All day long, Emily had felt like something was off. She’d awakened before dawn, tangled in the sheets beside Matt. She’d slipped out from under the covers and made her way downstairs to the kitchen. It still amazed her that one person lived in that gigantic house. Her tiny apartment could have fit into the master bedroom alone.
She’d started a pot of coffee, but she was too restless to wait for it to brew. Instead, she left a note, saying she was heading to the store early. She’d arrived in front of Harmony Skeins as the sun was clearing the horizon.
The store hadn’t offered any cure for her restlessness. She’d straightened a couple of displays, shuffling a few colors to highlight the upcoming holidays—Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day. But it was hard to get enthusiastic about upcoming events when she knew she’d be lucky to see a dozen customers all day. It was the middle of January, the heart of the winter doldrums for sales.
She’d considered going down to the diner to gossip with Anne, but she didn’t want to face her sister’s inevitable good cheer. She’d thought about going to Jenkins Bakery, about smothering her irritability in pastry cream and chocolate ganache, but the idea only made her sick to her stomach.
It wasn’t until she looked at her calendar that the penny dropped. January 8. Jon’s birthday.
She remembered celebrating the occasion in high school, the way all the kids did. It was a competition, like everything else in high school social cliques. Girls baked cakes for their boyfriends, and they decorated lockers.
Sophomore year, Emily had kept things small; she and Jon had only been dating since Homecoming, and she didn’t want to scare him off. She bought a cake mix at the Smart Shopper Food Store, and she slapped on some canned frosting. She shoved a store-bought birthday card through the slots on Jon’s locker, one she’d picked up in a flash, just taking the time to weed out the stupid cards with fart jokes and invitations to get drunk.
Junior year was a little more elaborate. Emily baked a cake by hand, following a recipe she found in her mother’s old Joy of Cooking. She made her own frosting too, not worrying when it turned out a little too thin to cover the cake completely. She put streamers on the outside of Jon’s locker, and she left a card inside, one she’d gone all the way to the giant Hallmark store in Winchester to find.
And then there was senior year. Emily felt a pressure to succeed, to prove to all her classmates that she and Jon were real, that their relationship would last forever. She baked a yellow layer cake, carefully slicing each round in two horizontally, using dental floss like she saw in a video on You Tube. She made boiled caramel icing, discarding two whole batches when she wasn’t satisfied with the texture. She decorated the outside of his locker with paper cut-outs—Harmony Hornets shaped from construction paper and colored in by hand. Inside, she included photos that mattered to the two of them—their picture as Homecoming King and Queen, the one that had run in The Herald, a snapshot of the bleachers to commemorate where Jon had given her the game ball from State, a view of the footbridge at the bottom of Old Man Marshall’s property, the place they went to make out.
Three months later, they’d broken up.
So, yeah. It was January 8.
After another hour of unsuccessful distraction, she finally gave up. She pulled a piece of paper out of the printer drawer and wrote up a sign: Closed for Family Emergency. She started to tape it in the window, but then she realized her neighbors would see it, and someone might call her mother, wanting to know what emergency had stricken the Barton household.
She crumpled the page and just flipped her regular sign around. Closed.
The drive out to the cemetery was actually pleasant. It had snowed on Tuesday, so the fields were covered to either side of the road, but the cleared blacktop had had plenty of time to heat under the winter sun.
The heavy iron gates to Harmony Gardens were open. Emily was surprised to see car tracks in the snow; she suspected that the graves went mostly unattended until spring. She knew where Jon was buried. She’d attended his funeral and watched as the plain military casket was interred next to his grandparents, safe amid a scattering of aunts and uncles, of distant cousins.
The tire tracks led directly to that corner of the cemetery. Emily didn’t recognize the black Buick by the side of the road. She pulled behind it and slipped her car into Park. When she walked by the boxy car, she saw two suitcases jumbled on the back seat.
A man stood at the foot of Jon’s grave. He wore a shapeless black coat and a cheap stocking cap. His hands were jammed into his pockets, and his shoulders were hunched up to his ears.
He didn’t turn around as Emily approached, her feet squeaking on the new snow. When she came to stand beside him, though, he gave her a curious glance. It was Mr. Dawson.
His nose was red, as if he’d already been standing in the cold for a while. His eyes were watering, just at the corners, and Emily couldn’t tell if he’d been crying or if the wind had sparked the tears.
“It’s Emily, right?” His voice was hoarse.
