“No, as a matter of fact. Although I have one.”
Everyone looked at Abby, waiting for her next question. It didn’t come. She sat staring across at the Nelsons’ house with something tense and set about her mouth. Finally, Jeannie asked it: “You’ve finished college?”
“Yes,” Denny said.
“How did you do that?”
“Same way anyone does it, I guess.”
They looked again at Abby. She stayed silent.
“Well, you never did much like building things,” Stem said after a moment. “I remember from back when you were working with Dad in the summers.”
“I’ve got nothing against building things; I just couldn’t stand the customers,” Denny said, sitting up straight again. “All those trendy homeowners wanting wine cellars in their basements.”
“Wine cellars! Ha!” Stem said. “And dog-washing stations in their garages.”
“Dog-washing stations?”
“Lady up in Ruxton.”
Denny snorted.
“Mother Whitshank?” Nora asked. “Can I get you anything? A little more iced tea?”
“No, thanks,” Abby said shortly.
The grandchildren were migrating now from the backyard to the front, and Sammy even invaded the porch, climbing the steps to throw himself in his mother’s lap and complain about his brothers. “Somebody needs his nap,” Nora told him, but she sat on limply, gazing out over Sammy’s head to where the other children were debating the rules of their game. “The bushes by the house are safe, but not the ones in the side yard,” one was saying.
“But the ones in the side yard are the best places! You can hide underneath them.”
“So why would we use them as safes?”
“Oh.”
Jeannie’s son, Alexander, was It, which was painful to watch because he was the first Whitshank in known history to show a tendency toward pudginess. When he ran, he cast his legs out clumsily and paddled the air with both hands. Ironically, his sister, Deb, was the family’s best athlete—a wiry girl with muscular, mosquito-bitten legs—and she beat him to the biggest azalea bush and sang out, “Ha-ha! Safe!”
“Can somebody please call Heidi?” Alexander asked the grown-ups. “She keeps getting in my way.”
Heidi was nowhere near him—she was racing around the perimeter with her usual exuberance—but Stem whistled and she came bounding up the porch steps. “Down, girl,” he said. He tousled her mane affectionately, and she gave a resigned whimper and curled herself at his feet.
“Brenda must be getting old,” Denny told his sisters. “She’d have been out here chasing Heidi, once upon a time.”
Jeannie said, “It kills me to think she’s old. Can you imagine this house without a dog?”
“Easily,” Denny said. “Dogs are hell on houses.”
“Oh, Denny.”
“What? They scratch the woodwork, they scuff the floors …”
Amanda made a tch-ing sound of amusement.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her.
“Listen to you! You sound like Dad. You’re the only one of us who doesn’t have a dog, and Dad claims he wouldn’t have one, either, if it were up to him.”
“Oh, that’s just talk,” Abby told them. “Your dad loves Clarence as much as we do.”
Her four children exchanged glances.
In the hammock, Red groaned and sat up. “What are you saying?” he asked, rummaging through his hair.
“Just talking about how you love dogs, Dad,” Jeannie called.
“I do?”
Amanda tapped Denny’s wrist. “When will we be seeing Susan?” she asked him.
“Well, she can’t visit till we’ve got a room free to put her up in,” Denny said.
Till Stem and his family moved out, was his implication, but Amanda sidestepped that by saying, “She could always share the bunk room with the little boys. Would she mind?”
“Or wait for the beach trip,” Jeannie suggested. “That’s coming up very soon, and the beach house has tons of beds.”
Denny let the subject drop. His eyes followed the children playing in the yard—Petey tussling with Tommy, Elise pulling them apart and chiding them in her thin, bossy voice.
“Think I’m going to have to call the Petronelli brothers and have them repair the front walk again,” Red said, ambling down the porch to join them. On his way, he grabbed a rocker by one of its ears. He set it next to Abby.
“Every time I come here, you’re doing something to that walk,” Denny told him.
“The trouble goes back to your grandfather’s time. He wasn’t happy with how it was laid.”
“It did seem he was always fiddling with it,” Abby said.
“One of my first memories after we moved in was, he had all the mortar ripped out and the stones reset. But still he wasn’t satisfied. He claimed it was graded wrong.”