They turned to the left when they reached the street—the opposite direction from Ree’s house. Not that Abby wouldn’t love to see Ree, but after Abby’s little lapse that time, Ree would have been distressed to find her walking alone. And Abby loved walking alone. Oh, it felt so good to set out like this, free as a bird, no “What’ll we do about Mom?” hanging unspoken over her head! She hoped she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.
Sometimes on her walks it would strike her that of all her original family, she was the only one left. Who would ever have dreamed that she’d be traveling through the world without them? She thought again of the framed picture in her bedroom: the solitary child threading a path beneath giant, looming trees, the guardian angel following protectively behind. Except that Abby didn’t believe in angels, and hadn’t since she was seven. No, she was truly on her own.
She used to have at least one of her children with her everywhere she went. It was both comforting and wearing. “Hand? Hand?” she used to say before she crossed a street. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.
Clarence eyed a squirrel but kept on heeling, not even tempted. “I agree,” Abby told him. “Squirrels are beneath you.” Then she gave a testing pat to the cushiony space above her breasts. Had she thought to hang the house key around her neck before she set out? No, but never mind; the lock was set to manual. And there was always Nora to let her back in if need be.
Another secret she knew, but this wasn’t something anyone had told her: it had occurred to her just recently that the song Stem remembered his father’s singing him to sleep with could very well have been “The Goat and the Train.” Burl Ives used to sing that on a children’s record she had owned when she was small. Should she suggest it to Stem? It could be a transporting moment for him, hearing that song again after all these years. But he might think she was tactlessly reminding him that he was not a Whitshank. Or maybe her reason for keeping silent was more selfish. Maybe she just wanted him to forget that she wasn’t his first and only mother.
He and Denny had treated each other with artificial politeness ever since their fight at the beach. You would think they were barely acquainted. “Denny, are you going to want that last piece of chicken?” Stem would ask, and Denny would say, “Be my guest.” They didn’t fool her for a minute. They could have been two strangers in a waiting room, and she was beginning to lose hope that that would ever change.
Oh, always lately it seemed that some crisis arose at the beach house. No wonder she dreaded vacations! Not that she ever let on.
“What’s gone wrong with us?” she’d asked Red on the ride home from this year’s trip. “We used to be such a happy family! Weren’t we?”
“Far as I can recall,” Red had answered.
“Remember that time we all got the giggles at the movies?”
“Well, now …”
“It was a Western, and the hero’s horse was staring straight at us, head-on, chewing oats, with these two little balls of muscle popping out at his jaws when he chomped down. He looked so silly! Remember that? We burst out laughing, all of us at once, and the rest of the audience turned toward us just mystified.”
“Was I there?” Red asked her.
“You were there. You were laughing too.”
Maybe the reason he’d forgotten was that he took their happiness for granted. He didn’t fret about it. Whereas Abby … oh, she fretted, all right. She couldn’t bear to think that their family was just another muddled, discontented, ordinary family.
“If you could have one single wish,” she had asked Red one night in bed when neither of them could sleep, “what would it be?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“I would wish wonderful lives for our children,” Abby said.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“How about you?”
“Oh,” he said, “maybe that Harford Contractors would go bankrupt and quit underbidding me.”
“Red! Honestly!”
“What?”
“How can you not put your children’s welfare first?” Abby asked him.
“I do put it first. But you already took care of that with your wish.”
“Huh,” Abby said, and she had flounced over to her left side so she was lying with her back to him.