ANN HOOD

The Knitting Circle

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers in 2008

This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2017

Copyright © Ann Hood 2008

Cover layout design © debbieclementdesign.com 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Ann Hood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847560100

Ebook Edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007281848

Version: 2017-08-30

Dedication

For knitters

For friends

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: Casting On

Chapter One: Mary

Chapter Two: The Knitting Circle

Part Two: K2, P2

Chapter Three: Scarlet

Chapter Four: The Knitting Circle

Part Three: Knit Two Together (K2Tog)

Chapter Five: Lulu

Chapter Six: The Knitting Circle

Part Four: Socks

Chapter Seven: Ellen

Chapter Eight: The Knitting Circle

Part Five: A Good Knitter

Chapter Nine: Harriet

Chapter Ten: The Knitting Circle

Part Six: Sit And Knit

Chapter Eleven: Alice

Chapter Twelve: The Knitting Circle

Part Seven: Mothers And Children

Chapter Thirteen: Beth

Chapter Fourteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Eight: Knitting

Chapter Fifteen: Roger

Chapter Sixteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Nine: Common Suffering

Chapter Seventeen: Mamie

Chapter Eighteen: The Knitting Circle

Part Ten: Casting Off

Chapter Nineteen: Mary

Chapter Twenty: The Knitting Circle

Acknowledgments

The Knitting Circle

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Daughter, I have a story to tell you. I have wanted to tell it to you for a very long time. But unlike Babar or Eloise or any of the other stories that you loved to hear, this one is not funny. This one is not clever. It is simply true. It is my story, yet I do not have the words to tell it. Instead, I pick up my needles and I knit. Every stitch is a letter. A row spells out “I love you.” I knit “I love you” into everything I make. Like a prayer, or a wish, I send it out to you, hoping you can hear me. Hoping, daughter, that the story I am knitting reaches you somehow. Hoping, that my love reaches you somehow.

PART ONE

Casting On

To knit, you have to have the stitches on one needle. ‘Casting on’ is the term for making the foundation row of stitches. Once you have cast on, you are ready to knit. —NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ, A Passion for Knitting

1

Mary

Mary showed up empty-handed.

“I don’t have anything with me,” she said, and she opened her arms to indicate their emptiness.

The woman standing before her was called Big Alice, but there was nothing big about her. She stood five feet tall, with a tiny waist, short silver hair, and gray eyes the color of a sky right before a storm. Big Alice had her slight body wedged between the worn wooden door to the shop and Mary herself.

“This isn’t really my kind of thing,” Mary said apologetically.

The woman nodded. “I know,” she said, stepping back so that the door swung open wide. “I can’t tell you how many people have stood right where you’re standing and said that exact thing.” Her voice was soft, British.

“Well,” Mary said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

She never did know what to say these days, or what to do. This was in September, five months after her daughter Stella had died. That stunned disbelief had ebbed slightly, but the horrible noises in her head had grown. They were hospital noises, doctors’ voices, and Stella’s own five-year-old voice saying Mama. Sometimes Mary imagined she really heard her daughter calling out to her and her heart would squeeze tight on itself.

“Come on in,” Big Alice said.

Mary followed her into the shop. Alice wore a gray tweed skirt, a white oxford shirt, a gold cardigan, and pearls. Although the top half of her looked like a schoolmarm, she had crazy-colored striped socks on her feet and pink chenille bedroom slippers with red rhinestone cherries across the tops.

“I’ve got the gout,” Big Alice explained, lifting one slippered foot. Then she added, “I guess you know I’m Alice.”

“Yes,” Mary said.

Like everything else, Mary could easily have forgotten the woman’s name. She’d written it on one of the hundreds of Post-its scattered around the house like confetti after a party. But, like all of the phone numbers and dates and directions, the paper with Alice written on it was gone. Outside the store, however, a wooden sign read Big Alice’s Sit and Knit, and when Mary saw it she had remembered: Alice.

Mary stopped and got her bearings. These days this was always necessary, even in familiar places. In her own kitchen she would stop what she was doing and look around, take stock. Oh, she would say to herself, noting that the television was off instead of tuned to Sagwa, the Chinese Cat; the bowl Stella had made at Claytime with its carefully painted and placed polka dots was empty of the sliced cucumbers or mound of blueberries it used to hold; the cutout hearts with crayoned I love you’s and the construction-paper kite with its pink ribbon tail drooped. Oh, Mary would say, realizing all over again that this was how her kitchen—her life—looked now. Empty and sad.

The shop was small, with creaky wooden floors and baskets and shelves brimming over with yarn. It smelled like sweaters and cedar and Alice’s own citrus scent. There were three rooms: this small one, the room beyond with the cash register and a well-worn couch slipcovered in a pink and red floral pattern, and another larger room with more yarn and a few chairs.

The yarn was beautiful. Mary saw this immediately and touched some as she followed Alice into the next room, letting her fingertips linger a bit over the skeins.

“So,” Alice was saying, “we’ll start you on a scarf.” She held up a finished scarf. Cobalt blue with pale blue tassels. “You like this one?”

“I guess so,” Mary said.

“You don’t like it? You’re frowning.”

“I do. It’s fine. It’s just, I can’t make it. I’m not good with my hands. I flunked home ec. Really, I did.”

Alice turned toward the wall and pulled down some wooden knitting needles.

“A ten-year-old can make that scarf,” she said, a bit impatiently. She handed the needles to Mary.

They felt large and smooth and awkward in her hands. Mary watched as Alice went over to a shelf and grabbed several balls of yarn. The same cobalt blue, and aquamarine, and mauve.

“Which color do you like?” Alice said. She held them out to Mary like an offering.

“The blue, I guess,” Mary said, and the particular blue of Stella’s eyes presented itself in her mind. When she tried to blink it away, she felt tears slide out. She turned her head and wiped her eyes.

“Blue it is,” Alice said, more gently. She pointed to a chair tucked into a corner beneath balls of fat yarn. “Sit down and I’ll teach you how to knit.”

Mary laughed. “Such optimism,” she said.

“A woman came in here two weeks ago,” Alice said, dropping into an overstuffed chair and sticking her feet up on a small footstool with a needlepoint cover. “She’d never knit a thing, and she’s made three of these scarves. That’s how easy it is.”

Mary had driven forty miles to this store, even though there was a knitting shop less than a mile from her house. As she navigated the unfamiliar back roads, it had seemed foolish, coming so far, to knit of all things. But sitting here with this stranger who knew nothing about her, or about what had happened, with these unfamiliar needles in her sweaty hands, Mary knew somehow that it was the right thing to do.

“It’s just a series of slipknots,” Alice said. She held up a long tail of the yarn and demonstrated.

“I was kicked out of the Girl Scouts,” Mary said. “Slipknots are a mystery to me.”

“First home economics. Then the Girl Scouts,” Alice said, tsking. But her gray eyes gleamed mischievously.

