.

The men had returned to the subject of stump removal. Earl was of the opinion that they ought to just go ahead and cut the last of the trunk level with the ground, while Landis suggested waiting for Mitch. “Meantime we can strip these branches,” he said, and he set a foot on the nearest branch and gave one of its shoots an experimental tap with his axe. Abby liked hearing workmen discuss logistics. It made her feel like a small child again, sitting on her father’s counter swinging her feet and breathing in the smells of metal and machine oil.

Earl yanked the cord of his chainsaw and set up a deafening roar. He lowered the blade to the thickest part of a branch while Ward bent to grab another branch and haul it out of the way. “I don’t guess you brought an axe,” Red shouted to Dane.

Dane, who was lighting a cigarette, shook out his match and said, “Now, how would I ever have gotten my hands on an axe?”

“I’ll fetch another from the basement,” Red said. He propped his own axe against a dogwood. “Come on, Ab, I’ll take you up to the house.”

“You’re sure I can’t do something here?” she asked. It seemed a shame to go off and leave Dane.

But Red said, “You can help my mom fix lunch, if you like.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dane cocked an eyebrow at her in a silent goodbye, and then she and Red turned to climb the flagstone walk. Leaving behind the din of the chainsaw, she felt as if her ears had gone numb. “You really think this will take until lunchtime?” she asked Red.

“Oh, longer than that,” he said. “We’re lucky if we’re done before dark.”

She supposed that was just as well. She would have more time to reassemble her composure in front of Dane. By evening she’d be a whole different person, self-possessed and mature.

They arrived at the porch steps, but instead of leaving her there, Red came to a stop. “Say,” he said. “I was wondering. You want a ride to the wedding?”

“I’m not sure I’m going to the wedding,” Abby said.

She had about decided not to, in fact. The invitation (on paper so thick it had required two postage stamps) had come as a surprise; she and Merrick weren’t close. Besides, Dane wasn’t invited. Merrick barely knew Dane. So Abby had been meaning for weeks now to send her regrets.

But Red said, “You aren’t going? Mom was counting on it.”

Abby wrinkled her forehead.

“I was, too,” he told her. “Because who else will I know in that crowd?”

She said, “Don’t you have to be an usher or something?”

“It never even came up,” he said.

“Well, thank you, Red. You’re nice to offer. I’ll let you know if I decide to go, okay?”

He hesitated a moment, as if there were more he wanted to say, but then he smiled at her and split off toward the rear of the house.

Crossing the porch in three long strides, tall and craggy as Abraham Lincoln and dressed not all that differently from Lincoln, Junior Whitshank inclined his head a quarter-inch in Abby’s direction and then swiftly descended the steps. “Morning, young lady,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Whitshank.”

“Merrick’s not up yet, I don’t believe.”

“Well, I was looking for Mrs. Whitshank.”

“Mrs. Whitshank is in the kitchen.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Whitshank veered off the flagstone walk toward where the men were working. Abby, gazing after him, wondered where on earth he bought his shirts. They were white, always, and unfashionably high in the collar, so that a tall band of white encased his skinny neck. She often had the feeling that he might be modeling himself after some ideal — some illustrious figure from his past that he had admired. But his narrow black trousers looked empty in the seat, and the Y of his suspenders accentuated the weary, burdened posture of an ordinary laboring man.

“Mitch here yet?” she heard him call, and a murmur of answers rose above the buzz of the chainsaw like bees humming in a log.

Abby climbed the steps, crossed the porch, opened the screen door, and tootled, “Yoo-hoo!” It was something Linnie Whitshank would have done. Automatically, Abby seemed to have switched to Mrs. Whitshank’s language and to her tone of voice — thin and fluty.

“Back here!” Mrs. Whitshank called from the kitchen.

Abby loved the Whitshanks’ house. Even on a hot July day it was cool and dim, with the ceiling fan revolving high above the center hall and another fan gently stirring in the dining room. A folded tablecloth had been placed at one end of the table with a clutch of silverware resting on top, waiting to be distributed. She continued through to the kitchen, where Mrs. Whitshank stood at the sink rinsing okra pods. Mrs. Whitshank was slight and frail-looking, but an incongruously deep, low bosom filled out the top of her gingham housedress. Her pale hair hung limply almost to her shoulders. It was a young girl’s hairstyle, and her face when she turned to Abby seemed young as well — unlined and plain and guileless. “Hey, there!” she said, and Abby said, “Hi.”

“Don’t you look pretty today!”

“I came to see how I could help,” Abby said.

“Oh, honey, you don’t want to spoil those nice clothes. Just sit and keep me company.”

Abby pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and settled on it. She had learned not to argue with Mrs. Whitshank, who was a force of nature when it came to cooking and would only find Abby a hindrance.

“How’s that tree coming along?” Mrs. Whitshank asked her.

“They’re starting to cut up the branches now.”

“Did you ever hear of such a thing? Bringing down a whole poplar for the sake of a photograph.”

