“Why would you figure that?”
“Well, you used to play French horn.”
Denny sliced into his meat.
“What’s Susan doing over the summer?” Red asked.
Everyone looked at him.
“Clarinet, Red,” Abby said finally.
“Eh?”
“Clarinet!”
“My grandson in Milwaukee plays the clarinet,” Mrs. Angell said. “It’s hard to listen to him without giggling, though. Every third or fourth note comes out as this terrible squawk.” She turned to Atta and said, “I have thirteen grandchildren, can you believe it? Do you have grandchildren, Atta?”
“How would that be possible?” Atta demanded.
Another silence fell, this one heavy and muffling, like a blanket, and they all turned their attention to the food.
After lunch Atta took her leave, carrying with her the remains of the store-bought sheet cake they’d served for dessert. (She’d barely touched the tuna salad—“Mercury,” she had announced—but it seemed she had quite a sweet tooth.) Elise joined the other children in the backyard, but everyone else went out onto the porch. Even Nora had been persuaded to leave the kitchen cleanup till later, and Red chose to nap in the mildew-smelling hammock at the south end of the porch rather than up in his room.
“Why are Dad’s arms so splotchy?” Denny asked his sisters in a low voice. The three of them were sharing the porch swing.
But it was Abby who answered, sharp-eared as always. She broke off a conversation with Mrs. Angell to call, “It’s the blood thinner he’s on. It makes him subject to bruising.”
“And since when has he started napping?”
“The doctors ordered him to do that. He’s supposed to nap even on weekdays, but he doesn’t.”
Denny was quiet a moment, absently kicking the swing back and forth and watching a gray squirrel skitter beneath a bush. “Interesting how nobody told me about his heart attack,” he said. “I didn’t know a thing till last night. If I hadn’t happened to phone Jeannie, I might not ever have known.”
“Well, it’s not as if you could have made any difference,” Amanda said.
“Thanks heaps, Amanda.”
Abby stirred protestingly in her rocker.
“Hasn’t it been just the loveliest summer?” Mrs. Angell asked in a lilting voice.
Since in fact it had been a very hot summer, wracked by violent storms, it was obvious that she was merely trying to change the subject. Abby reached over to pat her hand. “Oh, Lois,” she said, “you always look on the bright side.”
“But I enjoy the heat, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Abby said, “but I can’t help thinking of those poor souls down in the inner city with no means of keeping cool.”
The Whitshanks themselves kept cool only with ceiling fans and a cleverly rigged attic fan and high, old-fashioned ceilings. Every now and then Red talked about installing air conditioning, but he said it didn’t sit right with him to disturb the bones of the house. Even the porch had ceiling fans, three of them, spaced out along its length—beautiful old fans with varnished wooden blades that matched the varnished porch ceiling and floor and the honey-colored porch swing and the wide front steps. (Junior’s choices, all of them, and Junior’s decision to set the lacy windowless transoms above every ground-floor doorway to let the breezes flow through.) And then the tulip poplars, of course: they provided shade, although Abby often complained about too much shade. Nothing would grow beneath them; the lawn was mostly packed earth with a few hardy sprigs of crabgrass poking forth, and the only plants that bloomed along the north edge of the lot were the hostas, with their miserly buds and their giant, monstrous leaves.
“What are the Nelson kids up to?” Jeannie asked, her eyes on the Nelsons’ house across the street.
“I’m not sure,” Abby said. “Nowadays, you ask people about their children and you can see they wish you hadn’t. They say, ‘Well, our son just graduated from Yale but at the moment he’s, um …’ and then it turns out he’s bartending or brewing cappuccinos, and more often than not he’s moved back home again.”
“He’s lucky if he’s found a job at all,” Amanda’s Hugh said. “I’ve had to start laying off some of my wait staff.”
“Oh, dear, is the restaurant not doing well?”
“It seems nobody’s eating out anymore.”
“But now Hugh has this better idea,” Amanda said. “He’s thought up a whole new business, provided he can find backers.”
“Really,” Abby said. She frowned.
“Do Not Pass Go,” Hugh said.
“What?”
“That would be the name of my company. Catchy, right?”