“Actually, it was Girl Scouts, then home ec,” Mary said.

Alice chuckled. “If it makes you feel any better, I hated knitting. Didn’t want to learn. Now here I am. I own a knitting store. I teach people to knit.”

Mary smiled politely. Other people’s stories held little interest for her. She used to like to listen to tales of broken hearts and triumphs and the odd twists of life. But her own story had taken over the part of her that was once open to such things. And if she listened out of politeness or necessity—like now—the situation begged for her to talk, to share. She wanted no part in that. There were times when she wondered if she’d ever tell her story to anyone.

“So,” Mary said, “slipknots.”

“Since you’re a Girl Scouts–home economics flunkee,” Alice said, “I’ll cast on for you. Besides, if I stand here and teach you, I’ll be wasting both our time because you’re going to forget.”

Mary didn’t bother to ask what “cast on” meant. Like a magician practicing sleight of hand, Alice made a series of loops and twists, then held out one needle, the blue yarn snaking up it ominously.

“I cast on twenty-two stitches for you, and you’re ready to go.”

“Uh-huh,” Mary said.

Alice motioned for Mary to come sit beside her.

“In here,” Alice said, demonstrating. “Then wrap the yarn like this. And pull this needle through.”

Mary smiled as first one stitch, then another, appeared on the empty needle.

“Okay,” Alice said. “Go ahead.”

“Me?” Mary said.

“I already know how to do it,” Alice said, “don’t I?”

Mary took a breath and began.

2

The Knitting Circle

Here was what Mary still found extraordinary: on the day before Stella died, nothing unusual happened. There were no signs, no premonitions, nothing but the simple daily routine of their life together—she and Dylan and Stella. Her neighbor when she’d lived in San Francisco, on a high hill in North Beach, had been an old Italian woman named Angelina. Angelina always wore a black shawl over her head, and thick-soled black shoes, and a black dress. “People should know you’re in mourning,” she’d told Mary. “When you wear black, they understand.”

Mary hadn’t pointed out to her that everyone wore black these days. She hadn’t rolled her eyes or smirked when Angelina told her that three days before her husband died—and here she’d made the sign of the cross, spitting into her palm at the end— a dog had howled, facing their apartment. “I knew death was coming,” she’d said. Also, two other men from the neighborhood had died in the past few months. “Death,” she’d explained, “comes in threes.” Angelina had a litany of signs, dreams of clear water, of teeth falling out of her mouth; a dead bird on her doorstep; goose bumps in still, warm air.

But Mary had none of this. No dreams or dead birds or howling dogs. What she had was a typical day. A good day. At five, Stella still drank a bottle of milk in the morning and one at bedtime, a secret they kept from her kindergarten friends. Dylan brought her, happily and sleepily sucking her bottle, into bed with them and they cuddled there, Mary and Dylan reading the newspaper and Stella watching Sesame Street.

They knew it was time to get up when Stella came to life. No longer sleepy, she would start to tickle Dylan. Mary wished she could remember what they’d had for breakfast that last morning together, what they talked about over Eggos or cinnamon toast. But so ordinary was that morning that she cannot recall such details.

She knows that Stella wore striped tights and polka-dot clogs and a jumper that was too long, also striped. But she knows this because after Stella died, when they came home from the hospital, these clothes still lay in a crumpled heap, right where Stella had dropped them when she got ready for bed. She knows this because for days she carried them around, pressing them to her nose for the last hints of Stella’s little-girl scent.

Dylan had left that morning while they were still getting ready for school. He always left early, kissing them both on the top of their heads. Stella would yell, “Don’t go, Daddy!” and pout, making Mary a little jealous. It was true, she thought, that the parent who did the most caretaking, the driving around and cooking and bathing, didn’t get the adoration.

She felt guilty now, of course, that she had no doubt grown short with Stella for dawdling that morning. Stella was a dawdler, easily distracted by the sight of her forgotten rain boots or the sparkles on a picture she’d drawn and hung on the fridge. Even while Mary hurried her, Stella hummed and dawdled happily, grinning up at her mother as she rushed her into the car. “We’re going to be late,” Mary probably mumbled that morning, because they were usually late. And Stella probably said, “Uh-huh,” before she returned to her humming.

Mary stopped for coffee that morning, and visited with other mothers at the café, and shared funny stories about their amazing children; she went to work, wasting these last precious hours as a mother with reviews and research and other meaningless tasks; Dylan called her—he always did—to tell her when he’d be home that evening, to ask if Stella had anything special going on; then she raced to pick up her daughter at school, sat in the car, and watched her come out, dreamy and tired, her backpack dragging on the ground. And as she watched her, Mary’s heart soared; it always did when she saw Stella, her daughter, again.

Unlike the rest of that day, the clarity of their last evening together was so strong that it made Mary double over to remember it. All of it. The late afternoon sun in their kitchen. Stella working on her Weekly Reader. Lighting the grill for an early barbecue. Stella drizzling the olive oil on the chicken. Stella scrubbing the dusty outdoor table and chairs, placing the napkins so carefully beside each plate, running into Dylan’s arms when he walked into the backyard, grinning, pleased, and said: “A barbecue! In April!”“Yes,” Stella had said,“we’re eating outside!”

That night, Mary placed the portable CD player in the open window and played Stella’s favorite CD of dance music, the two of them dancing barefoot: the Macarena, the chicken dance, the limbo, and finally Dylan joined them and all three danced to “Shout,” jumping and waving their arms. The sliver of a moon hung above them in the big glorious sky, like a blessing, Mary remembered thinking.

The morning of Stella’s funeral, Mary’s mother called.

“You have so many people with you,” she’d said. “I know you’ll understand if I go back this morning. The later flight gets in after midnight, and you have so many people with you.”

Mary had frowned, not believing what her mother was telling her. “You’re not coming?” she asked. She still wasn’t able to say her daughter’s name in the same sentence as “funeral” or “died” or “dead.”

“You understand, don’t you?” her mother had said, and Mary thought she heard pleading in her voice. While her mother explained about the connection in Mexico City, how far apart the gates were, how confusing Customs was there, Mary quietly hung up.

Her mother had disappointed her for her entire life. She was not the mother who went to school plays or parents’ nights; she gave praise rarely but never gushed or bragged; she had missed Mary’s wedding because of a strike in San Miguel, where she lived, that forced her to miss her flight to the States. “I’ll send you a nice gift,” she’d said. And she had. The next week a set of Mexican pottery arrived, with half of the plates broken in the journey.

But still, in this most terrible time, Mary had expected her mother to be there in a way she had not been able to so far. When Mary studied the faces in the church, saw the neighbors and colleagues and teachers and relatives and friends, disappointment filled her chest so that she couldn’t breathe. She had to sit down and gulp air. Her mother really had not come.