“Photy-graph,” she pronounced it. She had a country way of talking, and unlike her husband, she made no attempt to alter it.

“Dane says the tree was already dying, according to Mr. Whitshank,” Abby said.

“Oh, sometimes Junior will just get this sort of vision about how he wants things to be,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. She shut off the faucet and wiped her hands on her apron. “He’s already bought frames for the photos, isn’t that something? Two big frames, wooden. I asked him, I said, ‘You going to hang those over the mantel?’ He said, ‘Linnie Mae.’ ” She made her voice go deep and gruff. “Said, ‘People don’t hang family photos in their living rooms.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Did you know that?”

“My mom’s got photos all over the living room,” Abby said.

“Well, then. See there?”

Mrs. Whitshank took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and poured some into a bowl. “I’m fixing okra and sliced tomatoes,” she told Abby. “And fried chicken, with some of my biscuits. Oh, later on you might help with the biscuits, now that you know how. And peach cobbler for dessert.”

“That sounds delicious.”

“Did Red tell you he would give you a ride to the wedding?”

“He did,” Abby said, “but I’m not sure yet if I’m going.”

She felt embarrassed now about waiting so long to make up her mind. If her mother had known, she would have been horrified. But all Mrs. Whitshank said was, “Oh, I wish you would! I need someone to prop me up.”

Abby laughed.

“Merrick had me buy this yellow dress at Hutzler’s,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It makes me look like I’ve got the jaundice, but Merrick was real set on it. She’s like her daddy; she takes these notions.” She was spooning cornmeal into a second bowl.

Abby said, “I’m just afraid I wouldn’t know anybody. Merrick’s crowd is all older than me.”

“Well, I won’t know them, either,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “It’ll be her college friends, mostly — not many from around here.”

“Who all in your family is coming?” Abby asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, grandparents? Aunts and uncles?”

“Oh, we don’t have any of those,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

She didn’t sound very regretful about it. Abby waited for her to elaborate, but she was measuring out salt now.

“Well, I told Red I appreciate the offer,” Abby said finally. “It’s good to know I’ve got a ride if I need one.”

Really she should just say yes and be done with it. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her. It was only half a Saturday, a tiny chunk of her life.

The Saturday after she spent the night with Dane. If she spent the night.

She imagined how he might say, “Aw, you don’t want to leave me all by myself, the morning after we …”

After we …

She looked down at her skirt and smoothed it across her knees.

“How’s your job going?” Mrs. Whitshank asked her. “You still liking those little colored kids?”

“Oh, I’m loving them.”

“I hate to think of you going down into that neighborhood, though,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

“It’s not a bad neighborhood.”

“It’s a poor neighborhood, isn’t it? The people there are poor as dirt, and they’d as lief rob you as look at you. I swear, Abby, sometimes you don’t show good sense when it comes to knowing who to be scared of.”

“I could never be scared of those people!”

Mrs. Whitshank shook her head and dumped the colander of okra onto a cutting board.

“Oh, what a world, what a world,” Abby said.

“How’s that, honey?”

“That’s what the wicked witch says in The Wizard of Oz. Did you know that? They’re showing a revival downtown and I went to see it last night with Dane. The witch says, ‘I’m melting! Melting! Oh, what a world, what a world,’ she says.”

“I remember the part about ‘I’m melting,’ ” Mrs. Whitshank said. “I took Red and Merrick to see that movie when they were little bitty things.”

“Yes, well, and then she talks about ‘what a world.’ I told Dane afterward, I said, ‘I never heard that before! I had no idea she said that!’ ”

“Me neither,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “In a way, it sounds kind of pitiful.”

“Exactly,” Abby said. “All at once I started feeling sorry for her, you know? I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.”

“Oh, Abby, Lord preserve you,” Mrs. Whitshank said with a gentle laugh.

Loud, sharp heels clopped down the stairs and through the front hall. The clops crossed the dining room and Merrick appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing a red satin kimono and red mules topped with puffs of red feathers. Giant metal curlers encased her head like some sort of spaceman’s helmet. “Gawd, what time is it?” she asked. She pulled out a chair and sat down next to Abby and took a pack of Kents from her sleeve.

“Good morning, Merrick,” Abby said.

“Morning. Is that okra? Ick.”

“It’s for lunch,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. “We’ve got all those men out front who are going to need feeding.”

“Only Mom believes it’s impolite to make your workmen bring their own sandwiches,” Merrick told Abby. “Abby Dalton, are you wearing hose? Aren’t you melting?”

“I’m melting!” Abby wailed in a wicked-witch voice, and Mrs. Whitshank laughed but Merrick just looked annoyed. She lit a cigarette and let out a long whoosh of smoke. “I had the most awful dream,” she said. “I dreamed I was driving a little too fast on this winding mountain road and I missed a curve. I thought, ‘Oh-oh, this is going to be bad.’ You know that moment when you realize it’s just got to, got to happen. I went sailing over the edge of a cliff, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut and braced for the shock. But the funny thing was, I kept sailing. I never landed.”

