One week after Save Our Stores was founded…
Emily stood in the doorway of the sunroom at Jefferson Manor. Down the hall, she could hear salsa music with an instructor calling out, “Use your hips, people! Don’t forget to use your hips!”
Emily figured she’d be lucky if she could waltz when she was old enough to move in to Jefferson Manor.
She crossed the room to the expected pair of wheelchairs situated in the corner. One of them was centered in a patch of sunshine. Its occupant wore a cheerful orange sweater, the blazing color set off against a pair of crimson pants that looked like she might have stolen them from Santa Claus. A very skinny Santa Claus. A very skinny Santa Claus who preferred bright yellow slippers to boots.
The other chair lurked in the shadows, looking like a black-and-white photograph of the first. The ancient woman who sat there wore black slacks and charcoal slippers. Her soot-colored sweater set off her pale face, and she’d wrapped a grey scarf around her thin neck.
Both women were sleeping. Emily slipped into a nearby chair, gently easing her gigantic tote bag off her shoulder. Apparently she wasn’t quiet enough, though, because when she turned back to the sleepers, she found herself staring into a pair of glittering black eyes.
“Dolores!” Emily said, smiling and getting up to kiss the old woman’s cheek. She smoothed the grey scarf back into place as she stepped away.
After accepting her due, Dolores reached out to kick her sister’s chair. “Joyce!” she snapped. “Wake up!”
The younger Horton sister—by three minutes, if legend was true—startled awake. Emily brushed another kiss against her soft cheek and said to both of them, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Dolores said. “Spend the day sleeping, and you’ll be certain to toss and turn all night.”
Joyce patted at her hair, decades past the age when she’d bother to contradict her sister. Instead, she beamed a smile at Emily. “Hello, dear. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Emily grinned and did her best to keep her voice cheerful. She didn’t have ninety-six years of practice, but she thought she did a damn good job. “I’m sorry to say the sweater-knitting class didn’t get enough people to sign up. I have to cancel it.”
“Again, dear?” If Joyce was upset, she didn’t show it. Instead, her dark eyes clouded with concern. “You mustn’t let it get you down, dear. There are more student fish in that sea.”
“When was the last time one of your classes actually did go forward?” Dolores asked. Her voice sounded as if it had been dipped in a tub of liquid gloom.
Emily redoubled her efforts at positive thinking. “Classes just aren’t that popular these days. Maybe things will pick up after the new year.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what will happen, dear. Perhaps you can show people how to knit Easter bonnets.” Joyce sounded as if she couldn’t imagine a world without hand-made Easter millinery.
“That’s absurd,” said Dolores. “People are far more likely to knit Christmas presents. If you can’t get them into the store as the weather’s getting cold, I can’t imagine you’ll have any better luck come spring. Maybe Theresa should consider packing up.”
Emily’s back teeth gritted as she forced herself to smile. “She’d never do that. Not when she has the support of long-time customers like both of you,” she said. “And that’s why I brought some yarn with me this morning. If students won’t come to Harmony Skeins, then I’ll bring the class to them.”
“What a wonderful idea, dear!” Joyce actually clapped her hands, as if she’d just been told she was getting a pony for her birthday. Although what a ninety-six year old woman would ever do with a pony, Emily didn’t dare consider.
“What’s the project?” Dolores asked.
Before Emily could reply, Joyce said, “It’s that cable knit sweater, silly. Don’t you remember? The one with the crew neck?”
“Crew neck,” Dolores sniffed, and Emily was pretty sure she was trying to cover up a moment of forgetfulness. “Those always make me itch.”
“Not this wool,” Emily said, reaching for her well-stuffed bag. She pulled out a dozen skeins of soft black yarn. “It’s Spud and Chloe.”
Dolores pursed her lips. “Sounds like a potato. And a French prostitute.”