The flower arrangement her mother sent was the biggest of them all. Purple calla lilies, so many that they threatened to swallow the entire room. If Mary had had the energy, she would have thrown it out, that ostentatious apology. Instead, she purposely left it behind.

In the hot sticky summer right after Stella died, Mary’s mother called her. She had called once a week, offering advice. Usually Mary didn’t speak to her at all.

“What you need,” her mother told her, “is to learn to knit.”

“Right,” Mary said.

Her mother’s colonial house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, had a bright blue door that led to a courtyard where a fountain gurgled and big pink flowers bloomed. She had stopped drinking when Mary was a senior in high school. Now that Mary thought about it, that was when her mother started knitting. One day, balls of yarn appeared everywhere. Her mother sat and studied patterns at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and chewing peppermint candies.

“Here’s what I’m hearing,” her mother said. “You can’t work, you can’t think, you can’t read.”

While her mother talked, Mary cried. Not the painful sobbing that had consumed her when Stella first died, but the almost constant crying that had replaced it. Her world, which had been so benign, had turned into a minefield. The grocery store held only the summer berries that Stella loved. Elevators only played Stella’s favorite song. And everywhere she walked she saw someone she had not seen since the funeral. Their faces changed when they saw her. Mary wanted to run from them and from the berries and the songs and the whole world that had once held her and Stella so safely.

“There’s something about knitting,” her mother said. “You have to concentrate, but not really. Your hands keep moving and moving and somehow it calms your brain.”

“Great, Mom,” Mary said. “I’ll look into it.”

Then she’d climbed back into bed.

When Mary gave birth to Stella, she promised her that very first night that they would be different. Mary was going to be the mother she’d always wished for, and Stella would be free to be Stella, whatever that meant. She had kept her word too. She had spent afternoons making party hats for stuffed animals, letting her own deadlines go unmet. She had let Stella wear stripes with polka dots, orange earmuffs indoors, tutus to the grocery store.

They looked alike, Mary and Stella. The same shade of brown hair with the same red highlights that showed up in bright sunlight or by midsummer. The same mouths, a little too wide and too large for their narrow faces. But it was that mouth that gave them both such a killer smile. It was Mary’s father’s mouth that they’d both inherited, but in his later life it had turned downward, making him look like one of those sad-faced clowns in bad paintings.

Dylan used to joke that Mary hadn’t needed him at all to make Stella. “She’s you through and through,” he’d say. The only thing Stella had that was all her own were her blue eyes. Both Mary and Dylan had brown eyes, but Stella’s were bright blue. Not unlike Mary’s mother’s eyes, she knew, but hated to admit. Still, the overall effect was that Stella was a miniature version of Mary, right down to the long narrow feet. Mary wore a size ten shoe, and surely Stella would have too.

For fun, they would sometimes both dress in all black and Stella would make them stand in front of the mirror on the back of Mary’s closet door and grin together. “You look just like me,” Stella would say proudly. And Mary’s heart would seem to expand, as if it might burst through her ribs. She had done just as she promised. She was a good mother. Her daughter loved her.

As a child, Mary’s life was rigid, structured, and controlled by her mother. Breakfast had all the food groups. Shoes and pocketbooks matched. Hair was pulled into two neat braids, made so tightly that Mary suffered headaches after school until she could free them. Then she would sit and rub her head, wincing.

As she got older, Mary understood that all of her mother’s rules, all of the structure she imposed, were an effort to hide her drinking. When she came home from school, Mary sat at the kitchen table to do her homework, in a desperate need to be near her mother. Her mother would make dinner, sipping water as she cooked, The Joy of Cooking propped up on a Lucite cookbook stand. Mary found it ironic that this was her mother’s cookbook of choice since she seemed to take no joy in cooking or eating.

Still, Mary sat at that kitchen table every afternoon, sometimes asking her mother for help even if she didn’t need it, just so that her mother would come close to her. Mary would study her mother’s beautiful face then, the smooth skin and perfect turned-up nose, the shiny blond hair, and fall in love with this stranger each time. Her mother’s Chanel No. 5 would fill Mary, would make her dizzy.

Sometimes at night, her mother passed out on the sofa, and her father would lift her like Sleeping Beauty into his arms and carry her to bed. “Your mother works so hard,” he’d say when he returned. Mary would nod, even though, other than cleaning, she had no idea what her mother did. Then, that night when she was a sophomore in high school, while she was doing the dishes, Mary pressed her own chapped lips to the rosy lipsticked imprint of her mother’s on the water glass. She could taste the crayon taste of the lipstick, and then, sipping, the shock of vodka. All of those afternoons, her mother cooking with such concentration, those nights when she passed out on the sofa, her mother had been drunk. The realization did not shock Mary. Instead, it simply explained everything. Everything except why a woman so beautiful would drink so much.

That sad summer, time passed indifferently. Mary would lie in bed and think of what she should be doing—putting on Stella’s socks for her, cutting the crust off her sandwiches, gushing over a new art project, hustling her off to ballet class. Instead, she was home not knowing what to do with all of the endless hours in each day.

Mary was a writer for the local alternative newspaper, Eight Days a Week, affectionately referred to as Eight Days. She reviewed movies and restaurants and books. Every week since Stella had died, her boss Eddie called and offered her a small assignment. “Just one hundred words,” he’d say. “One hundred words about anything at all.” Holly, the office manager, came by with gooey cakes she had baked. Mary would glimpse her getting out of her vintage baby blue Bug, with her pale blond hair and big round blue eyes, unfolding her extralong legs and looking teary-eyed at the house, and she would pretend she wasn’t home. Holly would ring the doorbell a dozen times or more before giving up and leaving the sugary red velvet cake or the sweet white one with canned pineapple and maraschino cherries and too-sweet coconut on the front steps.

Mary used to go out several times a week, with her husband Dylan or her girlfriends, or even with Stella, to try a new Thai restaurant or see the latest French film. Her hours were crammed with things to do, to see, to think about. Books, for example. She was always reading two or three at a time. One would be open on the coffee table and another by her bed, and a third, poetry or short stories, was tucked in her bag to read while Stella ran with her friends around the neighborhood playground.

And Mary used to have ideas about all of these things. She used to believe firmly that Providence needed a good Mexican restaurant. She could pontificate on this for hours. She worried over the demise of the romantic comedy. She had started to prefer nonfiction to fiction. Why was this? she would wonder out loud frequently.

How had she been so passionate about all of these senseless things? Now her brain could no longer organize material. She didn’t understand what she had read or watched or heard. Food tasted like nothing, like air. When she ate, she thought of Stella’s Goodnight Moon book, and of how Stella would say the words before Mary could read them out loud: Goodnight mush. Goodnight nothing. It was as if she could almost hear her daughter’s voice, but not quite, and she would strain to find it in the silent house.

She imagined learning Italian. She imagined writing poetry about her grief. She imagined writing a novel, a novel in which a child is heroically saved. But words, the very things that had always rescued her, failed her.