Abby said, “That’s a terrible dream!” but Mrs. Whitshank went on placidly slicing okra.

“I thought, ‘Oh, now I get it,’ ” Merrick said. “ ‘I must already be dead.’ And then I woke up.”

“Was the car a convertible?” Mrs. Whitshank asked.

Merrick paused, with her cigarette suspended halfway to her mouth. She said, “Pardon?”

“The car in your dream. Was it a convertible?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

“If you dream you’re in a convertible it means you’re about to make a serious error in judgment,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

Merrick sent Abby a look of exaggerated astonishment. “I wonder what error you could possibly be thinking of,” she said.

“But if the car is not a convertible, it would signify you’re going to get some sort of promotion.”

“Well, what a coincidence, I dreamed about a convertible,” Merrick said. “And the whole world knows you’re dead set against this wedding, so don’t waste your breath, Linnie Mae.”

Merrick often addressed her mother as “Linnie Mae.” The twisted sound of the name in her mouth somehow managed to imply all of her mother’s shortcomings — her twangy voice, her feed-sack-looking dresses, her backwoods pronunciations like “supposably” and “eck cetera” and “desk-es.” Abby felt bad for Mrs. Whitshank, but Mrs. Whitshank herself didn’t appear to take offense. “I’m just saying,” she said mildly, and she slid a handful of okra spokes into the bowl of milk.

Merrick took a deep drag of her cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“Anyhow!” Abby told Merrick. “I bet it was one of those dreams you were really glad to wake up from, wasn’t it?”

Merrick said, “Mm-hmm,” with her eyes on the fan blades spinning above her.

Then a girl’s voice called, “Mare? Hello?” and Merrick straightened and called, “In the kitchen.”

The screen door slammed, and a moment later Pixie Kincaid and Maddie Lane arrived in the kitchen, both wearing Bermuda shorts, Maddie carrying a powder-blue Samsonite vanity case. “Merrick Whitshank, you’re still in your bathrobe!” Pixie said.

“I didn’t get home from the party till after three in the morning.”

“Well, neither did we, but it’s almost ten! Did you forget we’re practicing your makeup today?”

“I remember,” Merrick said. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Come on upstairs and let’s do this.”

“Hi, Mrs. Whitshank,” Pixie said belatedly. “Hi, um, Abby. See you later.” Maddie just gave a little wave like a windshield wiper. Then the three of them walked out, Merrick’s heels clattering. A sudden quiet descended.

“I guess Merrick must be feeling kind of tense these days,” Abby said after a moment.

“Oh, no, that’s just how she is,” Mrs. Whitshank said cheerfully. She had finished slicing the okra. She stirred the slices around in the milk, using a slotted spoon. “She was a snippy little girl and now she’s a snippy big girl,” she said. “Nothing much I can do about it.” She began transferring the okra slices to the cornmeal mixture. “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to me there’s just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over. Merrick’s always put me in mind of my granny Inman. Disapproving kind of woman; tongue like a rasp. She never did think much of me. You, now, you’re a sympathizer, same as my aunt Louise.”

“Oh,” Abby said. “Yes, I see what you’re saying. It’s kind of like reincarnation.”

Mrs. Whitshank said, “Well …”

“Except it’s within one single lifetime instead of spread out over different lifetimes.”

“Well, maybe,” Mrs. Whitshank said. Then she said, “Honey, you want to do something for me?”

“Anything,” Abby said.

“Fetch that pitcher of water from the icebox and those paper cups on the counter and take them out to the men, will you? I know they must be dying of thirst. And tell them lunch will be early; I’ll bet they’re wondering.”

Abby stood up and went to the refrigerator. Her stockings were sticking damply to the backs of her legs. It might not have been the best idea to wear them on a day like today.

As she was crossing the front hall, she overheard Mr. Whitshank talking on the phone in the sunroom. “This afternoon? What the hell?” he was saying. “Goddammit, Mitch, I’ve got five men out there waiting on you to tell them how to do that tree stump!” Abby made her footsteps lighter, thinking he might be embarrassed that she’d caught him using swear words.

Outside, the air hit her face like a warm washcloth, and the porch floorboards gave off the smell of hot varnish. But the soft, fresh breeze — unusual for this time of year — lifted the damp wisps along her hairline, and the water pitcher she was hugging chilled the insides of her arms.

Landis had gotten hold of a second chainsaw from somewhere, and he and Earl were slicing the thickest branches into fireplace-size logs. Dane and Ward were hacking off the thinner branches and dragging them to a huge pile down near the street, while Red had set up a chopping block and was splitting the logs into quarters. They all stopped work when Abby arrived. Earl and Landis killed their chainsaws and a ringing silence fell, so that her voice sounded shockingly clear: “Anybody want water?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Earl told her, and they set down their tools and came over to her. Ward had taken his shirt off, which made him look like an amateur, and he and Dane were deeply flushed. Red, of course, had been working this hard the whole summer, but even he had rivulets of sweat running down his face, and Earl and Landis were so drenched that their blue chambray shirts were almost navy.

