Knit Two Together

“About leaving you with Grandma P, you mean.”

Libby nodded. “About that. About never calling or writing or—” She coughed away a sudden tightness in her throat. “I’ve told you all that, too,” she said, feeling safer skirting the subject than she did being smack-dab in the quagmire. “I don’t have any answers. Nobody does. I’m grateful she did leave the business to me, though. It’s given us a place to start over. And I’m sorry that Barb’s life was so out of control.”

“Except if it was…” She shivered and hugged her arms around herself. “How did she ever keep the business going?” she asked. In spite of Libby’s warning that, no matter what the calendar said, it was too damp and cool for summer clothes, Meghan had chosen to wear a pair of khaki shorts and a bright yellow tank.

Another look around the shop at the cobwebs and the dirt, and Libby found herself wondering the same thing. “I’m hoping we find some ledger books or something so we can find out how the business was really doing. Something tells me it wasn’t doing well. Barb sure didn’t keep this place in shape.” As if to prove the theory, Libby saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. A mouse. Rather than freak Meghan out, she ignored the critter and promised herself a trip to a hardware store and a lifetime supply of traps. “This place is a mess.”

“Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Meghan looked up toward the water-stained ceiling, and Libby knew exactly what she was thinking.

The day before, they had ventured no farther than the dining room, where the tattered teddy bear had been waiting for them. Today it was time to check out the apartment upstairs. She wondered what she’d find in the place Barb had called home. As to how she’d handle the glimpse into her mother’s private world, Libby knew there was only one way to find out.

“Feeling brave?” she asked, and before Meghan could answer—and before Libby herself could listen to the voice inside her own head that asked if after all this time she was ready—she headed through the kitchen and to the stairway near the back door.

She took the steps two at a time, partly to make Meghan think this was all part of the adventure she’d promised but mostly because she knew if she dawdled, she’d lose her nerve.

She paused at the top of the steps, bracing herself. After Meghan arrived, though, there was only so long she could stall. A quick breath for courage, and Libby pushed open the door.

They found themselves in the kitchen, a small, tidy room painted sunny yellow with red accents. There was a maple table surrounded by four chairs against the windows to Libby’s left, and a ceiling fan overhead. There was more dust, sure, but it wasn’t what she saw that caught Libby’s attention. It was what was missing from the room that piqued her curiosity.

Anxious to see if her initial suspicion was true, she did a quick survey and made a trip through the kitchen and into the small spare dining room. From there, she peeked into the living room, the bedroom and the bath.

The apartment was orderly. The furniture wasn’t flashy, but it was sturdy and well cared for. The colors were pleasant, brighter and clearer than what she’d expected, though she had to admit she honestly didn’t know what she’d expected.

“It looks like no one ever lived here,” Libby mumbled, testing the theory on herself. Just to be sure she wasn’t imagining it, she looked around again. There were no pictures on the walls or on the end tables flanking the living room couch. There were no books on the shelves in the one corner of the bedroom that had apparently been used as an office. There was nothing in the way of mementos or knickknacks. No plants or candles or magazines left lying around.

Barb had died suddenly and certainly unexpectedly in an auto accident, and when she’d imagined this moment—as she had so many times—Libby had envisioned stepping into the apartment and directly into what had been her mother’s life. There would be books, and the books would give Libby a clue as to whether Barb enjoyed romances or mysteries, thrillers or history. There would be magazines, and she’d find out if her mother was the Newsweek type or a woman who read People. There would be little clues in the kinds of photos Libby had expected to find dotting the apartment: vacations, friends, pets. Maybe a picture of Libby as a child?

The very thought clutched at her heart, and she turned her back on Meghan and cleared her throat. “Somebody’s been here,” she said, though she suspected Meghan hadn’t thought of that. Nor did she think her daughter cared. “No way could anyone live without anything personal at all. Somebody must have come in after Barb died and cleaned the place up. I wonder what they took?”

“You’re not going to start that again, are you?” Meghan tried to keep her question light, but Libby couldn’t help but notice the undertone of worry.