“How’s the knitting?” her mother asked her several weeks after suggesting Mary learn.

It was July by then.

“Haven’t gotten around to it yet,” Mary had mumbled.

“Mary, you need a distraction,” her mother said. In the background Mary heard voices speaking in Spanish. Maybe she should learn Spanish instead of Italian.

“Don’t tell me what I need,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” her mother said.

In August, Dylan surprised her with a trip to Italy.

He had gone back to work right away. The fact that he had a law firm and clients who depended on him made Mary envious. Her office at home, once a walk-in closet off the master bedroom, had slowly returned to its former closet self. Sympathy cards, CDs, copies of books and poems and inspirational plaques, all the things friends had sent them, got stacked up in her office. There was a whole box in there of porcelain angels, brown-haired angels that were supposed to represent Stella but looked fake and trivial to Mary. Stella’s kindergarten teacher had shown up with a shoe box of Stella’s work. Carefully written numbers and words, drawings and workbooks, all of it now in a box in her office.

“I figured,” Dylan had said, clutching the plane tickets in his hands like his life depended on them, “if we’re going to sit and cry all the time, we might as well sit and cry in Italy. Plus, you said something about learning Italian?”

His eyes were red-rimmed and he had lost weight, enough to show more lines in his face. He had one of those faces that wore lines well, and ever since she’d met him Mary had loved those creases. But now they made him look weary. His own eyes were changeable—brown with flecks of gold and green that could take on more color in certain weather or when he wore particular colors. But lately they had stayed flat brown, the bright green and gold almost gone completely.

She couldn’t disappoint him by telling him that even English was hard to manage, that memorizing verb conjugations and vocabulary words would be impossible. The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that?

Instead, she said, “I love you.” She did. She loved him. But even that didn’t feel like anything anymore.

They spent a very peaceful two weeks in a large rented farmhouse, with a cook who came each morning with fresh rolls, who made them fresh espresso and greeted them with a sumptuous dinner when they returned at dusk. The time passed peacefully, though mournfully. The change of scene and change of routine was healing, however, and Mary hoped that they might return with a somewhat changed attitude. But, of course, home only brought back the reality of their loss, their sadness returning powerfully.

That first night, as Mary stood unpacking olive oil and long strands of sun-dried tomatoes, the answering machine messages played into the kitchen.

“My name is Alice. I own Big Alice’s Sit and Knit—”

“The what?” Dylan said.

“Ssshhh,” Mary said.

“—if you come in early Tuesday morning I can teach you to knit myself. Any Tuesday really. Before eleven. See you then.”

“Knitting?” Dylan said. “You can’t even sew on a button.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “My mother.”

The second time Mary showed up at the Sit and Knit, she had her week’s work in a shopping bag. After Alice had sent her on her way the week before, Mary had taken to carrying her knitting everywhere. She was reluctant to admit her mother had been right; knitting quieted her brain. As soon as Stella’s face appeared in front of her, Mary dropped a stitch or tied a knot. Once she even dropped an entire needle and watched in horror as the chain of stitches fell from it to the floor.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to think of Stella. She just didn’t want to lose her mind from that thinking. The hospital scenes played over and over, making her want to scream; sometimes she did scream. That was the kind of calming the knitting brought. Yesterday she walked into the supermarket and saw the season’s first Seckel pears, tiny and amber. Stella’s favorites. Mary used to pack two in her lunch every day in the fall. Seeing them, Mary felt the panic rising in her and she turned and walked out quickly, leaving her basket with the bananas and grated Parmesan behind. In the car, after she had cried good and hard, she picked up her knitting and did one full row right there in the parking lot before she drove home.

Standing on the steps of the knitting shop that second morning, waiting for Alice to open for the day, Mary examined her work. She could tell that what she had worked on all week was a mess. In the middle a huge hole gaped at her, and the neat twenty-two stitches Alice had cast on for her had grown into at least twice that. One needle was clogged with yarn, wound so tight she could hardly fit the other needle into one of the loops.

“That’s a mess,” Alice said from behind her. Mary noticed she had on the same outfit, but with a different sweater, this one a sage green. It made Mary aware of how she must look to Alice. She had gained weight since Stella died, a good ten pounds, and wore the same black pants every day because they had an elastic waist. And she was still wearing flip-flops despite the fall chill. But the idea of searching for other shoes exhausted her.

She wiggled her naked toes and held out her knitting.

Alice didn’t even unlock the door. She just took Mary’s knitting and in one firm yank pulled the entire thing apart.

Mary gasped.“In my line of work, you fix things, make them better. You never press the delete button like that.”

Alice unlocked the door and held it open for Mary. “It’s liberating. You’ll see.”

“I worked on that all week,” Mary said.

Alice dropped the yarn into her hands and smiled. “It’s not about finishing, it’s about the knitting. The texture. The needles clacking. The way the rows unfold.”

Already the bell announcing the arrival of customers was ringing, and women began to fill the store. They all seemed to carry half-finished sweaters and socks and scarves. Mary watched them fondle yarn, feeling its weight, holding it up to the light to better appreciate the gradations of color.

Alice took Mary’s arm and gently led her to the same seat where she’d spent most of last Tuesday morning.

“That yarn’s a little too tricky, I think,” Alice said. She handed Mary a needle with twenty-two new stitches already cast on. “This yarn is fun. It self-stripes so you won’t get bored.”

Mary hesitated.

“Go ahead,” Alice said.

Mary knit two perfect rows.

“Keep doing it, just like that,” Alice said. Then she went to help another customer.

Mary sat, knitting, the sounds of the other customers’ voices softly buzzing around her. The bell kept tinkling, marking the comings and goings of people. A purple stripe appeared, and then a violet one, and then a deep blue.

She was surprised when she felt someone standing over her.

“You’ve got it,” Alice said. “Now go home and knit.”

Mary frowned. “But what if I mess it up that way again?”

“You won’t,” Alice said.

Mary stood, feeling both elated and terrified.

“Alice?” a woman called from across the room. “How many do I cast on for the eyelash scarf?”

“Fifteen,” Alice said. “Remember, fifteen stitches on number fifteen needles.”

It’s like another language, Mary thought, remembering her idea to learn Italian. The yarn in her hand was soft and lovely. Better than complicated rules of grammar.

“Thank you,” Mary said. “I’ll come next week, if that’s all right.”

A customer handed Alice a scarf made of big loopy yarn.

“I dropped a stitch somewhere,” the woman said, her fingers burrowing through the thick yarn.

“I’ll fix that for you,” Alice said.

Mary turned to go. But Alice’s hand on her arm stopped her.

“Wednesday nights,” Alice said, “I have a knitting circle here. I think you’d like it.”

“A knitting circle?” Mary laughed. “But I can’t knit yet.”

Alice pointed at her morning’s work. “What do you call that?”

“I know, but—”

“These are women you should meet. All levels, they are. Each with something to offer. You’ll see.”