She distributed paper cups and then filled them while the men held them out, and they emptied them in one gulp and held them out again before she’d finished the first round. It wasn’t till halfway through the third round that anyone said more than “Thanks.” Then Red asked, “Did Dad get ahold of Mitch, do you know?”

“I think he’s on the phone with him now.”

“I still say we just go ahead and take the whole thing down,” Earl told Red.

“Well, I don’t want Mitch showing up and saying we made his job harder.”

Dane and Abby were looking at each other. Dane’s hair was damp, and he gave off a wonderful smell of clean sweat and tobacco. Abby had a sudden, worrisome thought: she didn’t own any nice underwear. Just plain white cotton underpants and white cotton bras with the tiniest pink rosebud stitched to the center V. She looked away again.

“Hello?”

It was a beefy man in a seersucker suit, parting the azalea hedge that bordered the lawn next door. Twigs crackled under his chalk-white shoes as he walked toward them. “Say, there,” he said when he reached them. He had his eyes fixed specifically on Red.

“Hi, Mr. Barkalow,” Red said.

“Wonder if you realize what time your men started work this morning.”

Landis was the one who answered. “Eight o’clock,” he said.

“Eight o’clock,” Mr. Barkalow repeated, still looking at Red.

Landis said, “That’s when me and Red and Earl here started. The rest of them showed up later.”

“Eight o’clock in the morning,” Mr. Barkalow said. “A Sunday morning. A weekend. Does that strike you as acceptable?”

“Well, it seems okay to me, sir,” Red said in a steady voice.

“Is that right. Eight o’clock on a Sunday morning seems a fine time to run a chainsaw.”

He had ginger eyebrows that bristled out aggressively, but Red didn’t seem intimidated. He said, “I figured most folks would be—”

“Morning, there!” Mr. Whitshank called.

He was striding toward them down the slope of the lawn, wearing a black suit coat that must have been put on in haste. The left lapel was turned wrong, like a dog’s ear flipped inside out. “Fine day!” he said to Mr. Barkalow. “Good to see you out enjoying it.”

“I was just asking your son, Mr. Whitshank, what he considers to be an acceptable hour to run a chainsaw.”

“Oh, why, is there a problem?”

“The problem is that today is Sunday; I don’t know if you’re aware of it,” Mr. Barkalow said.

He had transferred his bushy-browed glare to Mr. Whitshank, who was nodding emphatically as if he couldn’t agree more. “Yes, well, we certainly wouldn’t want to—” he said.

“It is perverse how you people love to make a racket while the rest of us are trying to sleep. You’re hammering on your gutters, you’re drilling out your flagstones … Only yesterday, you sawed an entire tree down! A perfectly healthy tree, might I add. And always, always it seems to happen on a weekend.”

Mr. Whitshank suddenly grew taller.

“It doesn’t seem to happen on a weekend; it does happen on a weekend,” he said. “That’s the only time we honest laboring men aren’t busy doing you folks’ work for you.”

“You ought to thank your lucky stars I don’t report you to the police,” Mr. Barkalow said. “They’re bound to have ordinances dealing with this kind of thing.”

“Ordinances! Don’t make me laugh. Just because you all like to lie abed till noon, you and that spoiled son of yours with his big fat—”

“When you think about it,” Red broke in, “it doesn’t really matter if there are ordinances or there aren’t.”

Both men looked at him.

“What matters is, we seem to be waking our neighbors. I’m sorry about that, Mr. Barkalow. We certainly never intended to discommode you.”

“ ‘Discommode’?” his father repeated in a marveling voice.

Red said, “I wonder if we could settle on an hour that’s mutually agreeable.”

“ ‘Mutually agreeable’?” his father echoed.

“Oh,” Mr. Barkalow said. “Well.”

“Does, maybe, ten o’clock sound all right?” Red asked him.

“Ten o’clock!” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Ten?” Mr. Barkalow said. “Oh. Well, even ten is … but, well, I guess we could tolerate ten if we were forced to.”

Mr. Whitshank looked up at the sky as if he were begging for mercy, but Red said, “Ten o’clock. It’s a deal. We’ll make sure to abide by that in the future, Mr. Barkalow.”

“Well,” Mr. Barkalow said. He seemed uncertain. He glanced again at Mr. Whitshank, and then he said, “Well, okay, then. I guess that settles it.” And he turned and walked off toward the hedge.

“Now see what you’ve done,” Mr. Whitshank told Red. “Ten o’clock, for God’s sake! Practically lunchtime!”

Red handed his paper cup to Abby without comment.

Landis said, “Uh, boss?”

“What is it,” Mr. Whitshank said.

“Did you get the word from Mitch?”

“He’s coming by this afternoon with his brother-in-law’s stump grinder. He says take the trunk on down.”

“So, cut it low to the ground?”