She turned and pinned her daughter with a look. “Start what?”

“You know…” Meghan shrugged, body language designed to let her mother know how little she cared. It didn’t work. As soon as Meghan failed to meet her eyes, Libby knew something was bothering her. If she needed more proof, it came in the singsong bitterness of Meghan’s voice. “You get the Subaru, I get the Lexus. I get the piano, you take the silver. You and Daddy…” Meghan kicked the toe of her sandals against the blue-and-white-tile floor. “Dividing up everything like it was the money and those little houses in a Monopoly game. Is that how you got stuck with me?”

As if she’d been punched, Libby sucked in a breath. “Where did that come from?”

Meghan turned away.

“Look…” She reached for her daughter’s hand, and though Meghan tried to be aloof and adult she was, after all, just a little girl. When Libby tugged her, she melted into her mother’s arms. One arm around her shoulders, Libby rubbed Meghan’s back the way she used to all those years before when she’d perched on the edge of Meghan’s bed and read her a bedtime story. “Divorce isn’t easy for anyone,” she said. “It wasn’t easy for me, and…” She swallowed her pride; easing Meghan’s fears was more important. “It wasn’t easy for Daddy either. There are lots of decisions that have to be made when a marriage is over and, yes, some of those decisions involve material things. The cars and the piano and the silver…those were all things that belonged to both me and Daddy. That’s why we had to decide who got what. Legally there was no other way. But you…” She held Meghan at arm’s length and with one finger chucked her under the chin.

“There was no deciding about who wanted you and who didn’t. We both did. We both do. That’s why you’re here in Cleveland with me now. And it’s why you’re going to spend as much time as possible with Daddy. We’d both like to have you with us all the time. But unless we can figure out how to clone you, that’s just not going to work. We adore you, silly creature.” When she coaxed a smile out of Meghan, Libby breathed easier. “No matter what else ever happens between me and Daddy, nothing will ever change that. You know that, don’t you?”

Meghan wasn’t about to give in easily. Not when she was the center of attention and being told how wonderful she was. “Did Barb ever tell you stuff like that?”

“No.” Libby shook her head. “She never did. At least not that I remember. Maybe she just didn’t want to make promises she couldn’t keep.”

“Promises like how you’ll always love me and you’d never leave me the way she left you?”

Had the worry haunted Meghan all these years?

The very thought pierced Libby’s heart and she prayed it wasn’t true. She had never questioned the wisdom of sharing her story with Meghan, but she’d never meant to make her question if she was valued and loved.

No, Rick had done that when he walked out on both of them.

Rather than let her anger at Rick spoil the moment, Libby kissed Meghan’s cheek. “I will never leave you like my mother left me,” she told Meghan. “I would never even think of it. I’d never even think about thinking about it. I’d never even think about thinking about—”

“All right!” Meghan laughed, and Libby was glad. A child of divorce had enough to worry about without adding to the list.

“And when I talked about someone being here and taking things…just so you know, I’m not being greedy. I just wondered.” Libby took another look around at the bare apartment and wondered what it had been like when Barb was alive. Did she host dinner parties in the dining room? And if she did, who did she invite? Did she have friends? Or a cheerless, lonely existence? If she’d been alone, was it Libby’s fault?

That was too much to consider and Libby shook the thought away. “I just wondered what kind of things might have been here,” she told Meghan.

“You mean stuff that would tell you what Barb was like.”

Libby sighed in relief. Sometimes her daughter could be remarkably mature. “Exactly.”

“Maybe we’ll find something.”

Another look around and Libby shook her head. “I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.”

“You never know.” Meghan untangled herself from Libby and strolled into the living room. “You know,” she raised her voice so Libby could hear her in the kitchen. It didn’t take much; the apartment wasn’t much bigger than the great room back in their suburban Cranberry Township home. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be up here. I mean, it’s not nearly as nice as home, but…” Meghan moved aside the lace curtains on the living room window that looked over the street. “At least it’s not as grungy as downstairs.”

“It will be even nicer once we get it cleaned up and get some of our own stuff in here.”