“I’ll think about it,” Mary said.

“Seven o’clock,” Alice said. “Right here.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, certain she would never join a knitting circle.

The next Tuesday night, when she finished her second skein of yarn and, Mary realized, an entire scarf, she thought about what she would make next. The scarf ’s stripes moved from that original purple all the way through blues and greens and browns and reds, ending in perfect pink. Excited, Mary wrapped it around her neck and went to show it off to Dylan.

He sat in bed, watching CNN. He was addicted to CNN, Mary decided.

“Ta-da!” she said, twirling for him.

“Look at you,” he said, grinning.

She came closer to show off the neat rows.

“Do you wear the needle in it like that?” he asked.

“Until I learn to cast off, I do.” She sat beside him, close.

“How will you learn such a thing?” Dylan whispered, stroking her arm.

Mary closed her eyes.

“I joined a knitting circle,” she said. “It starts tomorrow night.”

Dylan pulled her into his arms. It was dark out, the television their only source of light.

The knitting shop looked different at night. The parking lot was very dark and the store seemed smaller against the sky and trees. Tiny white lights hung in each window, like bright stars. Mary could clearly see the women inside, sitting in a circle, needles in hand. She considered driving away, going home to Dylan, who would be in bed already watching the news, as if he might hear something that would change everything.

Sighing, Mary opened the door, her scarf with the needle dangling wrapped proudly around her neck. If Alice was surprised to see her, she didn’t act it.

“Find a spot and sit down,” Alice said. “Beth brought some real nice lemon cake.”

Mary sat on the worn sofa beside a woman around her own age, with long red hair and dramatic high cheekbones.

“You finished!” Alice said. “Hey, everybody, this is Mary’s first project.”

The women—there were five, plus Alice and Mary—all stopped knitting to admire her handiwork. They commented on what a natural she was, how even her gauge, the depth of the color, and the length of the scarf. Mary realized that in this world, she could talk about these simple things and keep her grief to herself. She was anonymous here. She was safe.

“What size needles did you use?” the woman across from her asked.

“Elevens,” Mary said, pleased with her certainty after so many months of uncertainty.

The woman nodded. “Elevens,” she said, and returned her attention to her own knitting.

“That looks complicated,” Mary said as the woman maneuvered four small needles like a puppeteer.

“Socks,” she said. “The heel is tricky. But otherwise it’s just knitting.”

“What size are those needles?” Mary asked. “They’re so tiny.”

“Ones,” the woman said, blushing slightly.

“Ones!” Mary said.

“You’ll be making those in no time. But first let me show you how to cast off,” Alice said to Mary. “Then we’ll get you started on something else. Maybe another scarf, but you can learn to purl.”

Mary unwound her scarf and handed it to Alice. “No purling yet. I need to bask in my success for a bit.”

“I hear you,” the woman beside her said. Even though Mary felt uncomfortable among strangers, she liked her immediately.

Alice kneeled next to Mary and demonstrated casting off. “Knit two stitches, just like you know how to do. Then the needle goes in the bottom one and you pull that loop over. See?”

“Pull the stitch out?” Mary shrieked. “After all that hard work keeping them all in?”

“Pull it out,” Alice said, laughing.

Mary watched as a neat finished edge began to appear.

“Now you do it and I’ll find you some fun yarn,” Alice said.

“The way I learned,” said a woman in her sixties with a salt-and-pepper bob, “was you start with scarves, you only do scarves. Start with sweaters, you learn how to knit.”

She was knitting a sweater with a pattern across the bottom. Mary saw all the colored threads of yarn hanging from it and shuddered. Maybe the woman was right and she would be making scarves for the rest of her life. Maybe she would start a scarf business. Maybe she would never leave her house again except to buy yarn and she would stay inside and knit and knit her scarves.

“Nice job,” the red-haired woman said.

It took a moment for Mary to realize that she was talking to her. The scarf, free from the needle, lay in her lap.

“It’s like having a baby, isn’t it?” someone said, and Mary’s heart lurched. Babies and children were the last thing she wanted to discuss.

“Except it’s fun,” the woman knitting socks said.

Mary didn’t look up. Instead she concentrated on her scarf.

“Tonight,” Alice said, standing right in front of her, “you’re going to learn how to cast on and you’re going to make a scarf with this beautiful yarn.”

Grateful for the change of subject, for the start of a new project, for the feel of this yarn in her hands, Mary could only nod.

“Tell us who you are first,” the red-haired woman said to Mary.

“Mary Baxter,” she said.

“Have you ever eaten at Rouge?” Alice asked Mary.

“Of course. It’s great.”

“Well, she’s Rouge.”

“But most people call me Scarlet,” she said. She patted the woman in the chair next to her. “This is Lulu. And that’s Ellen,” she added, pointing to the sock woman.

Mary tried to remember, to put the name to something about each person. Scarlet was easy with all that red hair. Lulu, with her short hair dyed platinum above black roots, her cat glasses, and dressed all in black, looked like she’d been dropped here from New York City.

Ellen reminded Mary of someone from another era. The forties, she decided. Her dirty blonde hair fell in long waves down her back. She wore a faded vintage housedress in a red and white pattern. Bare legs and black Mary Janes. Her face was what Mary’s mother would call horsey, and her head seemed too big for her small, thin body. Yet the overall effect worked, all the elements coming together in an interesting combination of sexiness and innocence.

“I’m Harriet,” the older woman with the salt-and-pepper hair said, all matter-of-fact and slightly sour.

Harriet the sourpuss, Mary thought.

“And this is Beth,” Harriet said almost possessively. “Beth can knit anything. She’s amazing. See that little knit bag she’s practically finished with? When did you start that, Beth?”

“At lunch,” Beth said.

“Today!” Harriet said. “Isn’t she something?”

Everyone agreed that Beth was something. But Mary took in her shiny dark hair, styled and wisped and sprayed; her full makeup, the carefully lined eyes and glossy lips; her color-coordinated outfit, the sweater and those shoes the same beige, the creased plaid pants, the amber earrings and matching necklace. Mary took it all in and thought, She’s something all right.

“Do you remember how to get started?” Alice was asking her.

“Uh … no,” Mary said.

“First,” Alice said, “you cast on.”

Mary watched how deftly she moved the yarn, how easily the needles flew in her hands. Clumsily, she followed.

The two hours ended too quickly. That was what Mary thought as she said goodbye to this circle of strangers. Somehow, in the course of the evening, their presence had soothed her. Unlike her friends— her “mommy friends,” Dylan called them—whose lives still revolved around their children, these women’s lives remained a mystery. All that mattered, sitting there with them, was knitting.

In the dark parking lot, she watched Harriet and Beth get into a car together and drive away. Briefly she wondered what their story was, what had brought the older woman to boast so possessively about Beth, what had brought them here tonight.

The lights in the shop went dark. But Mary still stood there.