“Low as you can get it,” Mr. Whitshank said, and by then he had already turned away and was halfway up the hill again, as if he’d washed his hands of all of them. The hem of his suit coat hung unevenly, Abby noticed — sagging at the sides and hitching up at the center, as if it belonged to a much older and shabbier man.

She circulated among the others, collecting their paper cups in silence, and then she started back up the hill herself.

“Sometimes Junior thinks the neighbors might be looking down their noses at him,” Mrs. Whitshank said when she heard about the scene in the yard. “He’s a little bit sensitive that way.”

Abby didn’t say so, but she could see his side of it. During her years as a scholarship student she’d had a few dealings herself with Mr. Barkalow’s type — so entitled, so convinced that there was only one way to live. No doubt all his sons played lacrosse and all his daughters were preparing for their debutante balls. But she shook that thought away and folded the sheet of dough on the counter a second time and a third. (“Fold, fold, and fold again” were Mrs. Whitshank’s instructions when she’d taught Abby how to make her biscuits. “Fold till when you slap the dough, you hear it give a burp.”)

“Anyhow,” Abby said, “Red got them to compromise. It all worked out in the end.”

“Red is not so quick to take offense,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She drew a large bowl from the refrigerator and removed the dish towel that covered it. “I think it’s because he grew up here. He’s used to people like the Barkalows.”

The bowl contained pieces of chicken in a liquid white batter. Mrs. Whitshank lifted them out one by one with canning tongs and laid them on a platter to drain. “It’s like he’s comfortable with both sorts,” she said. “With the neighbors and with the work crew. I know if he had his way, though, he’d quit college right this minute and go on the work crew full-time. It’s only on account of Junior that he’s sticking it out till graduation.”

“Well, it never hurts to have a diploma,” Abby said.

“That’s what Junior tells him. He says, ‘You want the option of something better. You don’t want to end up like me,’ he says. Red says, ‘What’s wrong with ending up like you?’ He says the trouble with college is, it’s not practical. The people there aren’t practical. ‘Sometimes they strike me as silly,’ he says.”

Abby had never heard Red talk about college. He was two years ahead of her and they seldom ran into each other on campus. “What are his grades like?” she asked Mrs. Whitshank.

Mrs. Whitshank said, “They’re okay. Well, so-so. That’s just not how his mind works, you know? He’s the kind that, you show him some gadget he’s never laid eyes on before and he says, ‘Oh, I see; yes, this part goes into that part and then it connects with this other part …’ Just like his daddy, but his daddy wants Red to be different from him. Isn’t that always how it is?”

“I bet Red was one of those little boys who take the kitchen clock apart,” Abby said.

“Yes, except he could put it back together again, too, which most other little boys can’t. Oops, watch what you’re doing, Abby. I see how you’re twisting that glass!”

She meant the glass that Abby was using to cut out the biscuits. “Clamp it straight down on the dough, remember?” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Let me fetch you the skillet.”

Abby wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The kitchen was heating up, and she was swathed in one of Mrs. Whitshank’s bib aprons.

If it was true, Abby thought, that she represented a recurring figure in Mrs. Whitshank’s life — the “sympathizer”—it was equally true that Mrs. Whitshank’s type had shown up before in Abby’s life: the instructive older woman. The grandmother who had taught her to knit, the English teacher who had stayed late to help her with her poems. More patient and softer-spoken than Abby’s brisk, efficient mother, they had guided and encouraged her, like Mrs. Whitshank saying now, “Oh, those are looking good! Good as any I could have made.”

“Maybe Red could join his dad’s company full-time after college,” Abby said. “Then it could be Whitshank and Son Construction. Wouldn’t Mr. Whitshank like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “He’s hoping the law for Red. Law or business, one. Red’s got a fine head for business.”

“But if he wouldn’t be happy …” Abby said.

“Junior says happiness is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. “He says Red should just make up his mind to be happy.”

Then she stopped hunting through the utensil drawer and said, “I’m not trying to make him sound mean.”

“Of course not,” Abby said.

“He only wants what’s best for his family, you know? We’re all he’s got.”

“Well, of course.”

“Neither one of us has to do with our own families, anymore.”

“Why is that?” Abby asked.

“Oh, just, you know. Circumstances. We kind of fell out of touch with them,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “They’re clear down in North Carolina, and besides, my side were never in favor of us being together.”

“You mean you and Mr. Whitshank?”

“Just like Romeo and Juliet,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She laughed, but then she sobered and said, “Now, here is something you might not know. Guess how old Juliet was when she fell in love with Romeo.”

“Thirteen,” Abby said promptly.

“Oh.”

“They taught us that in school.”

“They taught Merrick that, too, in tenth grade,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “She came home and told me. She said, ‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’ She said that after she heard that, she couldn’t take Shakespeare seriously.”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Abby said. “A person can fall in love at thirteen.”

“Yes! A person can! Like me.”

“You?”

