A Spool of Blue Thread Read Free

he had to say, since he didn’t have the least idea what he wanted to do in life. Maybe in a year or two, he said.) His gayness, or his non-gayness, just seemed to get lost in the shuffle.
    “I can almost see now why some families pretend they weren’t told,” Abby said after the holidays.
    “Mm-hmm,” Red said, poker-faced.
    Of Red and Abby’s four children, Denny had always been the best-looking. (A pity more of those looks hadn’t gone to the girls.) He had the Whitshank straight black hair and narrow, piercing blue eyes and chiseled features, but his skin was one shade tanner than the paper-white skin of the others, and he seemed better put together, not such a bag of knobs and bones. Yet there was something about his face—some unevenness, some irregularity or asymmetry—that kept him from being truly handsome. People who remarked on his looks did so belatedly, in a tone of surprise, as if they were congratulating themselves on their powers of discernment.
    In birth order, he came third. Amanda was nine when he was born, and Jeannie was five. Was it hard on a boy to have older sisters? Intimidating? Demeaning? Those two could be awfully sure of themselves—especially Amanda, who had a bossy streak. But he shrugged Amanda off, more or less, and with tomboyish little Jeannie he was mildly affectionate. So, no warning bells there. Stem, though! Stem had come along when Denny was four. Now, that could have been a factor. Stem was just naturally good. You see such children, sometimes. He was obedient and sweet-tempered and kind; he didn’t even have to try.
    Which was not to say that Denny was bad. He was far more generous, for instance, than the other three put together. (He traded his new bike for a kitten when Jeannie’s beloved cat died.) And he didn’t bully other children, or throw tantrums. But he was soclose-mouthed. He had these spells of unexplained obstinacy, where his face would grow set and pinched and no one could get through to him. It seemed to be a kind of
inward
tantrum; it seemed his anger turned in upon itself and hardened him or froze him. Red threw up his hands when that happened and stomped off, but Abby couldn’t let him be. She just had to jostle him out of it. She wanted her loved ones happy!
    One time in the grocery store, when Denny was in a funk for some reason, “Good Vibrations” started playing over the loudspeaker. It was Abby’s theme song, the one she always said she wanted for her funeral procession, and she began dancing to it. She dipped and sashayed and dum-da-da-dummed around Denny as if he were a maypole, but he just stalked on down the soup aisle with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his fists jammed into his jacket pockets. Made her look like a fool, she told Red when she got home. (She was trying to laugh it off.) He never even glanced at her! She might have been some crazy lady! And this was when he was nine or ten, nowhere near that age yet when boys find their mothers embarrassing. But he had found Abby embarrassing from earliest childhood, evidently. He acted as if he’d been assigned the wrong mother, she said, and she just didn’t measure up.
    Now she was being silly, Red told her.
    And Abby said yes, yes, she knew that. She hadn’t meant it the way it sounded.
    Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly: “Could you come in for a talk about Denny? As soon as possible, please.” The issue was inattention, or laziness, or carelessness; never a lack of ability. In fact, at the end of third grade he was put ahead a year, on the theory that he might just need a bigger challenge. But that was probably a mistake. It made him even more of an outsider. The few friends he had were questionable friends—boys who didn’t go to his school, boys who made the rest of the family uneasy on the rare occasions they showed themselves, mumbling and shifting their feet and looking elsewhere.
    Oh, there were moments of promise, now and then. He won a prize in a science contest, once,