Emily smothered a laugh by turning back for Joyce’s yarn, a vibrant fuchsia. For any other customer, Emily would have suggested a more…subtle shade, but Joyce exclaimed in pleasure. “How perfect! And this is soft.”
“It’s superwash, too,” Emily said. “So you can just toss it in the machine if you ever need to clean it.”
Joyce shook her head in amazement. “What will they think of next?”
Emily smiled and parceled out the rest of her supplies—knitting needles and counters, half a dozen cable holders each, a multi-page pattern that she’d taken the liberty of printing at four times the normal size. She’d used a neon highlighter to indicate the instructions for the size Extra Small each sister would need.
Only after her students were casting on their requisite stitches did Emily fish out her own yarn. She’d skipped the Spud and Chloe in favor of a complex grey tweed. It was an unusual choice for her; she generally preferred dark jewel tones. But something about the yarn had called to her as she unpacked the shipment. The hand-dyed wool had subtle flecks of baby blue and soft lavender, even a hint of gentle pink. She checked the pattern, running her fingers beneath the instructions for her usual Medium.
She asked Joyce and Dolores about Jefferson Manor’s plans for Halloween, and then she cast on. As Dolores bemoaned the over-abundance of store-bought costumes—“Nothing beat a plain white sheet when we were growing up. A plain white sheet, with two holes cut out for eyes”—Emily frowned at her knitting.
Years of experience had taught her that the sweater was going to be…form-fitting if she kept to the instructions for a Medium. Emily preferred her clothes loose. “Gallumping,” her mother had described them when she was growing up. She cast on another twenty stitches, eyed it again, and added ten more. She dug a pen out of the bottom of her bag and made some quick calculations, expanding all the other dimensions of the pattern. She circled the new numbers so she wouldn’t accidentally short-change herself later on.
“So, dear,” Joyce said as she whipped her yarn around her needles. Not for the first time, Emily wondered why the woman even pretended to need a knitting class. “I understand you’re sparking with Matthew Dawson.”
Emily choked.
“Don’t say ‘sparking,’” Dolores instructed severely. “Young people these days say, ‘going out.’ Isn’t that right, Emily?”
“Yes,” she said, swallowing hard. “That’s what they say.”
Joyce cackled with delight. “Then you and Matthew are going out!”
“No!” Emily said. Her voice was sharp enough that both of the Horton sisters stared.
Joyce recovered first. “Then you’re just friends, dear?”
“Not exactly,” Emily said weakly.
“I could have sworn I heard about you and young Matthew. Sadie Parker said his truck was parked right in front of the yarn shop, what was it? Two weeks ago, I think.”
What was it with these women at Jefferson Manor? Their surveillance system could teach Homeland Security a thing or two.
“He wasn’t visiting me,” Emily said. “He just stopped by The Corner Bar to catch up with old friends.”
“It must be so difficult for him,” Joyce said. “Losing his brother overseas. Poor Jonathan. That boy was a hero.”
Emily glanced at Dolores. The woman never had a positive word to say about anyone or anything. Emily was actually curious to see how she would bad-mouth Harmony Springs’ genuine war hero.
She was surprised to see Dolores bow her head. The old woman whispered a few words, some sort of secret prayer, and when she looked up, her adamant eyes were glazed with a suspicious sheen. But that was impossible. Dolores Horton never cried. “May he rest in peace,” she said, her voice almost soft.
Shaken, Emily knit a few more stitches. Not surprisingly, Dolores recovered first. “I understand young Matthew bought Zeb Marshall’s place,” Dolores said. “I suppose he’s decided to settle down. To become a gentleman farmer.”
Emily shook her head. “Not really.” The basilisk look was back in Dolores’s eye. She was like a terrier; she wasn’t going to rest until she’d shaken loose every possible morsel of potential gossip. Emily knew her choices: Clarify now, or clarify later. She completed three more stitches before yielding to the inevitable. “Matt is opening up the American Discount store. Out on Main Street, just before First.”
“Well that makes sense, dear.” Joyce nodded happily and continued her knitting.