“I was thirteen when I fell in love with Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Oh, goodness, and here you are now, married to him!” Abby said. “That’s amazing! How old was Mr. Whitshank?”

“Twenty-six.”

Abby took a moment to absorb this. “He was twenty-six when you were thirteen?”

“Twenty-six years old,” Mrs. Whitshank said.

Abby said, “Oh.”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Yes, it is,” Abby said.

“He was this real good-looking guy, a little bit wild, worked at the lumberyard but only just sometimes. Rest of the time he was off hunting and fishing and trapping and getting himself into trouble. Well, you see the attraction. Who could resist a boy like that? Especially when you’re thirteen. And I was a kind of developed thirteen; I developed real early. I met him at a church picnic when he came with another girl, and it was love at first sight for both of us. He started up with me right then and there. After that, we would sneak off together every chance we got. Oh, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other! But one night my daddy found us.”

“Found you where?” Abby asked.

“Well, in the hay barn. But he found us … you know.” Mrs. Whitshank fluttered a hand in the air. “Oh, it was awful!” she said merrily. “It was like something out of a movie. My daddy held a gun to his neck. Then Daddy and my brothers ran him out of Yancey County. Can you believe it? Law, I think back on that now and it feels like it happened to somebody else. ‘Was that me?’ I say to myself. I didn’t lay eyes on him again for close onto five years.”

Abby had slacked off on the biscuit cutting. She was just standing there staring at Mrs. Whitshank, so Mrs. Whitshank took the glass from her and stepped in to finish up, making short work of it: clamp-clamp.

“But you kept in touch,” Abby said.

“Oh, no! I had no idea where he was.” Mrs. Whitshank was laying the biscuits in the greased skillet, edge to edge in concentric circles. “I stayed faithful to him, though. I never forgot him for one minute. Oh, we had one of the world’s great love stories, in our little way! And once we got back together again, it was like we’d never parted. You know how that happens, sometimes. We took up right where we left off, the same as ever.”

Abby said, “But—”

Had it never crossed Mrs. Whitshank’s mind that what she was describing was … well, a crime?

Mrs. Whitshank said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you, though. It’s supposed to be a secret. I’ve never even told my own children! Oh, especially my own children. Merrick would make fun of me. Promise you won’t tell them, Abby. Swear it on your life.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” Abby said.

She wouldn’t have known what words to use, even. It was all too extreme and disturbing.

Mr. and Mrs. Whitshank and Red, Earl and Landis, Ward, Dane and Abby: eight people for lunch. (Merrick would not be eating with them, Mrs. Whitshank said.) Abby traveled around the table doling out knives and forks. The Whitshanks’ silverware was real sterling, embossed with an Old English W. She wondered when they had acquired it. Not at the time of their wedding, presumably.

Her parents just had dime-store cutlery, not all of it even matching.

Suddenly she felt homesick for her bustling, sensible mother and her kindly father with his shirt pocket full of ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.

All the dining-room windows were open, the curtains wafting inward on the breeze, and she could see out to the porch where Pixie and Maddie sat in the swing with their backs to her, talking in soft, lazy voices. Merrick’s makeup session must be finished; Abby heard the shower running upstairs.

She went to the kitchen for plates, and as she returned, one of the chainsaws roared to life again. Till then, she hadn’t noticed the silence. The noise was so close that she bent to peer out a window and see what was going on. Apparently the men were tackling what remained of the trunk. Landis stood to the left, watching, while Earl stooped low with his saw. He was working on the far side of the tree, nearly out of her angle of vision, probably cutting a notch so it would fall away from the house, but Abby couldn’t be sure from where she stood. She always worried men would get crushed doing that, although these two certainly looked as if they knew what they were doing.

She set the plates around and then counted out napkins from the sideboard and laid one beside each fork. She returned to the kitchen and asked Mrs. Whitshank, “Shall I pour the iced tea now?”

“No, let’s wait a bit,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She was standing at the stove frying chicken. “Go sit on the porch and cool off, why don’t you? I’ll call you when it’s time.”

Abby didn’t argue. She was glad to leave the hot kitchen. She untied her apron and draped it over the back of a chair, and then she went out to the porch and settled in one of the rockers some distance from Pixie and Maddie. She looked for Dane and found him hauling a huge leafy branch down toward the pile near the street. His hair took on an almost metallic sheen when he stepped into a shaft of sunshine.

What would she tell her mother? “I’m going to spend the night at Ruth’s,” she could say, except that then her mother might phone her at Ruth’s; it had been known to happen. And even if Abby dared to ask Ruth to cover for her, there was the problem of Ruth’s parents.

Red was tossing split logs into a wheelbarrow. Ward was mopping his forehead with his balled-up shirt. Earl killed the chainsaw just as Merrick stepped onto the porch and said, “Whew,” letting the screen door slam behind her. “Feels like I’ve washed a rubber mask off my face,” she told Pixie and Maddie. She was eating from a bowl of cornflakes. She walked over to a cane-bottomed chair, hooked it with one foot, and pulled it closer to the swing and sat down. Her hair was still in curlers but she had on Bermudas now and a sleeveless white blouse.

