How to Knit a Heart Back Home (33 page)

And then Lucy burst into tears.

Toots was many things as a mother, and preoccupied was usually part of the equation. But her shoulders were the best shoulders Lucy had ever known for crying on, and she sat inside her mother’s embrace as they rocked in the cool air.

“There,” Toots said into Lucy’s hair. “There.” She didn’t ask questions; she just held on.

Long minutes later, Lucy choked back the last sob, her cheek against a chenille reptile.

Toots said, “A little better?”

Lucy nodded and hiccupped.

“It was your father’s and my thirty-ninth anniversary last week.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot!” Check off yet another thing Lucy had screwed up.

“Not your anniversary, is it? You’re not supposed to remember.” Toots touched the tip of Lucy’s nose with a finger. “Your father reminded me of what twitterpated fools we’d been, and how our energy had thrown things off for a while. In our first two apartments, clocks would never keep time right. Always went too fast, even when they were plugged in to regular house current. Just being together caused things to break. So many negative ions.”

“Mom, come on.”

Smiling ruefully, Toots said, “Sometimes love doesn’t run smoothly.”

“What if it doesn’t run at all? What if someone does something that breaks it?”

“Did you lie, cheat, or steal?”

“No.”

“Did he?”

Lucy shook her head.

Toots gave a small humph. “You want some hot chocolate?”

Lucy nodded again.

In the kitchen, Toots hummed while Lucy got out her knitting.

“Pretty yellow,” said Toots. “So much lovely stockinette. So relaxing.”

“It’s Grandma’s sweater, in Abigail’s yarn.” Lucy paused while she held it out.

Her mother kept humming.

“I don’t think I’m the right person to edit the Eliza patterns and put her book together.”

“I saw Irene Bancroft at Willow Rock last Christmas, when we were caroling, and she said something about boxes that should be taken to the Book Spire. I didn’t know what she meant, didn’t even remember she had a son Owen’s age. Didn’t pay much attention to her, to tell you the truth. I was just sad she seemed so lonely. But I do know this: the only thing that made Eliza happier than knitting was love.”

Lucy’s heart raced. “What?”

Toots dropped a flotilla of marshmallows on top of the hot chocolate and set it in front of Lucy. Then she added even more to her own.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know what she was thinking when she left the papers there. Her being dead and all. But sometimes I wonder . . . if she didn’t think that you and Owen might hit it off . . . You just never knew with Eliza.”

“Oh, brother. Why not just have a séance, Mom?”

“Oh!” Toots clapped her hands and leaned forward. “We
do
know Miss Potts on Beach Road.”

“I was
kidding.
”

“Shoot.” Looking disappointed, Toots sat in the chair opposite Lucy. “Are you in love with him?”

Lucy clutched the needles so hard they bent a bit. “Yeah, Mom. I am. Crazy in love.”

Toots smiled. “Good. Accept that. Revel in it. I’m glad.”

“But it’s broken. Mom, we’re two broken people, and it’s not easy like you always say it is. I can’t just . . . wave a magic wand and work on my aura or buy some magic beans and it’ll just be fine.”

“So you have to
fix
it,” proclaimed Toots with a flourish of her hands.

Lucy buried her face in her hands. “How?”

“We can just do a little hypnosis, honey.” Toots looked at her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“
Mom!
No. No way.”

Toots raised her hands to her hair where the curls were frizzing around her face. “Okay, okay, fine. I’ll come up with something. Give me a minute.” She reached for Lucy’s bag. “Oooh! Can I take a look at her papers, honey?”

Fine. Lucy let her change the subject and drew out a random pile for her mother to go through.

While her mother flipped through pages, dipping in and out of the notes and patterns, Lucy knitted. She was going to have to rethink where to start the raglan to make Eliza’s rough notes work. She was thinking of making it a spring cardigan. If only she had the sleeve instructions. She didn’t trust herself enough to just make them up. It wouldn’t be an Eliza Carpenter sweater if she did that. It would be a hybrid, and that’s not what she wanted. But she’d been through all the boxes now, and she didn’t think the missing page was going to show up. Lucy made herself a note and then knitted a few rows.

Knit through everything.
Eliza’s motto. She’d take it for her own now. Lucy wouldn’t think of Owen or of everything she’d lost, and she wouldn’t think of the look on Molly’s face as she’d run out of the bookstore yesterday.

How could her heart hurt this much and still keep beating? How could her hands keep knitting?

Knit through everything. Even after she’d screwed everything up so badly she’d never get the skein of her life unknotted.

But the sound of the house was comforting, as always. Her father collected clocks, so the four in the kitchen ticked companionably, never quite on the same exact beat. The heater clicked on automatically, and the house
woosh
ed as the furnace started. Was this small garter edging going to be enough to keep the piece from curling? Oh, well, blocking would cure all ills, just like Eliza had always said. And the crocheted edge would also help. When Owen’s dark eyes crept into Lucy’s thoughts, she resolutely thought about small pearl buttons instead, ignoring the sharp stab of grief.

As she turned the row again, her mother made a small noise. Was she crying? Granted, her mother cried at the drop of a double point, but it always undid Lucy.

“Mom? What is it?”

Toots wiped her cheek and held up a yellowed piece of lined paper. “Have you seen this one? Oh, we have to give this back to them.”

Shaking her head, Lucy reached for it. She’d seen it but hadn’t read it. “I knew it wasn’t Eliza’s hand.”

“Read it. Oh, read it now.”

The script was in pale blue ink, and some of it was smeared.

November 4, 1969

Eliza,

Were it not for you, I’d be gone. M would be alone, and I would be somewhere far away, brokenhearted and bereft. The world itself told us we were wrong, that we were unnatural. Even, perhaps, evil. Even though we knew we weren’t, knew it with every fiber of our beings.

