“What happened with the furniture making?”
“Oh, well … I forget. I think we moved on to the boring part, then. Baseboards or something. So I quit, by and by.”
Jeannie sighed and collected the bandage wrappings from the table. “Okay, Susan,” she said. “You can help your dad to the living room now.”
But just as Denny was getting to his feet, Stem walked in, with Nora close behind. By the looks of him, he’d recovered from the blow to his head. He seemed himself again, only paler and more rumpled. “Denny,” he said, “I want to apologize.”
“He is very, very sorry,” Nora put in.
“I should not have lost my temper, and I want to pay for your String Cheese Incident T-shirt.”
Denny made a little puffing sound of amusement, and Abby, who had come into the room behind them—of course she had to be part of this, falling all over herself to set her family to rights—said, “Oh, Stem, that’s no problem; I’m sure we can treat it with OxiClean,” which made Denny laugh aloud.
“Forget it,” he told Stem. “Let’s just say it never happened.”
“Well, that’s very generous of you.”
“Fact is, I’m kind of relieved to find out you’re human,” Denny said. “Till now I didn’t think you had a competitive bone in your body.”
“Competitive?”
“Let’s shake on it,” Denny said, holding out his hand.
Stem said, “Why do you say I’m competitive?”
Denny let his hand drop. “Hey,” he said. “You just assaulted me for saying I should be the one to help out with Mom and Dad. You don’t call that competitive?”
“God damn!” Stem said.
Nora said, “Oh! Douglas.”
Stem socked Denny in the mouth.
It wasn’t an expert blow—it landed clumsily, a bit askew—but it was enough to send Denny tumbling back onto his chair. Blood bubbled up instantly from his lower lip. He gave a dazed shake of his head. Abby shrieked, “Stop! Please stop!” and Jeannie said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and Susan started crying again and biting her knuckles. The others appeared in the doorway so instantaneously that it almost seemed they’d been lying in wait for this. Stem was looking surprised. He stared down at his fist, which was scraped across the knuckles. He shifted his gaze to Denny.
“Out,” Jeannie ordered everyone.
Then she said, in a weary tone of voice, “First we’re going to clean the wound and see if it needs stitches.”
6
ABBY FELT NERVOUS AT FIRST about the appointment with Dr. Wiss, but then she thought, “I can do this, because I’m so familiar with my mother’s Wiss pinking shears.” And the exact, clunky weight of those shears instantly came to her mind, along with the too-thick handle loop that pressed uncomfortably against the bone at the base of her thumb, and the initial balkiness as the heavy teeth began chewing into the fabric.
But wait. Really, the one kind of Wiss had nothing to do with the other.
It was Nora who made the appointment. She had called her pastor for the name of a gerontologist, and then she phoned Dr. Wiss’s office without consulting Abby. Meddlesome! She must have discussed it first with Red, though, because when Abby complained to him he didn’t seem surprised, and he told her it wouldn’t hurt to hear what a doctor had to say.
Abby was finding that Nora had started to get on her nerves. Why, for instance, did she persist in calling Abby “Mother Whitshank”? It made Abby sound like an old peasant woman in wooden clogs and a headscarf. Abby had offered all her children’s spouses a choice of “Mom” or “Abby” when they first joined the family. “Mother Whitshank” hadn’t so much as crossed her lips.
Also, Nora stacked the plates on top of each other when she was clearing the table, instead of carrying one in each hand as Abby had been taught was polite. All the plates arrived in the kitchen with food stuck to their backs. Yet she criticized Abby’s housekeeping! Or that was her implication, at least, when she blamed the dust in the rugs for Sammy’s allergies. And she cooked fatty fried foods that were bad for Red’s heart, and she was much too lax with her children, and that queen bed she had requested completely filled Stem’s little room, barely allowing space for a person to edge around it.
Oh, well, this was just roommate-itis, Abby told herself. It was rubbing elbows at too-close quarters; that was why she felt so irritable.
She told herself this several times a day.