“We were just wondering who the James Dean was,” Pixie told her.

“The who? Oh, that’s Dane.”

“He’s gaw-juss.”

“If next Saturday’s like today,” Merrick said, “my foundation’s going to streak clear off my face. And my mascara will give me raccoon eyes.”

“You’ll match your mother-in-law,” Maddie said with a giggle.

“Oh, just go ahead and kill me if I ever get circles like hers,” Merrick said. “You know what I suspect? I suspect she paints them on. She’s one of those people who like to look sick. She’s always trotting off to her doctor and of course he tells her she’s fine but when she comes back she says, ‘Well, he thinks I’ll be all right …’ ”

“Will he be at the wedding?” Pixie asked.

“Will who be at the wedding?”

“That Dane person.”

“Oh. I don’t know. Will Dane be at the wedding?” Merrick called down the porch to Abby.

Abby said, “He wasn’t invited.”

“He wasn’t? Well, feel free to bring him if you like.”

“Oh, you two go together?” Pixie asked Abby.

Abby gave a half shrug, hoping to imply that they did go together but that she could take him or leave him, and Pixie heaved a theatrical sigh of disappointment.

“Now, here is the sixty-four-dollar question,” Merrick said. “My curlers.”

“What about them?” Maddie asked.

“You see how big and bobbly they are. I’ve been going to bed in these since I was fourteen years old. My hair is straight as a stick otherwise. What am I going to do on my wedding night, is the question.”

“Ask me something hard,” Maddie said. “You go to bed without them, silly. Then early, early in the morning you wake up before Trey does and you sneak off to the bathroom and put your curlers in and take a hot shower. Don’t actually wet your hair; just steam it. Then get under the hair dryer — you’ll have to slip your hair dryer into the bathroom the night before—”

“I can’t bring my hair dryer on my honeymoon! It needs its own huge suitcase.”

“Then buy yourself one of those new kinds that you can hold in your hand.”

“What, and electrocute myself like that woman in the paper? Besides, you don’t know how stubborn my hair is. Two minutes of steam won’t have any effect at all.”

Pixie said, “You should do your hair like her.”

“Like who?”

“Her,” Pixie said, poking her chin in Abby’s direction. She was wearing a little smirk. “Abby.”

Merrick didn’t bother responding to that. “If I could just get away from Trey for a couple of measly hours,” she said. “If there was a beauty parlor in the hotel and it opened at five in the morning—”

The chainsaw roared up again, drowning out the rest of her words. Landis walked over to a dogwood tree and bent for a hoop of rope. Dane started up the hill toward where he’d left his axe.

Before the men came in for lunch they ducked their heads under the faucet at the side of the house, and so they walked in dripping wet, squeegeeing their faces with their hands. Earl actually shook himself all over, like a dog, as he took his seat.

Mr. Whitshank sat at the head of the table, Mrs. Whitshank at the foot. Abby sat between Dane and Landis. She and Dane were a good eighteen inches apart, but he slid his foot over so that it was touching hers. He kept his eyes on his plate, though, as if he and she had nothing to do with each other.

Mr. Whitshank was holding forth on Billie Holiday. She had died a couple of days before and Mr. Whitshank couldn’t see why people were so cut up about it. “Always sounded to me like she couldn’t hold on to a note,” he said. “Her voice would go slippy-slidey and sometimes she’d mislay the tune.” He had a way of rotating his face slowly from one side of the table to the other as he spoke, so as to include all his listeners. Abby felt like some sort of disciple hanging on her master’s every word, which she suspected was his purpose. Then she altered her vision — she was good at that — and imagined she was sitting at a table of threshers or corn pickers or such, one of those old-time harvest gatherings, and this cheered her up. When she had a home of her own, she wanted it to be just as expansive and welcoming as the Whitshanks’, with strays dropping by for meals and young people talking on the porch. Her parents’ house felt so closed; the Whitshanks’ house felt open. No thanks to Mr. Whitshank. But wasn’t that always the way? It was the woman who set the tone.

“Now, the kind of music I favor myself,” Mr. Whitshank was saying, “is more on the order of John Philip Sousa. I assume you all know who I’m talking about. Redcliffe, who am I talking about?”

“The March King,” Red said with his mouth full. He was deep in a leg of fried chicken.

“March King,” Mr. Whitshank agreed. “Any of you recall The Cities Service Band of America?”

No one did, apparently. They hunkered lower over their plates.

“Program on the radio,” Mr. Whitshank said. “No kind of music but marches. ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and ‘The Washington Post’ march, my favorite. I like to had a fit when they took it off the air.”