“Yeah. Except we have to share a bedroom.” She thought her mother couldn’t see her, but Libby didn’t miss the face Meghan made. “How lame is that, having to share a room with your mother?”

“Once we get the business up and going, we might use the apartment for storage and move into a bigger place. Or we can think about adding onto the shop and giving you your own suite downstairs. How would that be?”

Meghan’s blue eyes lit up. “Promise?”

“No.” Meghan’s hopeful expression fell and Libby laughed. “I can’t promise, but I can plan. Right now our plan starts with getting things ready up here so we don’t have to spend my entire divorce settlement on hotel bills.” She looked around again at the apartment, filled with furniture but empty when it came to clues about her mother’s life.

“At least it won’t be as hard to clean up here as it will be down in the shop. I thought there would be more to pack up, things to cart away. I thought—”

Rick’s words pounded through her head.

What are you hoping for? A letter? ‘Dear Libby, here are all the reasons I abandoned you, now you can live happily ever after’?

“Damned straight,” Libby mumbled to herself, then smiled at the look of utter bewilderment on Meghan’s face when she realized her mother was talking to herself. “Don’t worry, kid, I haven’t lost my mind. I was just wishing that Barb had left us something.”

“Some hint about who she really was and why she left you?”

“Now that you mention it…” Libby wrapped her arm around Meghan, and together they headed downstairs for the cleaning supplies. “I’d settle for an explanation as to why she left a yarn shop to a woman who can’t knit!”

The next day, the first thing Libby discovered was that the air-conditioning didn’t work. Too bad. The skies had finally cleared, the temperature was flirting with the mideighties and outside the sidewalks steamed with humidity.

She was hot. She was sweaty. She desperately needed a break from the mountain of cleaning that had kept her busy all morning.

So why, she asked herself, hadn’t she chosen something a little more relaxing?

She flicked a bead of sweat off her forehead and scraped her palms against the legs of her black shorts. By the time she took a deep breath and reached for the blue metal knitting needles she’d found below the front counter that morning, her hands were as damp as ever.

Needles in her right hand, yarn in her left, she stared at the how-to pictures in the book she and Meghan had unearthed in the room beside the dining room, which must have once been Barb’s classroom.

In fact, because that particular room wasn’t nearly as cluttered as the rest of the store, and so, easier to organize, Libby had left Meghan in there to finish the cleaning.

“Sure you don’t want to come over here and try this with me?” she called to her now. Meghan needed a break. And Libby? Well, she knew from the start that a little moral support in the knitting department wouldn’t hurt. “It’s a whole lot of fun.”

“No, thanks.” Meghan’s voice floated back to Libby along with a plume of dust from the general direction of the classroom. “And don’t tell me it’s fun, Mom. No way do you sound like you’re having fun.”

“You got me there,” Libby grumbled, but she wasn’t about to give up. As if it actually might help her make sense of the instructions, she bent closer to the page. “Cast on?” She read the words in large, bold print and peered at the drawings and the instructions. None of it made sense. If she tried to ignore the written instructions and follow the drawings, she got confused. If she did exactly what the instructions said and didn’t pay any attention to the drawings, she was more mixed up than ever.

After thirty minutes of trying, the only thing she’d succeeded in doing was putting a slipknot on one of the needles.

Something told her there was more to it than that.

Refusing to be intimidated by either the incomprehensible instructions, the confusing drawings or the needles that felt so foreign in her hands, Libby followed the pictures in the book, wound the yarn around her fingers and—

“Damn!” She watched the yarn untangle. Right before it settled into looking exactly the way it looked before she began the process.

She wondered if she was the only person in the world who’d ever had trouble learning to knit and decided that she must be. From the book’s worn pages and tattered binding, she guessed it was something Barb or her customers had used a lot. Obviously the incomprehensible instructions and mystifying black-and-white drawings meant something to them, and just as obviously that meant they must have been far more intelligent and far less klutzy than Libby.

