Excerpt from A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Of course he was serious! Why else would he say it?"

"The boy isn't gay, Abby."

"How do you know that?"

"He just isn't. Mark my words. You're going to feel silly, by and by, like, 'Shoot, I overreacted.'?"

"Well, naturally that is what you would want to believe."

"Doesn't your female intuition tell you anything at all? This is a kid who got a girl in trouble before he was out of high school!"

"So? That doesn't mean a thing. It might even have been a symptom."

"Come again?"

"We can never know with absolute certainty what another person's sex life is like."

"No, thank God," Red said.

He bent over, with a grunt, and reached beneath the bed for his slippers. Abby, meanwhile, had stopped pacing and was staring once more at the phone. She set a hand on the receiver. She hesitated. Then she snatched up the receiver and pressed it to her ear for half a second before slamming it back down.

"The thing about caller ID is," Red said, more or less to himself, "it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone. That's kind of the general idea with phones, is my opinion." He heaved himself to his feet and started toward the bathroom. Behind him, Abby said, "This would explain so much! Wouldn't it? If he should turn out to be gay."

Red was closing the bathroom door by then, but he poked his head back out to glare at her. His fine black eyebrows, normally straight as rulers, were knotted almost together. "Sometimes," he said, "I rue and deplore the day I married a social worker."

Then he shut the door very firmly.

When he returned, Abby was sitting upright in bed with her arms clamped across the lace bosom of her nightgown. "You are surely not going to try and blame Denny's problems on my profession," she told him.

"I'm just saying a person can be too understanding," he said. "Too sympathizing and pitying, like. Getting into a kid's private brain."

"There is no such thing as 'too understanding.'?"

"Well, count on a social worker to think that."

She gave an exasperated puff of a breath, and then she sent another glance toward the phone. It was on Red's side of the bed, not hers. Red raised the covers and got in, blocking her view. He reached over and snapped off the lamp on the nightstand. The room fell into darkness, with just a faint glow from the two tall, gauzy windows overlooking the front lawn.

Red was lying flat now, but Abby went on sitting up. She said, "Do you think he'll call us back?"

"Oh, yes. Sooner or later."

"It took all his courage to call the first time," she said. "Maybe he used up every bit he had."

"Courage! What courage? We're his parents! Why would he need courage to call his own parents?"

"It's you he needs it for," Abby said.

"That's ridiculous. I've never raised a hand to him."

"No, but you disapprove of him. You're always finding fault with him. With the girls you're such a softie, and then Stem is more your kind of person. While Denny! Things come harder to Denny. Sometimes I think you don't like him."

"Abby, for God's sake. You know that's not true."

Oh, you love him, all right. But I've seen the way you look at him—'Who is this person?'—and don't you think for a moment that he hasn't seen it too."

"If that's the case," Red said, "how come it's you he's always trying to get away from?"

"He's not trying to get away from me!"

"From the time he was five or six years old, he wouldn't let you into his room. Kid preferred to change his own sheets rather than let you in to do it for him! Hardly ever brought his friends home, wouldn't say what their names were, wouldn't even tell you what he did in school all day. 'Get out of my life, Mom,' he was saying. 'Stop meddling, stop prying, stop breathing down my neck.' His least favorite picture book—the one he hated so much he tore out all the pages, remember?—had that baby rabbit that wants to change into a fish and a cloud and such so he can get away, and the mama rabbit keeps saying how she will change too and come after him. Denny ripped out every single everlasting page!"

Excerpted from A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. Copyright 2015 by Anne Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC.