With This Kiss (39 page)

Barely holding back an eye roll, Andi said, “We both know that isn’t going to happen, Grandma.”

“You used to love to knit when you were a little girl. I’m telling you, it’s not natural to quit knitting one day and not miss it.”

“Are you calling me a freak of nature, Grandma?” Andi teased. Only way down deep inside, joking about not belonging didn’t really feel like a joke.

Instead, it felt like a reality that she’d tried to pretend hadn’t hurt all her life.

Evelyn picked up a few balls of yarn that were in the wrong basket. “I’m saying I think you must miss it.” She looked thoughtful. “Perhaps it’s simply that you haven’t found the right reason to start knitting in earnest yet.”

“I just don’t like knitting, Grandma. Not like you and Mom do.” Andi hadn’t thought about knitting, hadn’t been into another yarn or craft store for nearly two decades. Clearly, the yarn addiction hadn’t passed through to the third generation.

“You know, my mother tried to get me to knit for years before I really fell in love with it.”

“You’re kidding me?” Andi assumed her grandmother had been born with knitting needles in her hand. “What changed?”

Evelyn sat down on one of the soft couches in the middle of the room. “I met a man.”

“Grandpa?”

“No. Not Grandpa.”

Andi’s eyes went wide with surprise as she sank down beside her grandmother.

Evelyn reached into a basket beside her seat and pulled out a half-finished work in progress. As if she was hardly aware of the movements of her hands, she began a new row.

“Everyone was doing their part for World War II. I wanted to help the soldiers, and I was always good with knitting needles. I knew our socks and sweaters were giving joy and comfort to men, strangers I’d never meet,
but who desperately needed a reminder of softness. Of warmth.”

Andi thought about the tiny caps and booties her grandmother had always made for the new babies at the hospital. Andi had made them, too, when she was a little girl. She’d loved seeing a little baby at the park wearing something she’d made. But her grandmother was right. That hadn’t been enough to keep her knitting.

“So it wasn’t just one man who made you love knitting,” Andi said, trying to keep up with her grandmother, “but many?”

“I knit for the cause, but that’s all it was. A cause. It wasn’t personal. Not until
him
. Not until I made his sweater.” Evelyn’s eyes rose to meet Andi’s. “Every skein tells a story. As soon as a person puts it in their two hands, the mystery of the story is slowly revealed.”

Andi’s breath caught in her throat as her grandmother said, “Hold this, honey.” Since she didn’t know how to knit anymore, Andi laid the needles down awkwardly on her lap.

“Those fibers you’re holding can become anything from a baby blanket to a bride’s wedding veil,” Evelyn said softly. “But I’ve always thought knitting is about so much more than the things we make.”

Andi looked at her grandmother’s face and saw that Evelyn was a million miles away.

“Sometimes yarn is the best way to hold onto memories. But sometimes, it’s the only way to forget.”

Andi found herself blinking back tears.

This was exactly why she never came back to the lake. There were too many memories here for her. Memories of people that had meant so much to her.

The walls of the store suddenly felt too close, the room too small. She needed to leave, needed to go someplace where she could focus on work. And nothing else.

“Grandma,” she said as she stood up, “I need to go.” The needles and yarn fell from her lap to the floor.

Frowning, her grandmother bent to pick them up, but suddenly she was racked with coughs. Fear lancing her heart, Andi automatically put an arm around Evelyn and gently rubbed her back as if that could make the coughing stop.

Her grandmother tried to say, “I’m fine,” but each word was punctuated by more coughs.

Evelyn Thomas was a small-boned eighty-eight-yearold woman, but Andi had never thought of her grandmother as frail or fragile. Until now.

As her grandmother tried to regain her breath, Andi couldn’t believe how translucent her skin had become. Evelyn’s hands had always been one of the most impressive things about her with long, slim fingers and nails neatly rounded at the tips. So strong, so tireless as she quickly knitted sweaters and blankets, the needles a blur as she chatted, laughed, and gossiped with customers and friends in Lake Yarns.

“You shouldn’t come to work if you have a cold.” Fear made Andi’s words harder than they needed to be, almost accusing. “You should be resting.”

Mostly recovered now, her grandmother waved one hand in the air. “I told you, I’m fine. Just a little coughing fit every now and then.” At Andi’s disbelieving look, she said, “Things like that happen to us old people, you know.”

Andi hated to hear her grandmother refer to herself as
old, even though she knew it was technically true. It was just that she couldn’t bear to think that one day Evelyn wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be living and breathing this store, the yarn, the customers who loved her as much as her own family did.

A twinge of guilt hit Andi even though there was no reason for her to feel this way. Her mother and grandmother had always run Lake Yarns perfectly well by themselves. Nothing had changed just because Andi was going to be in town for a couple of weeks.

Still, she couldn’t help but feel that she should have been here before now. What if something had happened to her mother or grandmother while she’d been gone? Just like it had happened to her father.

“Have you seen Dr. Morris yet?” Andi asked, immediately reading the answer in her grandmother’s face. Sometimes Evelyn was too stubborn for her own good.

Andi grabbed the cordless phone and handed it to her grandmother. “Call him.”

“I can’t leave the store unattended.”

“I don’t care about the store, Grandma. I care about you. That cough sounded awful. You need to get it checked out, make sure it isn’t something serious.”

When Evelyn didn’t take the phone, Andi decided to take matters into her own hands. “Hello, this is Andi Powell. My grandmother Evelyn has a terrible cough and needs to see Dr. Morris as soon as possible.” After a moment of silence, where she listened to the friendly receptionist’s questions, Andi shot Evelyn a look. “She isn’t calling herself because talking makes her cough. Yes, she can be there in fifteen minutes.” She put the phone down on the counter. “He’s squeezing you in.”

“I won’t put a closed sign up in the middle of the day on my store. I’ve been open rain or shine for nearly sixty years.”

Andi found her grandmother’s purse behind the counter and forced her to take it, just as Evelyn had forced her to take the needles and yarn. “I’ll watch the store.”

“You?”

Evelyn’s disbelief was right on the edge of insulting. “Yes, me. How hard can it be?”

One neat eyebrow moved up on her grandmother’s pretty face, and Andi realized how insulting her response had been.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Grandma. Look, the register is the same one you had when I was a kid. I couldn’t have forgotten positively everything about knitting. If I don’t know something, I’ll figure it out. I promise.”

“Well, if you think you can handle it for an hour…”

The challenge in her grandmother’s voice had her saying, “After your appointment, I want you to take the rest of the day off. I’ll close up.”

But after Evelyn left, the bells on the door clanging softly behind her, Andi stood in the middle of the store wondering what the heck she’d just signed up for. With all the money Andi made in skyscrapers and on corporate campuses, she had absolutely no idea what she was doing in a place like this.

Still Andi told herself there was no reason to panic.

Anyone with half a brain could run a yarn store for a few hours on a Monday morning.

A few seconds later, the front door opened and a gray-haired woman walked in.

“Hello,” Andi said in an overbright voice. “Welcome to Lake Yarns.”

“Thank you. I’ve heard such good things about your store that I drove all the way from Utica to come take a look.”

Andi’s eyes widened. “You drove an hour and a half to visit this store?”

The woman gave her a strange look. “Yes, I did. Several of my friends simply rave about your selection and customer service.”

Andi hoped she didn’t look as horrified as she felt. This woman had traveled one hundred miles to shop here… and she was getting stuck with someone who didn’t even know how to knit.

Sorely tempted to run down the street to call her grandmother back, Andi told herself she was being ridiculous. How much help would someone need in a yarn store? If you were a serious knitter, shouldn’t you already know everything?

With another wide smile, Andi finally said, “Be sure to let me know if you need anything.”

She stared down at the ancient register, not really remembering how to use it at all, and wondered if there was an instruction booklet somewhere under the counter. She didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her first customer.

“Excuse me?”

Andi straightened up from her fruitless search for a manual. “Yes? Is there something I can help you with?”

The woman held up a skein of yarn. “It says this is superwash, but I’m a fairly new knitter and I don’t know whether I should trust the label or not. Can you tell me
how this actually washes? Does it pill or felt if you leave it in the dryer for too long?”

Andi carefully studied the label as if “100% Superwash Merino Wool” meant something to her. If she said she had no idea how it washed because she didn’t knit or know the first thing about any of the yarns in the store, the woman would be—rightly—disgusted. But if she lied and said it would wash well and then it didn’t, Lake Yarns would have lost a customer for life.

She’d never thought she’d have to think so fast standing in the middle of a yarn store.

How wrong she’d been.

Quickly deciding the truth was her best option, Andi said, “Actually I’ve never used that particular yarn.”

The woman frowned. “Is there anyone here that has?” she asked, craning her head to see if there was some yarn guru hiding in the back of the store.

“I’m sure there’s some information online about that brand. It will just take me a minute to look it up.”

Thank god she never went anywhere without her tiny laptop. Unfortunately, it seemed to take forever to start up. She felt like she was standing in front of one of her clients who wanted answers about their project and wanted them now. Andi usually worked double-time not to be put in this kind of position.

But her grandmother really had sounded terrible. Watching the store was the right thing to do.

“I’ll just find an Internet connection and then—”

Shoot. All of the nearby wireless providers were locked tight with passwords. Working not to let her expression betray her, Andi reached for her phone. But after what seemed like an eternity of trying to pull up her
search page, all she got was a message that said, “Cannot connect.”

She couldn’t believe it. She was being beaten by a yarn store.

Shooting her clearly irritated customer a reassuring smile, she said, “I’ll have the information for you in another few moments,” then picked up the cordless phone and local phone book and went into the back.

Flipping through the pages, she found another yarn store in Loon Lake and quickly dialed the number. “Hi, this is Andi Powell from Lake Yarns. I have a quick question for you about—” The woman on the other end of the line cut her off. “Oh yes, of course, I understand if you’re busy with a customer. Okay, I’ll call back in fifteen minutes.”

But Andi already knew that fifteen minutes would be way too long. Desperate now, she walked out the back door and held her cell phone out to the sky, praying for bars.

“Thank god,” she exclaimed when the word
searching
in the top left corner of her phone slowly shifted to the symbol that meant she had a wireless connection. Typing into the web browser with her thumbs, she actually exclaimed “hooray” and pumped her fist in the air when the information she’d been looking for appeared.

A moment later, greatly relieved to find her customer was still in the store, she said, “Good news. It seems that everyone who has used that yarn is really happy with how well it washed. Plus it evidently doesn’t itch in the least.”

The woman nodded. “Okay.”

Uh-oh. That was less than enthusiastic.

Hoping that talking about the woman’s intended
project might reengage her earlier enthusiasm, Andi asked, “What were you thinking of knitting with it?”

“A baby blanket for my new granddaughter.”

The woman pulled a picture out of her purse. The baby was chubby and bald and smiling a toothless grin.

“She’s beautiful,” Andi said softly.

The woman nodded, her previously irritated expression now completely gone. “I learned to knit for her.”

Just like that, Andi suddenly understood what her grandmother had been talking about: this baby was the reason this woman was falling in love with knitting. As Andi instinctively ran the yarn’s threads between her thumb and forefinger, a shiver of beauty, of sweet, unexpected calm suddenly moved through her.