“Yes, sir.” She shifted her weight. She’d only spoken to Mr. Dawson a handful of times. When she and Jon had dated, he always seemed to be at the factory, working extra shifts. It was Mrs. Dawson who ran the house, who checked homework, who made sure her boys had clean clothes and food in their bellies.
“He would have been thirty-one today.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“In my mind, though, he’ll always be sixteen.”
“Why sixteen?” she asked. She and Jon had started dating when they were sixteen.
“That was when he made the varsity football team. Varsity! And he was just a sophomore.”
“He was a great cornerback.”
“I’ll never forget his first game.”
Emily would never forget that game either. They’d played Winchester, a school ten times their size. Jon had spent the summer working out; he was proud of the weight he’d put on, all muscle. But every Winchester player had ten pounds on him at least.
Jon had scrambled to break free, fighting to race downfield. He’d stretched for the ball any time the quarterback got it remotely near him. He’d taken a beating in the process, losing his helmet on one particularly vicious play. Coach had made him sit out the next down, standard penalty for a player who couldn’t keep his gear under control.
And the Hornets had won. It was their first victory in seventeen games, their first in almost three seasons. She’d waited by the locker room door with all the other girls. They’d cheered the team when the boys emerged, hair wet, faces shiny, football pads slung over their shoulders.
She’d cheered the loudest, and Jon had walked straight up to her. “Good game,” she’d said, suddenly shy, but knowing this was her one and only chance to get his attention.
“Thanks.” He’d shifted his pads. “Some of the guys are going to the diner. Wanna come with us?”
“Me?” She’d looked around, as if to make sure no one had sneaked up behind her. But she covered quickly. “Yeah. Um, sure.”
And they’d been dating from that point on. Until Kaylie.
She blinked, wondering how long it had been since Mr. Dawson had spoken. “They beat Winchester,” she said.
“Seventeen, fourteen.” They both said at the same time. They laughed, then both seemed to decide it was inappropriate to be laughing in a cemetery.
“That was the first thing he ever achieved on his own,” Mr. Dawson said. “The first time he went after something he wanted, instead of following in his older brother’s footsteps.”
“Were they close, growing up?”
Mr. Dawson shook his head. “That was probably my fault,” he said. “Matt’s too much like me. Fights like a pine marten. Always has to be the fastest, the strongest, the best.”
Emily pursed her lips. “I know someone a little like that.”
“Jon’s the one who challenged us, his mother and me. He’d rather take an hour explaining why he couldn’t do something than the five minutes to do it. He was always up for a joke or a game. And he wasn’t afraid of anything.”
Emily touched Mr. Dawson’s sleeve. It was harder to see a man trying not to cry than it was to watch actual tears. “He loved the Army,” she said. “He was proud of what he did. Proud of his country.”
Mr. Dawson said, “I just wanted a little of Matt to rub off on him, you know? A little responsibility. Matt is every parent’s dream.”
“Then tell him that.” She couldn’t believe she said it, not those words, not out loud. She didn’t know Mr. Dawson that well. She didn’t have any right to get involved with family politics, with the rough roads that had been carved out over lifetimes.
Mr. Dawson stared at the snow-frosted headstone, as if it was easier to talk to a dead son than a living woman. “I’ve already said too much,” he said. “But words can’t be undone. You can’t take back what you never should have said out loud.”
“You can,” Emily said. “If you admit you made a mistake. Love is stronger than the mistakes people make.”
“You’re young,” Mr. Dawson said with a harsh laugh. “You can still believe that.”
“I believe it because it’s true.”
He apparently didn’t have an answer for that. And she didn’t have any other argument. Mr. Dawson finally leaned down and brushed snow from the crown of Jon’s headstone. “His mother wants to plant flowers here in the spring. Lilies, she’s thinking.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“You work at the florist shop, don’t you?”
Emily shook her head. “I’m at Harmony Skeins. The yarn store across from the Antique Mall.”
“Do you like it?”
The question surprised her. It seemed too direct. Too personal. But she’d been thinking about the answer a lot, so she said, “I like knitting. And I’m good at running the store—teaching new knitters, fixing problems in the projects they bring in. But it’s not something I plan on doing for the rest of my life.”
He nodded. “Don’t waste a lifetime doing something you don’t want to do.”
She heard an entire encyclopedia of regret there. She remembered the story the Horton sisters had told her, the way Dave Dawson had planned on opening a nursery. For plants. Not babies. But she wasn’t supposed to know that. So she asked, “What did you want to do?”
