“Low as you can get it,” Mr. Whitshank said, and by then he had already turned away and was halfway up the hill again, as if he’d washed his hands of all of them. The hem of his suit coat hung unevenly, Abby noticed—sagging at the sides and hitching up at the center, as if it belonged to a much older and shabbier man.
She circulated among the others, collecting their paper cups in silence, and then she started back up the hill herself.
“Sometimes Junior thinks the neighbors might be looking down their noses at him,” Mrs. Whitshank said when she heard about the scene in the yard. “He’s a little bit sensitive that way.”
Abby didn’t say so, but she could see his side of it. During her years as a scholarship student she’d had a few dealings herself with Mr. Barkalow’s type—so entitled, so convinced that there was only one way to live. No doubt all his sons played lacrosse and all his daughters were preparing for their debutante balls. But she shook that thought away and folded the sheet of dough on the counter a second time and a third. (“Fold, fold, and fold again” were Mrs. Whitshank’s instructions when she’d taught Abby how to make her biscuits. “Fold till when you slap the dough, you hear it give a burp.”)
“Anyhow,” Abby said, “Red got them to compromise. It all worked out in the end.”
“Red is not so quick to take offense,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She drew a large bowl from the refrigerator and removed the dish towel that covered it. “I think it’s because he grew up here. He’s used to people like the Barkalows.”
The bowl contained pieces of chicken in a liquid white batter. Mrs. Whitshank lifted them out one by one with canning tongs and laid them on a platter to drain. “It’s like he’s comfortable with both sorts,” she said. “With the neighbors and with the work crew. I know if he had his way, though, he’d quit college right this minute and go on the work crew full-time. It’s only on account of Junior that he’s sticking it out till graduation.”
“Well, it never hurts to have a diploma,” Abby said.
“That’s what Junior tells him. He says, ‘You want the option of something better. You don’t want to end up like me,’ he says. Red says, ‘What’s wrong with ending up like you?’ He says the trouble with college is, it’s not practical. The people there aren’t practical. ‘Sometimes they strike me as silly,’ he says.”
Abby had never heard Red talk about college. He was two years ahead of her and they seldom ran into each other on campus. “What are his grades like?” she asked Mrs. Whitshank.
Mrs. Whitshank said, “They’re okay. Well, so-so. That’s just not how his mind works, you know? He’s the kind that, you show him some gadget he’s never laid eyes on before and he says, ‘Oh, I see; yes, this part goes into that part and then it connects with this other part …’ Just like his daddy, but his daddy wants Red to be different from him. Isn’t that always how it is?”
“I bet Red was one of those little boys who take the kitchen clock apart,” Abby said.
“Yes, except he could put it back together again, too, which most other little boys can’t. Oops, watch what you’re doing, Abby. I see how you’re twisting that glass!”
She meant the glass that Abby was using to cut out the biscuits. “Clamp it straight down on the dough, remember?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Let me fetch you the skillet.”
Abby wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The kitchen was heating up, and she was swathed in one of Mrs. Whitshank’s bib aprons.
If it was true, Abby thought, that she represented a recurring figure in Mrs. Whitshank’s life—the “sympathizer”—it was equally true that Mrs. Whitshank’s type had shown up before in Abby’s life: the instructive older woman. The grandmother who had taught her to knit, the English teacher who had stayed late to help her with her poems. More patient and softer-spoken than Abby’s brisk, efficient mother, they had guided and encouraged her, like Mrs. Whitshank saying now, “Oh, those are looking good! Good as any I could have made.”
“Maybe Red could join his dad’s company full-time after college,” Abby said. “Then it could be Whitshank and Son Construction. Wouldn’t Mr. Whitshank like that?”
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “He’s hoping the law for Red. Law or business, one. Red’s got a fine head for business.”
“But if he wouldn’t be happy …” Abby said.
“Junior says happiness is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Whitshank told her. “He says Red should just make up his mind to be happy.”
Then she stopped hunting through the utensil drawer and said, “I’m not trying to make him sound mean.”
“Of course not,” Abby said.
“He only wants what’s best for his family, you know? We’re all he’s got.”
“Well, of course.”
“Neither one of us has to do with our own families, anymore.”
“Why is that?” Abby asked.
“Oh, just, you know. Circumstances. We kind of fell out of touch with them,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “They’re clear down in North Carolina, and besides, my side were never in favor of us being together.”