So we hid.

And when that rumor started and blazed (oh, but it was true! The worst kind of rumor), we considered leaving, packing our bags and heading for a different town, where no one knew us. But M is so attached here, her roots so deep, that she would wither and die anywhere else, and I felt it was my responsibility to leave, to protect her, to save her.

You, my dear Eliza, when you stepped into our house to knit with us, when you invited us out with your knitting friends, when you included us, together, you changed everything. I stopped mentally packing my bags every time I heard a whispered comment behind my back, and I stopped worrying about bumps in the night.

And last week, when you asked in front of all those women what day we celebrated as our anniversary . . . Well, this isn’t New York. We hear about people marching for rights, and we’ll never do that. We used up all our bravery when we moved in together as roommates years ago, and we were about to run out of that little which we’d held in reserve against emergencies.

Last week, we left your home with our heads held high. You included us. You’ve always loved us, but you included us in the conversation that day, and your friends followed your magnificent lead.

We are validated by your friendship and we remain eternally in your debt,

G.

Toots clapped her hands delightedly and wiped away another tear. “Isn’t that just so Eliza? If she couldn’t matchmake a couple, then at least she could help keep them together.”

Lucy shook her head. “Who is this?”

“You silly thing. Think.”

“All I can think of are Mildred and Greta, but they’re not . . .” Lucy’s hand flew to her mouth.

“You didn’t
know
?”

“I just thought . . . I thought they were best friends.”

“Well, of course they are. In the same way your father and I are best friends.”

Lucy’s knitting slipped from her lap, and she caught it by the working yarn. How on earth could she have missed that for all these years?

“You know,” her mother continued. “In the sleeping-in-the-same-bed way, the having-sex way.”

“Mom! I get it!”

“In the way you and Owen—”

“Quit it!”

“Are you uncomfortable with them being gay?”

“Of course not. Who do you think you raised?” she said.

Toots nodded, with patience in her eyes. “That’s all right, then. I can take clueless. I can’t take bigoted, but clueless is just fine.”

Lucy looked at her knitting. She thought about her mother and father, happy in the same bed for thirty-nine years. Mildred and Greta, happy, presumably, for decades, and Lucy, because she didn’t see change, because she’d seen them as friends since her childhood and had never seen fit to revise that vision, had no freaking clue about their happiness.

Lucy officially knew nothing about other people’s relationships. She wasn’t allowed to judge anymore.

But she could try to understand. And she could ask the question that had been bothering her for the last week. She took a deep breath. “Mom. In high school, did you ever . . . preempt a letter to me from Owen?”

Toots glanced sideways at Lucy and then back down at the papers. She didn’t pretend not to know what Lucy was talking about. “I wondered when you’d ask me that. I didn’t open it, I can promise you that. I’m not a snoop. But still, it wasn’t my proudest mothering moment, and I’ve regretted it. But I had heard he’d left town, and I didn’t think you needed the distraction. I threw it away. It was your senior year, honey. And you were so preoccupied with thoughts of him. I didn’t think you’d ever get over that boy—it hurt you so much when he left.”

“Oh, Mom. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

The corners of Toots’s mouth quivered. “I’m sorry. And then the others, your other boyfriends. They kept leaving. I wondered if it was my fault somehow—I should have worked outside the home, made you a latchkey child, more independent. Or something . . .”

“Oh, stop. Don’t cry. You did everything right.” Lucy just needed to move forward. “Mom, I need your help.”

Oh, she didn’t know if this would work. This might just be too much. It might be
way
too much.

Toots pushed the papers to one side and sat forward on the edge of her chair, the tears still welling. “My sweet little radish. Anything.”

“I need to buy some . . . things.”

“Things?”

“From you.”

Toots brightened. “Sex toys?”

“
Gah
. Can you please go get your trunk or bag of tricks or whatever it is you have? And if you tell Dad I’ll have to kill myself. Probably with a butter knife. Positively, absolutely. So never, ever tell. This is not a dinner story, capisce?”

Toots made a locking motion in front of her lips and threw the invisible key behind her. Then she stood up. “For you and Owen? Yes?”

Lucy groaned and covered her eyes with the half-knitted sleeve. “No. For Molly. And whoever she wants to use them with.
Please
don’t ask.”

“Darling. I don’t judge. I just hope she picks Jonas and that he has a good time. I have something he’ll like, in fact . . .”

Lucy wondered if it was possible to die of embarrassment.

Or of hope.

Chapter Thirty-two

Always be brave.

—
E. C.

L
ucy carried in the big brown Trader Joe’s grocery bag and thumped it down on Molly’s kitchen table. Molly wasn’t home, but thankfully, she had Molly’s spare key for times exactly like these.

Times when she needed to scatter sex toys all over her best friend’s table, willy-nilly.

Well, willy, at least.

Lots of them.

Lucy started at the top of the bag and worked her way down. First the dildos. They ranged from small to large, seven of them. There was a purple one, a blue one, two pink ones, and two that looked way too realistic for Lucy’s comfort. Did they have to have simulated veins? Was that really necessary? One was double-ended and Lucy couldn’t figure out for the life of her the logistics of it. She quit trying after a moment.

Lucy stacked them like Lincoln Logs on the table and then stood back to look. They looked more like dog toys than sexual items, like those Kongs people filled with dog treats.

Next came the nipple items. There were vibrating nipple clamps, ones with feathers, ones with chains. Nipple oil that heated when blown upon, and tiny little clothespins that looked like they were supposed to hang up doll clothes, although Lucy supposed they weren’t. Not with that packaging.

Then the little pink whip and the black paddle with the heart cut-out—it was kind of cute, in its own way, Lucy thought. Not that she’d ever have sex again anyway. Without Owen, what was the point?