Dane, waiting for Red in the doorway, sent her a wink. He liked to poke fun at Red’s devotion sometimes, referring to him as “your feller.” Usually this made her smile, but today she just went back to her table clearing, and after a moment he and Red walked on out to join the others.
She set the silverware next to the kitchen sink where Mrs. Whitshank was washing glasses, and then she returned to the dining room. There stood Mr. Whitshank, scooping a gooey chunk of peach cobbler from the baking dish with his fingers. He froze when he saw Abby, but then he lifted his chin defiantly and popped the chunk into his mouth. With showy deliberation, he wiped his fingers on a napkin.
Abby said, “It must be hard to be you, Mr. Whitshank.”
His fingers stilled on the napkin. He said, “What’s that you say?”
“You’re glad your daughter’s marrying a rich boy but it irks you rich boys are so spoiled. You want your son to join the gentry but you’re mad when he’s polite to them. I guess you just can’t be satisfied, can you?”
“Missy, you’ve got no business taking that tone with me,” he said.
Abby felt as if she were about to run out of breath, but she stood her ground. “Well?” she asked. “Can you?”
“I’m proud of both my children,” Mr. Whitshank said in a steely voice. “Which is more than your daddy can say for you, I reckon, with that disrespectful tongue of yours.”
“My father is very proud of me,” she told him.
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering where you come from.”
Abby opened her mouth but then closed it. She snatched up the cobbler dish and marched out to the kitchen with it, her back very straight and her head high.
Mrs. Whitshank had left off washing dishes to start drying some of those that were sitting on the drain board. Abby took the towel from her, and Mrs. Whitshank said, “Why, thank you, honey,” and returned to the sink. She didn’t seem to notice how Abby’s hands were shaking. Abby felt bitterly triumphant but also wounded in some way—cut to the quick.
How dare he say a word about where she came from? He of all people, with his shady, shameful past! Her family was very respectable. They had ancestors they could brag about: a great-great-grandfather, for instance, who had once rescued a king. (Granted, the rescue was merely a matter of helping to lift a carriage wheel out of a rut in the road, but the king had nodded to him personally, it was believed.) And a great-aunt out west who’d gone to college with Willa Cather, although it was true that the great-aunt hadn’t known at the time that Willa Cather existed. Oh, there was nothing lower-class about the Daltons, nothing second-rate, and their house might be on the smallish side but at least they got along with their neighbors.
Mrs. Whitshank was talking about dishwashing machines. She just didn’t see the need, she was saying. She said, “Why, some of my nicest conversations have been over a sinkful of dishes! But Junior thinks we ought to get a machine. He’s all for going out and buying one.”
“What does he know about it?” Abby demanded.
Mrs. Whitshank was quiet a moment. Then, “Oh,” she said, “he just wants to make my life easier, I guess.”
Abby fiercely dried a platter.
“People don’t always understand Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “But he’s a better man than you know, Abby, honey.”
“Huh,” Abby said.
Mrs. Whitshank smiled at her. “Could you check out on the porch, please,” she asked, “and see if there’s any dishes?”
Abby was glad to leave. She might have said something she’d be sorry for.
No one was sitting on the porch. She picked up Merrick’s cereal bowl and her spoon, and then she straightened and surveyed the lawn. At the moment, both chainsaws were silent. The air seemed oddly bright; evidently that naked trunk had made more difference than she had suspected. It was lying flat now, pointing toward the street, and Landis was untying a length of rope that had been looped around its circumference. Dane had paused for a cigarette, Earl and Ward were loading the wheelbarrow, and Red was standing next to the sheared-off stump with his head bowed.
From his posture, Abby thought at first that he was brooding about what had happened at lunch, and she turned away quickly so he wouldn’t know she had seen. But in the act of turning, she realized that what he was doing was counting tree rings.
After all Red had been through today—the grueling physical effort and the din and the punishing heat, the altercation with the neighbor and the painful scene with his father—Red was calmly studying that stump to find out how old it was.
Why did this hearten her so? Maybe it was the steadiness of his focus. Maybe it was his immunity to insult, or his lack of resentment. “Oh, that,” he seemed to be saying. “Never mind that. All families have their ups and downs; let’s just figure the age of this poplar.”
Abby felt buoyed by a kind of airiness at her center, like the airiness of the lawn once that trunk had been felled. She stepped back into the house so lightly that she made almost no sound at all.