Abby searched for any trace in him of the wild boy from Yancey County. She could see why some might call him good-looking, with that straight-edged face of his and not a sign of a paunch even in his fifties or maybe sixties. But his clothes were so proper, almost a caricature of properness (he had corrected the wayward lapel by now), and his eyes had a disenchanted droop at the outside corners. There were gnarly purple veins on the backs of his hands and distinct black dots of whiskers stippling his chin. Oh, let Abby not ever get old! She pressed her left ankle against Dane’s ankle and passed the biscuits on to Landis.

“My father thinks Billie Holiday’s the greatest,” Dane offered. He took a swig of his iced tea and then leaned back, clearly at ease. “He says Baltimore’s biggest claim to fame is, Billie Holiday used to scrub front stoops downtown for a quarter apiece.”

“Well, I and your father will have to agree to disagree,” Mr. Whitshank said. Then he gave a quick frown. “Who is your father?”

“Dick Quinn,” Dane said.

“Quinn as in Quinn Marketing?”

“None other.”

“Will you be going into the family business?”

“Nope,” Dane said.

Mr. Whitshank waited. Dane stared back at him pleasantly.

“I would think that would be a fine opportunity,” Mr. Whitshank said after a moment.

“Me and Pop tend not to see eye to eye,” Dane told him. “Besides, he’s ticked off because I got fired from my job.”

He seemed perfectly comfortable volunteering the information. Mr. Whitshank frowned again. “What’d they fire you for?” he asked.

“Just didn’t work out, I guess,” Dane said.

“Well, I tell Redcliffe, I say, ‘Whatever you do in life, do your best. I don’t care if it’s hauling trash, you do it the best it’s ever been done,’ I say. ‘Take pride in it.’ Getting fired? It’s a black mark on your record forever. It’ll hang around to haunt you.”

“This was at a savings and loan,” Dane said. “I have no plans to make my career in savings and loans, believe me.”

“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 planned to take them home. Ward had a shred of chicken stuck to his lower lip.

“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.”

“Huh,” Abby said.

Mrs. Whitshank smiled at her. “Could you check out on the porch, please,” she asked, “and see if there’s any dishes?”

Abby was glad to leave. She might have said something she’d be sorry for.

No one was sitting on the porch. She picked up Merrick’s cereal bowl and her spoon, and then she straightened and surveyed the lawn. At the moment, both chainsaws were silent. The air seemed oddly bright; evidently that naked trunk had made more difference than she had suspected. It was lying flat now, pointing toward the street, and Landis was untying a length of rope that had been looped around its circumference. Dane had paused for a cigarette, Earl and Ward were loading the wheelbarrow, and Red was standing next to the sheared-off stump with his head bowed.

From his posture, Abby thought at first that he was brooding about what had happened at lunch, and she turned away quickly so he wouldn’t know she had seen. But in the act of turning, she realized that what he was doing was counting tree rings.

After all Red had been through today — the grueling physical effort and the din and the punishing heat, the altercation with the neighbor and the painful scene with his father — Red was calmly studying that stump to find out how old it was.

Why did this hearten her so? Maybe it was the steadiness of his focus. Maybe it was his immunity to insult, or his lack of resentment. “Oh, that,” he seemed to be saying. “Never mind that. All families have their ups and downs; let’s just figure the age of this poplar.”

Abby felt buoyed by a kind of airiness at her center, like the airiness of the lawn once that trunk had been felled. She stepped back into the house so lightly that she made almost no sound at all.

“What’s going on out there?” Mrs. Whitshank asked. She was wiping a counter; the last of the pots and pans had been dried and put away.

Abby said, “Well, they got the trunk down, but Mitch hasn’t shown up yet. Dane is taking a cigarette break, and Ward and Earl and Landis are clearing the yard, and Red is counting tree rings.”

“Tree rings?” Mrs. Whitshank asked. Then, perhaps imagining that Abby had no knowledge whatsoever of the natural world, she said, “Oh! He must be guessing its age.”

“He was just standing there, after all that fuss, wondering how old a poplar was,” Abby said, and all at once she felt on the verge of tears; she had no idea why. “He’s a good man, Mrs. Whitshank,” she said.

Mrs. Whitshank glanced up in surprise, and then she smiled — a serene, contented, radiant smile that turned her eyes into curls. “Why, yes, honey, he is,” she said.

Then Abby went out to the porch again and settled in the swing. It was the prettiest afternoon, all breezy and yellow-green with a sky the unreal blue of a Noxzema jar, and in a minute she was going to tell Red she’d like to ride with him to the wedding. For now, though, she was saving that up — hugging it close to her heart.

She nudged a porch floorboard with her foot to set the swing in motion, and she swung slowly back and forth, absently tracing the familiar, sandy-feeling undersides of the armrests with her fingertips. Her eyes were on Dane now; she watched him with a distant feeling of sorrow. She saw how he dropped his cigarette, how he ground it beneath his heel, how he picked up his axe and sauntered over to a branch. What a world, what a world. And then the line that came after that one: “Who would have thought,” the witch had asked, “that a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?”

But Abby stood up from the swing, even so, and started walking toward Red, and with every step she felt herself growing happier and more certain.