With a sigh, she flipped the book closed. It was, according to its title, a complete and comprehensive guide to knitting, and as far as she could tell, the complete and comprehensive part was true. At the back of the heavy volume there were pictures of different stitch patterns and instructions on how to knit them, written in what looked to be some kind of code. There was a section on the different kinds of knitting needles—a surprise to Libby since she didn’t know there were different kinds of knitting needles—and another on choosing the right yarn for every project. There were chapters on finishing garments and fixing mistakes.

Comprehensive was the name of the game.

As for being a guide, Libby was pretty certain two-dimensional drawings designed to teach her a three-dimensional skill weren’t going to guide her anywhere but to frustration.

So far it was the only thing about knitting she was good at.

“Mom! You said this was going to be easy.” Meghan’s anguished cry pretty much echoed the words that were bouncing through Libby’s head. Meghan, though, was not talking about knitting. Libby looked up just in time to see her daughter come through the dining room dragging two very full black garbage bags. “It doesn’t look like there’s much junk in there. Until you start digging through it all. There was tons of paper in that cabinet against the wall. And there was plenty of yarn piled in those baskets in there. What do you want me to do with this junk?”

At breakfast they’d discussed their cleaning and organizing strategy over muffins from the nearby bakery shop, but she wasn’t surprised that Meghan didn’t remember. Even as Libby had listed their tasks room by room, and looked at a calendar to set a schedule so they could have the store cleaned out before the end of summer, she knew Meghan wasn’t listening and knew precisely why. Cleaning out years of clutter from a dusty and dreary yarn shop was not Meghan’s idea of fun.

Libby appreciated the help more than she could say. That was the only thing that made it possible for her to force the knitting-induced aggravation out of her voice. “Is that good junk or bad junk in those bags?” she asked.

Her daughter rolled her eyes. Libby was quickly learning this was an all-embracing expression, a sort of universal language practiced by every teenager on the face of the earth. It could mean anything from You’ve got to be kidding to How could I possibly be this smart when I have a mother who is so dumb? and everything in between.

This time she was pretty certain the expression covered the smart/dumb part of the equation.

Libby massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers. “You remember what we said this morning? If it’s just dusty, there might be something we can do to salvage the yarn. Or maybe we can at least donate it somewhere and take the tax write-off. But if it’s got mouse dirt on it, well, in that case we’re going to have to toss it.”

“This is some kind of sick joke, right? You expect me to check to see if there’s mouse poop on this yarn?” Meghan’s face turned as pale as her white T-shirt. She’d been clutching one garbage bag in each dirty fist and now she dropped them and stepped back. “That’s too disgusting for words! There is no way I’m going to do that. There’s no way I should have to! If I was home—”

“You are home.”

“Oh, yeah, right. I forgot. We left our nice house and our nice neighborhood so we could live in the ghetto. We spend our time looking for mouse poop.”

“Meghan…” Libby made a move to walk around the front counter, but Meghan would have none of it. She backed up another step. If that’s the way Meghan wanted it, Libby wouldn’t violate her space. “Why don’t you take a break? You could go upstairs and—”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

It was a rhetorical question and Libby knew better than to answer it. Rhetorical questions from testy teenagers meant nothing but trouble.

“Go!” she said instead, and somehow when she shooed Meghan toward the back of the store, she managed to make it look like a casual gesture instead of the ultimate surrender. “I don’t care what you do up there, just do something that will help make it easier when the movers arrive with our furniture next week. I’ll look through the yarn myself and decide what to do with it.”

“Yeah, go right ahead. Have fun looking for mouse poop.”

Meghan’s final comments rang through the store along with the sounds of her footsteps as she stomped up the steps. The last Libby heard from her was the slam of the upstairs door.

“You handled that well,” Libby told herself, the sarcasm as heavy as the bags she grabbed and dragged to the corner of the room. “A few more years of practice and you really ought to know how to screw up a conversation with your daughter.”

The possibilities were too frightening to dwell on, and besides, she didn’t have the time or the energy. Libby went back to the front counter, but there was nothing appealing about trying to knit again. Instead she reached for the legal pad where earlier that day she’d begun a to-do list.

So far not one thing was checked off.

Upstairs

Finish cleaning.