“It does?” Emily couldn’t help but sound mystified.
“Well, he is his father’s son.”
“What does that mean?”
Joyce looked at her with astonishment. “Why, he’s following straight in David Dawson’s steps.”
Emily answered carefully. “Dave Dawson is an accountant at Baked Rite.”
“Certainly, he is now. But David never planned on making a career balancing books out there. He had such grand dreams when he came out of the Army.”
“Dreams!” Dolores huffed. She pointed her knitting needle at Emily. “He was going to open a nursery.”
“Plants,” Joyce said helpfully. “Not babies.”
“But babies changed his plans,” Dolores cackled. “He’d scraped together the money to set up his business. Brought in all his stock—fruit trees and flowers, rare things he’d read about in books. Kept most of them in a greenhouse because they couldn’t take the mountain cold. And it was just his bad luck that first spring ran long. Seventeen inches of snow in May. Wet snow too; it brought down the power lines. He couldn’t afford a generator, not at first. So everything he had died.”
“But that Susan Franklin, she stayed with him,” Joyce said.
“What choice did the girl have, once she started putting on her baby weight?” Dolores’s smile glinted.
Joyce said, “They had a lovely wedding. Father Steven married them in June, and he christened little Matthew in December.”
Dolores was not about to be softened by happy wedding memories. She scowled and said, “They never took a honeymoon. David walked out of the church the day they were married and drove straight over to Baked Rite. Took a job on the night shift, the only thing they had open, running the machine that puts the cookies in boxes. Worked a full shift every night and took classes at Shenandoah Valley Community College during the day.”
Joyce shook her head, her knitting now forgotten. “He barely saw poor Susan and the baby.”
“Saw enough of her that young Matthew had a brother three years later,” Dolores corrected tartly.
Joyce accepted the correction with equanimity. “By the time Jonathan was born, David worked in the front office. He made it home for dinner then. Got to see all the firsts he’d missed with young Matthew—first steps, first loose teeth, first…everything. He was so proud when that boy followed in his footsteps. So proud when Jonathan signed up for the Army.”
“At least one of his sons understood the value of hard work,” Dolores said. “Instead of going off to play games.”
That wasn’t fair. Matt had played professional ball. He hadn’t been scraping around sandlots, staying out after curfew. He’d been part of an elite group, one of the best pitchers in the world.
But Emily didn’t say that. She didn’t like how it felt to defend Matt. She didn’t like saying anything good about him.
Instead, she dove back into her knitting, letting the familiar rhythm soothe the jagged feelings stirred up by the Horton sisters’ story. She allowed the yarn to slip through her fingers, stitch by stitch, building something new, something stronger, something that became better from the sheer force of repetition.
In the end, she promised the Horton sisters she’d be back the following week. They’d work more on their sweaters. They could sit here in the sun room if the weather held, or by the fire in the living room if the temperatures started to dip.
As Emily drove home, she realized why the Horton sisters’ story seemed so strange. Jon had never told her any of it. Not a word about how hard his father had worked. Not a hint of how his father had dreamed. It was like Dave Dawson had never existed before he settled into his boring office job at Baked Rite.
People got trapped. And family, babies, could build the strongest traps of all.
By the time she got home, Emily had made up her mind. The itch she’d felt the week before, the hint that it was time to move on from Harmony Skeins—that wasn’t just a momentary flicker. She needed something new in her life. She needed something different.
It was time to start asking around town, to find out who was hiring. With the economy still rough, it might take her a while to land her next job. But with eighteen months under her belt at Harmony Skeins, she had no doubt it was time to move on. She could always knit for fun after she found a new place to work.
She had to park her car a block away from the store and her apartment, but she didn’t mind the walk down the sunlit street. For the first time in weeks, she felt light. She felt comfortable. Just deciding to start her job hunt had quelled the nagging feeling that had haunted her since her birthday.
It was enough. For now.