“Mary?” Scarlet said from behind her. “Wishing on a star?”

“You know,” Mary said, “I don’t believe in that anymore.”

Scarlet leaned against the car beside Mary’s and lit a cigarette. “Fuck,” she said. “Neither do I.”

They both looked up at the sky. Clouds floated by, blocking the stars, then revealing them.

“You know something else?” Scarlet said. “I don’t believe in comets or meteor showers.”

“Those are scientific facts,” Mary said.

“Do you know how many times I’ve gotten my tired ass out of bed to go and see Hale-Bopp or the best meteor shower in a zillion years and it’s always a disappointment. I sit in a freezing car staring up at the sky waiting for this phenomenon. This once-in-a-lifetime incredible thing. But it never happens.”

It does, Mary thought, and Stella’s face took shape in the dark sky.

“It does happen,” Mary said. “It’s just fleeting.”

Scarlet took another drag on her cigarette, then put it out under her boot. From the depths of her oversized bag she pulled out a business card. “I’ll teach you how to purl,” she said. “When you finish that scarf, you’ll be ready.”

“Great,” Mary said. “So I’ll call you in what? A million years?”

“You’ll finish that thing in a couple of days,” Scarlet said. “That’s how it is at first,” she said, her voice low. “You knit to save your life,” she said like someone who knew. She touched Mary’s arm lightly, then got into her car. That was when Mary saw Lulu inside, slouched in the passenger seat. “Call me,” Scarlet said. “Anytime.”

Mary waved goodbye. She got into her own car and waited for Alice to come out. But she didn’t. When Mary finally backed away, her headlights illuminated the shop and she could see Alice inside, alone, knitting.

PART TWO

K2, P2

Once you are comfortable with the knit stitch, you should move on to the purl stitch. These two stitches are the foundation of knitting. From these two stitches, you can create everything you’ll ever want to knit. —NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ, A Passion for Knitting

3

Scarlet

In three days, Mary finished her second scarf. She draped it over a chair at the kitchen table for Dylan to see as soon as he got home. Her fingers followed the stripes of color down the length of the scarf. It would look good with tassels, she decided. If she went back to the knitting circle she would ask Alice how to make tassels, and how to attach them.

The phone rang and Mary let the machine pick up.

Her boss’s voice filled the room.

“Hey, Mary, it’s me, Eddie,” he said. “Just, you know, checking in.”

As Eddie talked, Mary set the table for dinner. Two plates, two napkins, two forks, two wineglasses. Even after all these months this simple act made her gut wrench. That third seat—Stella’s seat—empty.

“So there’s this truck driving around town selling tacos,” Eddie was saying. “Or empanadas. Something. And I was thinking, you could maybe find this truck and eat some tacos, or whatever, and write about the experience.”

“Shut up, Eddie,” Mary said to the answering machine.

“I don’t know, Mary,” Eddie said, his voice soft. “Maybe it would help a little.”

Her mouth filled with a sharp metallic taste and she swallowed hard a few times.

“The thing is,” Eddie continued, “I know you’re standing right there listening to me and I just wish you would pick up the phone or go and eat some empanadas or something.” He waited, as if she might really pick up the phone. “Okay,” he said finally. “Call me?”

At the sound of him hanging up, Mary said, “Bye, Eddie.”

The faces of the women in the knitting circle floated across her mind. She liked that they were strangers, that her story, her tragedy, was unknown to them. And, she realized, their stories were unknown to her. For all she knew, they each held their own secret; they each knit to … what had Scarlet said? To save their lives. To them, she was a knitter, a woman who could make something from a ball of yarn. Her friends would never believe this of her. Once, out of frustration, her friend Jodie had come over and sewn on all of Mary’s missing or loose buttons. “Hopeless,” Jodie had called her. It had been weeks since Jodie had even called. Like many of her friends, Jodie had run out of ways to offer comfort.

Mary heard Dylan’s key in the door and ran to meet him.

“What a welcome,” he whispered into her hair.

She held on to him hard. She hated being alone now, and she hated her neediness.

“Smells good,” Dylan said.

“Me?” Mary said, flirting. “Or dinner?”

“Both,” he said.

“Can you believe it?” she said, walking to the stove. “Eddie wants me to chase some food truck around town.”

“And?” Dylan said too hopefully.

“And write about it,” Mary snapped. “As if I could write about the importance of a taco,” she muttered.

She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the boiling water and bit into it, testing. She tried not to think of Stella standing at her side, her pasta tester, the way she would bite into a strand and wrinkle her nose with seriousness before pronouncing it was almost ready. “Two more hours,” she liked to say.

“It might be fun,” Dylan said, but she could tell his heart wasn’t into having this argument again. It had become a pattern with them, his frustrated urging for her to go back to work, her anger at him for being able to work at all. A few times it had grown into full-blown fighting, with Dylan yelling at her, “You have to try to help yourself!” and Mary accusing him of being callous. More often, though, it was this quiet disagreement, this sarcasm and misunderstanding, the hurt feelings that followed.

Mary sighed and drained the pasta, stirring in the sauce she’d made—onions, crushed tomatoes, pancetta. As she grated cheese over it, Dylan opened a bottle of wine.

“I can’t get used to it,” Mary said, turning her attention to the salad, drizzling olive oil over the greens and sprinkling sea salt. “The silence.”

Dylan stood, head bent, while she struggled to explain how the kitchen, the house, the world felt to her without Stella in it. But finally she shrugged, and finished dressing the salad. Words, her livelihood, her refuge, even at times her salvation, were now the most useless things in the world. Dylan couldn’t understand that.

Stella would be singing while Mary finished making dinner. Or she would be showing off her work brought home from kindergarten that day. She would ask for an apple, sliced and peeled, to nibble. She would ask for a cup of water. She would make noise. Guiltily Mary remembered her impatience with these distractions. How could she have grown impatient with Stella?

Mary heard her loud footsteps as she brought the food to the table. The screech of the chair as Dylan pulled it away from the table. Mary’s own sigh.

“Your latest creation?” Dylan said, motioning to the scarf.

He was trying to move past the awkwardness. She knew that, but she still smarted from it.

“How’d you make that pattern?” he asked, impressed.

“It self-stripes as you knit.”

“My wife, the knitter,” he said.

Mary was acutely aware of the sounds of chewing, of forks on plates, of their breathing.

“I wonder about those women,” she said after a time, softening. “At the knitting circle.”

“What about them?” Dylan said.

“You know, who they are. There’s this one woman, Beth. She’s so rigid. Hair in place. Clothes pressed. Lipstick. Apparently she does everything perfectly.”

Mary didn’t mention the few facts she had gleaned about Beth. The four children in matching sweaters who smiled out of a posed studio photograph she’d passed around. Four children! Mary had thought, shuddering at that abundance, that good luck.

