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

They lay like that for some time, until gradually Abby stopped fidgeting and her breaths grew slow and even. Red, though, went on staring up into the dark. At one point, he mouthed some words to himself in an experimental way. " '.?.?.?need to tell you something,'?" he mouthed, not even quite whispering it. Then, "?'.?.?.?like to tell you something.'?" Then, "?'Dad, I'd like to .?.?.' 'Dad, I need to .?.?.'?" He tossed his head impatiently on his pillow. He started over. "?'.?.?.?tell you something: I'm gay.' '.?.?.?tell you something: I think I'm gay.' 'I'm gay.' 'I think I'm gay.' 'I think I may be gay.' 'I'm gay.'?"

But eventually he grew silent, and at last he fell asleep too.

Well, of course they did hear from him again. The Whitshanks weren't a melodramatic family. Not even Denny was the type to disappear off the face of the earth, or sever all contact, or stop speaking—or not permanently, at least. It was true that he skipped the beach trip that summer, but he might have skipped it anyhow; he had to make his pocket money for the following school year. (He was attending St. Eskil College, in Pronghorn, Minnesota.) And he did telephone in September. He needed money for textbooks, he said. Unfortunately, Red was the only one home at the time, so it wasn't a very revealing conversation. "What did you talk about?" Abby demanded, and Red said, "I told him his textbooks had to come out of his earnings."

"I mean, did you talk about that last phone call? Did you apologize? Did you explain? Did you ask him any questions?"

"We didn't really get into it."

"Red!" Abby said. "This is classic! This is such a classic reaction: a young person announces he's gay and his family just carries on like before, pretending they didn't hear."

"Well, fine," Red said. "Call him back. Get in touch with his dorm."

Abby looked uncertain. "What reason should I give him for calling?" she asked.

"Say you want to grill him."

"I'll just wait till he phones again," she decided.

But when he phoned again—which he did a month or so later, when Abby was there to answer—it was to talk about his plane reservations for Christmas vacation. He wanted to change his arrival date, because first he was going to Hibbing to visit his girlfriend. His girlfriend! "What could I say?" Abby asked Red later. "I had to say, 'Okay, fine.'?"

"What could you say," Red agreed.

He didn't refer to the subject again, but Abby herself sort of simmered and percolated all those weeks before Christmas. You could tell she was just itching to get things out in the open. The rest of the family edged around her warily. They knew nothing about the gay announcement—Red and Abby had concurred on that much, not to tell them without Denny's say-so—but they could sense that something was up.

It was Abby's plan (though not Red's) to sit Denny down and have a nice heart-to-heart as soon as he got home. But on the morning of the day that his plane was due in, they had a letter from St. Eskil reminding them of the terms of their contract: the Whitshanks would be responsible for the next semester's tuition even though Denny had withdrawn.

"'Withdrawn,'?" Abby repeated. She was the one who had opened the letter, although both of them were reading it. The slow, considering way she spoke brought out all the word's ramifications. Denny had withdrawn; he was withdrawn; he had withdrawn from the family years ago. What other middle-class American teenager lived the way he did—flitting around the country like a vagrant, completely out of his parents' control, getting in touch just sporadically and neglecting whenever possible to give them any means of getting in touch with him? How had things come to such a pass? They certainly hadn't allowed the other children to behave this way. Red and Abby looked at each other for a long, despairing moment.

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.