Downstairs

Sort through all yarn and knitting supplies, toss what can’t be saved.

Catalogue and store the rest in moth-proof containers.

Thoroughly clean.

Repair ceiling in dining room.

Paint.

Talk to yarn companies, schedule visits from reps.

Stock shelves.

Talk to bank.

Meet with attorney.

Arrange for advertising.

Plan grand opening.

Set date for soft opening.

Just looking at the list, a thread of panic snaked through her. She beat it back with reason. It would take a lot longer than one morning to make a difference in the disaster that was Barb’s Knits. She and Meghan had made a start, she reminded herself, and if Meghan didn’t want to participate…

She looked up at the ceiling, wondering what her daughter was doing upstairs. Was she busy putting their room in some sort of order or was she up there sulking?

Either way, Libby wasn’t worried. Meghan would eventually realize she’d be more comfortable if the room she and Libby shared looked at least a little like her room had back at home. She’d want her clothes in neat order in her half of the closet and the little bit of makeup Libby allowed her—lip gloss and light pink nail polish—displayed on her dresser.

Sooner or later Meghan would come around. At least Libby hoped she would.

As for Barb’s Knits, that was another matter altogether.

“It won’t come around at all. Not unless I make it come around,” Libby told herself. With that in mind, she’d just started to flip through the calendar to check their cleaning schedule when she heard a bang, a crash and the sound of breaking glass upstairs. All of it was punctuated by Meghan’s high-pitched scream.

Libby’s heart jumped into her throat. She had raced through the store and up the stairs before she realized she was even moving. “Meghan? Meghan, answer me. Are you all right? What happened? What—”

She pushed open the kitchen door and found Meghan standing in the middle of the room, covered with plaster dust. She was holding the metal pull chain that belonged to the ceiling fan. The fan itself—or at least what was left of it—was on top of the kitchen table along with about a million shards of glass that sparkled like diamonds in the morning sunlight. The acrid smell of fried electrical wires filled the air.

“I’m sorry!” Meghan must have mistaken Libby’s expression for anger instead of the relief it was. Meghan’s face was coated with plaster dust, and when she started to cry, the tears left rivulets on her cheeks. “I didn’t mean it, Mom. I was just trying to turn the fan on. It’s hot and there’s no air-conditioning and—” The rest of her words were lost in a wail of despair.

“It’s okay, honey. Honest.” Libby did a quick assessment of her daughter’s condition. Except for a cut on her arm, it didn’t look as if Meghan had sustained any injuries. The fan and the ceiling it had once been anchored to were another matter. One Libby would deal with after she took care of Meghan.

She led her to the bathroom. “It’s no big deal. We’ll get the fan fixed.”

Meghan was beyond being consoled. She was scared, she was shocked and she was embarrassed as only a fourteen-year-old can be. She was crying so hard Libby could barely understand her. “And the ceiling? How are you going to fix the ceiling? It fell down right on top of me. I hate it here. Mommy, please, please let’s go home!”

It was the worst time in the world for the phone to ring. Libby left Meghan in the bathroom to wash her face and hands and grabbed the phone.

“Mrs. Cartwright! How’s everything going there?” It took her a moment to recognize the voice of Will Harper, the real-estate agent. “You enjoying our fair city?”

Libby looked at the wreckage in the kitchen. “It’s not exactly a good time to be asking that,” she said. “We’re having a little electrical problem here.”

“I’m not surprised.” She could picture Will shaking his head in an I-told-you-so way. “That property has seen better days.”

Meghan was still crying and Libby could barely hear. She retreated into the living room. “What can I do for you, Mr. Harper?”

Will laughed. “Oh, no. That’s not what you’re supposed to be asking. I’ve called, Mrs. Cartwright, because I’m going to do something for you.”

“Like?”

“Like admitting you were right and I was wrong. Doesn’t happen often, let me tell you. I know this market like the back of my hand.”

“And—”

Meghan peeked into the room. She saw that Libby was on the phone so she didn’t talk loud—at least not too loud—when she wailed, “I can’t find the bandages anywhere!”