“I’m certain she has one of those houses, those center-hall colonials with the big square rooms and window treatments.” She flushed, embarrassed. “God,” Mary said. “Listen to me. I hardly know the woman. I hate her because she has so … so much.”

“I do it too,” Dylan said. “When I see a father walking with his little girl on his shoulders I want to yell at him. How could he have this privilege? This blessing?”

His voice trembled and Mary touched his hand lightly. Who are we becoming? she wondered.

After a moment, she said, “You know that great bakery? Rouge?”

“With the really buttery croissants?” Dylan said. “And those special things? What are they?”

“Cannelles,” she said. “The owner’s in the knitting circle. Scarlet. She’s lovely. Long red hair, like … like …” She’d show him, Mary thought. She was a writer after all, surely she could come up with a good description. “Like rusty pipes,” she said finally.

“Rusty pipes?” Dylan said, grinning. “That sounds very lovely.”

Mary slapped his arm playfully. “It is lovely. And she has these cheekbones. Real style. She must have lived somewhere fabulously sophisticated.”

Dylan put his hand to her cheek. “You’re lovely,” he said softly.

Mary let him pull her close. Whenever they kissed, she wanted to cry.

“Holly left us cupcakes,” she whispered when their lips parted. “A dozen of them. She colored the frosting toxic orange.”

“Later,” Dylan said.

They left the half-empty plates on the table and together went upstairs to bed.

Her hands needed to do it. It was as if the movement of the needles coming together and falling apart took away the horrible anxiety that bubbled up in her throughout the day. Just when Mary began to consider the challenge of tassels, her mother called.

“Sometimes I miss the leaves changing,” her mother told her. “Those gorgeous colors. The cactus are beautiful in their way, but still.”

“I’ve done it,” Mary said reluctantly. “I’ve learned to knit.”

“Ah,” her mother said. “So Alice called.”

When Mary didn’t reply, her mother said, “It’s good, isn’t it? They say to some women, religious women, each stitch is like a prayer.”

Mary had no interest in discussing spirituality with her mother. “How do you make tassels? I’ve made this scarf and I think tassels would really complete it.” Plus, Mary added to herself, I’m about to lose my fucking mind and I think if my hands stay busy it will help and I’ve even thought about sitting here and knitting scarves until I die.

“Simple,” her mother said. “Take some leftover yarn and cut it all the same length and then make bundles of three or four of those. Tie them along the hem in good strong knots.”

“How many, though? How close together do I tie them?”

“Be creative, Mary. Do whatever suits you.”

Mary frowned, eyeing the hem of her scarf.

“I have Spanish at eleven,” her mother said. “Better go.”

“Right,” Mary said.

One day, a few months after her mother had stopped drinking, Mary came home from school and found her sitting on the sofa rolling yarn into fat balls. By this time, her father had started to recede from the family, as if once her mother stopped drinking he no longer had a role there. When Mary left for college, her parents got divorced, but their separation from each other began before that.

“You’re knitting?” Mary said.

“I used to knit socks and hats for the GIs,” her mother had explained.

“What GIs?”

“During World War Two. Betty and I would walk down to the church and sit with all the other girls knitting. It was very patriotic.”

“So now you’re going to sit here and knit all day and send socks to soldiers in Vietnam?”

“Babies,” her mother said softly. “I’m knitting hats for the babies in the hospital. The newborns,” she said, holding up a tiny powder blue hat.

For the rest of that year, small hats in pastel colors piled up everywhere, on end tables and chairs and countertops. Then they would disappear and her mother began new piles. Eventually she knit striped hats, and white ones flecked with color, and then zigzag patterns.

“She’s lost her mind,” Mary whispered to her best friend Lisa.

Lisa could only nod and stare at all the tiny hats everywhere.

Mary lost her virginity in her bedroom while her mother sat downstairs knitting hats for babies she did not know. Every afternoon that spring, Mary and her boyfriend Billy had sex on her pink-and-white-striped sheets, Billy turning her every way he could, entering her from every direction, kissing every part of her, while her mother sat, oblivious, and knit those stupid hats.

Sometimes Mary imagined that she could see through the hardwood floor, past the ceiling, into the living room where her mother sat surrounded by yarn. Maybe, Mary thought, her mother was only capable of loving one thing at a time. There had been her father at some point, she supposed. And then the drinking. And now this, knitting. But Mary couldn’t help wondering why she had never been her mother’s obsession. Nothing Mary had ever done—playing Dorothy in the third-grade production of The Wizard of Oz, getting straight A’s her entire sophomore year, winning her school’s top literary prize—nothing, had ever earned her more than halfhearted praise from her mother. “You’ll go far,” her mother liked to say. She’d make her toads-in-the-hole for breakfast and call it a celebration.

While her parents watched The Fugitive, Mary took Billy upstairs to her room. As she unbuttoned the five buttons on his jeans, he whispered, “I don’t know, Mary. They’re both downstairs.”

She kneeled in front of him, taking him into her mouth. From downstairs, she heard David Janssen searching for the one-armed man. Her mother would be knitting without even glancing down at her stitches. Her father would have Time magazine opened in his lap. Billy groaned and Mary yanked her head away. Already her mind was far from here, from the tiny hats and her mother’s glazed stare and her father’s impenetrable front. She could imagine her future, bright and near.

It took Mary almost the entire next morning to do the tassels, but when she finished she decided to go to Big Alice’s and buy more yarn. The idea that these scarves were becoming like those long-ago infant hats her mother made occurred to her. But she was different, she told herself. She would give them as Christmas gifts. Mary earmarked the striped one for Dylan’s niece, Ali, who went to college in Vermont and certainly needed scarves. The first one she would keep for herself; Alice had said you should keep the first thing you knit.

Satisfied with her practicality, she entered the store. The smell of wool comforted her, the way the old-book-and-furniture-polish smell of libraries used to. Mary could still remember how the ball scene in Anna Karenina had helped calm her after one of her mother’s tirades; how Marjorie Morningstar’s kiss under the lilacs had let her forget her own broken heart one summer; how Miss Marple used to make her smile.

Now here she stood in a knitting store, and that same sense of safety, of peace, filled her. The store was crowded, but Mary spotted Scarlet’s red hair across the room. She had on a green shawl with elaborate embroidery and long fringe wrapped around her, and beneath it she wore a startling fuchsia turtleneck.

Scarlet turned, her arms filled with a dozen or more skeins of fat loopy yarn in shades of beige and rust and white. Her eyes crinkled at the sight of Mary.

“Told you,” Scarlet said.

“I admit it,” Mary laughed.

Scarlet dropped her yarn on the counter and made her way over to Mary. “You need to learn how to purl and you look like you need a cup of coffee.”

“Coffee, yes,” Mary said. “But purling still seems … unnecessary.” Already she was eyeing a variegated yarn in moss green with gold and red and orange pom-poms woven throughout. It made her think of autumn. Hesitantly, she lifted a skein.

