A Farewell to Yarns

What a shame she hadn’t finished it earlier so she could enjoy it longer before having to sell it. It brightened not only the room, but also her spirits. Willard looked at the afghan and barked. She took it as a compliment.
    “Do we get the morning off?“ Mike asked, staggering in and sprawling bonelessly on the sofa. Max minced along the sofa back trying to determine what part of Mike’s prone body he’d settle on.
    “What do you—oh, quarter of ten! I don’t suppose you’d go to the ten-thirty service with me, would you?“
    “Nope. Do we have any orange juice?“
    “Mike, in all your life have you ever known me to run out of orange juice? Toilet paper, yes. Butter, shampoo, light bulbs, cat food, clean sheets, yes. But never orange juice.”
    Jane let the other kids sleep in, and she and Mike enjoyed a quiet morning together. Passing sections of the Sunday paper to each other and gorging themselves on sweet rolls, they didn’t really talk much or about anything important, but Jane felt the time with him was probably more beneficial to both of them than a hectic race to church would have been.
    Quality time vs. quantity. One of those trendy pop-psych phrases that sometimes meant a great truth and most often were used as a cop-out by parents who couldn’t bother to make time for the kids. Like nature vs. nurture. That was the most recent one, Jane thought as she stacked up the rumpled newspapers and the glasses that the orange juice crud was drying on. It was an interesting concept. For years, if not generations, mothers had been made to feel every fault a child showed was truly their parents’ failing. Recently the women’s magazines had been running pieces on the opposite theory—that none of a child’s problems were the parents’ fault, that people are born being what they are, and nothing in their domestic environment can change that basic character.
    The truth had to be somewhere in between, or different for different people. But there must be something to the nurture theory. How else could you account for somebody like Bobby Bryant being Phyllis’s son? Nobody ever mistook Phyllis for an intellectual, but at the same time, there wasn’t a mean or selfish bone in her body. Bobby’s creepy character certainly couldn’t be attributed to her genes. But that wasn’t entirely fair to some unknown adoptive parents. They wanted him and, while Joan Crawford’s daughter might dispute the point, most people didn’t go out of their way to adopt children in order to mistreat them.
    Then, too, it took two people to make a baby. Maybe it wasn’t Phyllis’s genes, but those of the boy she’d been married to so briefly. Jane wished now that she’d asked more about him. What sort of kid was he? Phyllis had called him “ambitious and smart“ or some such thing. Of course, from her sweet, simple vantage point, practically anyone could qualify for those adjectives. But could he have been a boy of strong character to let himself get swept into playing house? Hadn’t he even the wit to wonder if Phyllis might have been pregnant—or didn’t he care?
    “Aren’t you going to the door, Mom?“ Mike shouted down the stairs. She’d been so deep in thought that she hadn’t noticed her son leave the room, nor had she registered Willard’s frenzied barking.
    She opened the door to a blast of cold air and a Suzie Williams she’d never seen before. “Good God, you look like you’ve been stepped on by the cavalry,“ she said graciously to her guest.
    “Thanks,“ Suzie croaked. Her face was pale but with hectic red circles on her cheeks, like a little girl who’s been playing with her mother’s rouge. Her hair, straggling out from a knitted hat, was lank. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she was mopping pitifully at a Santa nose. “I feel like shit,“ she said unnecessarily. “Could I come in, or are you going to watch me like a biology experiment while I die on your front porch?“
    “I guess you might as well be in my house, since you haven’t the common sense to be home in bed at your own.”
    Suzie staggered through to a chair in the kitchen. Collapsing in it melodramatically, she said in a voice that hurt to listen to, “A branch fell on the phone lines. I couldn’t call. Jane, I need help.“
    “You need a doctor.“
    “I’ve called him and picked up the medicine already.“ She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out an orange plastic bottle full of capsules as proof of this