“When I was a little boy? I wanted to be a marine biologist.”
“What stopped you?”
He looked around at the snow-covered hills. “There’s not a lot of ‘marine’ in Harmony Springs.” His smile was sad. “I didn’t see the ocean till I shipped overseas in the Army. I came back and thought I could have a different dream, but Mother Nature had another plan. I ended up taking a job at the cookie factory. Thirty-two years, day in, day out. But that’s all over now.”
The suitcases in the back of the car. “You’re leaving.”
“It’s time.”
“Does Matt know?” She had no business asking. But regular rules didn’t apply. Not here, beside Jon’s grave. Not talking to the man who had cut Matt Dawson to the quick.
“He won’t care.”
“He will, though. At least tell him goodbye.”
Mr. Dawson turned to her, squinting against the glare of sun on snow. “What do you care if I talk to my son?”
“I want him to be happy.”
“That makes two of us. Three, if you count his mother. But I can’t make my boy be happy. I don’t have that power anymore.”
Emily wanted to tell him he was wrong. She wanted to say that she knew how much it would mean if her own father called her, if he picked up the phone to tell her she was making the right choice in leaving Harmony Skeins. Even if he told her she was making the wrong choice.
But that ship had sailed a long time ago. And she couldn’t share her disappointment with this virtual stranger. Instead, she said, “At least you said goodbye to Jon,” she said. The son who doesn’t need you. The son who can’t hear you.
Then she was afraid she really would say too much. She’d tell Mr. Dawson what she actually thought about how he’d burdened Matt, how he’d layered on unrealistic expectation after unrealistic expectation, all on a boy’s narrow shoulders. She’d tell the father how much he’d hurt his son at the Fête, how deeply his alienation had cut.
But Mr. Dawson would never listen to her. Not when he’d spent a lifetime ignoring his own family. So she pulled her coat tighter over her sweater and turned away. She barely glanced at those suitcases tossed in the back of the Buick. She didn’t bother to see if Mr. Dawson watched her start her own car, watched her turn around on the snowy cemetery lane. But the whole way back to town, she thought of all the things she’d wanted to say—to Mr. Dawson, to her own father, to Jon.
And when she got back to Harmony Springs, she drove up and down each narrow street, cruising slow enough to study the windows of every store from Jackson to Sycamore. Someone had to have a Help Wanted sign in the window. Someone had to be offering her a ticket out.
Her restlessness was a tangible thing. It made her breath come fast, as if she’d just run a race. Her palms sweated against her steering wheel, and she didn’t quite settle to a stop before she turned onto Main Street.
She needed a change. Just like Mr. Dawson, she needed things to be different. She needed to pave the way for a different future, for a life she couldn’t even envision right now.
But in the end, she only found what she’d always known. No one was hiring. Not in January, in the heart of the winter slow-down. Her options were as narrow as they’d ever been, for a girl who’d skipped out on the traditional path, on all the doors college might have opened.
That was making things too simple, though. She could go to college, if that’s what was necessary to make the life she wanted. But college wasn’t going to fix what ailed her. College wouldn’t shore up Main Street. It wouldn’t preserve the Harmony Springs she’d known and loved for her entire life.
College wouldn’t cut out the ache Mr. Dawson’s departure was going to sink into Matt. It wouldn’t heal Mrs. Dawson. It wouldn’t bring back Jon.
Shaking her head in the middle of her living room, Emily collected the qiviut yarn Matt had given her. There was one place that felt comfortable to her, one place that would be safe.
She headed out to Jefferson Manor. She settled into the sunroom with Dolores and Joyce Horton. The yak yarn worked up like a dream, soft and light, like knitting a cloud. The qiviut was so warm that Emily felt as if she were wrapped in a cocoon, as if she was sheltered and safe and nothing in the world could ever hurt her.
She knit between the two women until the sun set over the snowy fields. With every new row, she felt herself relax further into the familiar interplay of bitter and sweet, of sorrow and joy, of the history of Harmony Springs. She joined Dolores and Joyce for afternoon tea, skipping the too-sweet pecan tartlets that Joyce tried to shovel onto her plate, passing up the bitter watercress sandwiches that were Dolores’s favorite.
And as she drove home, she tried not to think about the hole Mr. Dawson had dug that day, about the gaping wound he’d carved into the lives of the people he said he loved. Instead, she waited for Matt to come to her. And when he knocked on her door, she pulled him into the tiny apartment above Harmony Skeins, and she did her best to make him forget.