“That yarn is fun to work with. It makes a great child’s sweater,” Scarlet said, pointing to a small sample hanging up.

Mary swallowed hard and managed to shake her head.

“It also makes a great scarf,” Scarlet said easily. “But not for purling. Let’s pick out some multicolored yarn and get us that coffee. I make a café au lait that, if you close your eyes, will make you think you’re in France.”

Relieved, Mary followed Scarlet’s soft green shawl through the crowded store, toward her next lesson.

Mary sat at the counter that separated Scarlet’s living area from the kitchen in her loft in an old jewelry factory. The walls were brick and the ceiling had steel beams across it. Below the wall of windows city traffic inched toward the highway.

Scarlet handed Mary a yellow ceramic bowl of café au lait. “Let’s sit on the sofa where the light’s better,” she said.

Mary’s yarn was pink and yellow and blue. A funny tangle of Stella’s favorite colors, she realized as she watched Scarlet cast on for her and the colors revealed themselves.

“Knit two stitches,” Scarlet said.

She smelled of sugar and the sour tang of yeast. Up close like this, Mary saw pale lines etched at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

“Remember when you purl it’s tip to tip,” Scarlet said, pulling the loose yarn in front. “The tip of this needle goes here and they form an X, see?”

Scarlet purled two stitches and then turned it over to Mary. “Knit two, purl two,” she said. “It’s tedious as hell, but when you finish that scarf you’ll be an expert purler.”

Mary knit two easily, then hesitated.

“Tip to tip,” Scarlet said, picking up her own knitting.

When Mary successfully purled two stitches, Scarlet said, “I knew you could do it.”

They knit in silence, the clicking of the wooden needles the only sound except the traffic below. Scarlet’s apartment was like a slice of Provence. Everything in soft yellows and blues with splashes of red, the wooden tables rough-hewn and worn, with drips of wax from candles and rings left from wet glasses. Mary imagined exotic men here, good red wine, the smells of a daube simmering on the stove, and pungent cheese and olives on this coffee table.

“How did you end up in Providence owning a bakery?” Mary asked. “You seem like you belong somewhere entirely different.”

“Like where?”

Mary blushed. “I don’t know. France, maybe.”

Scarlet nodded but didn’t reply. She had removed the ornate shade from the table lamp to give them more light, and that bright bulb showed something in her face that Mary could not identify. A sadness, perhaps. No, Mary decided. Regret.

After a time Scarlet looked up from her knitting and right at Mary. She was using very large needles and her sweater had already begun to take shape while Mary’s scarf still seemed small and new.

“Everyone has a story, don’t they?” Scarlet said. “Mine is about bread and the sea and, you’re right, about France.”

Mary held her breath for a moment, her needles poised. Then Scarlet began to speak, and Mary exhaled, put her needles together with a soft click, and listened.

“I was always good with my hands,” Scarlet said. “Even when I was little, I liked to touch things. I used to carry a stuffed dog everywhere with me. Pal, I called him. I rubbed away the fabric on one of his ears. And I rubbed holes into all of my blankets. I loved the feel of fabric in my fingers. It brought me … not joy, exactly, but … comfort. Yes, comfort.”

Scarlet paused, lost in thought.

“The first time I baked bread,” she continued, “I knew this was something I could do for the rest of my life.”

She took a breath, then continued.

“I was a terrible student. An art major only because I liked textiles and ceramics and it didn’t require a lot of reading or tests. Mostly, I smoked pot and had sex with other art majors. The summer after I graduated from college, I needed a plan or my parents were going to make one for me. So, out of the blue, I said that I wanted to live in France. Before I knew it, everything was set. My father knew a professor in Paris, Claude Lévesque, and he arranged an au pair job for me with Claude’s family. Claude and his wife Camille had two daughters, Véronique and Bébé.”

Mary thought of her own father, an insurance salesman who, other than his clients, seemed to know nobody. He moved through the world alone, circling her mother and Mary, a shadowy, quiet man.

Scarlet said, “They sent me pictures in a big envelope that one of the children had decorated with a border of flowers drawn in pen and ink. I wondered where I could get my pot in Paris and what I would do with the children and if they spoke any English. Their faces in the photographs seemed blank and uninteresting. The mother looked severe. But the father, Claude, looked like Gérard Depardieu, a big hulking guy with a bulbous nose and unkempt blond hair. Sexy and French.

“I left for Paris right after Christmas. When the plane was landing I looked out the window at the gray overcast city still lit up and something settled in me. I knew somehow that this was really where I belonged and that I would never leave.

“I know it sounds like a schoolgirl’s fantasy, but when I met Claude I knew that I would be with him somehow, that we would be connected forever. The wife, Camille, was not stern like in her photograph. She was actually quite pretty. A petite woman with that style that Parisian women have. I remember her coat was tangerine, and thinking how odd that would look in Cambridge among all the ugly L.L. Bean down coats everyone wore there. Her blond hair pulled back in that perfect knot, and her eyes always lined in black, and her skinny legs in their black stockings beneath that coat. She was aloof, and she smoked too much, but she wasn’t stern.

“The children were fine and we took to each other right away. I taught them how to knit, and we made blankets for their dolls and little hats for their stuffed animals. I would walk them to school and then go to French lessons for two hours and then run errands for Camille. I was alone in the apartment, a cramped two-story place in the twelfth arrondissement filled with really ugly antiques, until two o’clock, when I went to pick up the girls at school.

“At first I stayed in my room and watched television. But before long I began to wander the streets. I had a pass for the Métro and I would ride it all over and then get out and walk around, into cheese shops and pâtisseries and vintage clothing stores. One day I ran into Claude in the Latin Quarter. He was sitting having a carafe of wine at a café and he motioned for me to join him. We spoke to each other in English, which felt very foreign to me, and exotic. Claude spoke fluent English. Camille did not speak any English, and the children studied it in school but spoke it badly.

“We began to meet on Tuesdays, which was his free afternoon. Together we explored the city, speaking English like it was our own secret language. Then I would go and pick up the children, and once the weather turned warm we would go to the park and ride the carousel. At home I helped make dinner and ate with the family and helped to clean up and give the children their baths and then I went to my room. Claude ignored me during this part of the day. Our few hours together on Tues-days seemed like a dream, unconnected to anything else that happened.

“This continued for two years. The schedule like that and the Tuesday meetings. Over time I lost my baby fat and I began to dress like the women I saw on the streets. I grew my hair long. I stopped taking my French lessons because I was fluent really. So my free time was plentiful. I befriended a baker named Denis. His family owned one of the oldest bakeries in the city, and I would go there for my favorite baguette to nibble while I strolled.

“Soon Denis and I became lovers. He was a distracted young man, careless with everything except bread. But we would go dancing and to his small flat above the bakery and I felt very romantic, not in love with Denis, but romantic. Perhaps in love with the city and this simple life I led there. Sex with a handsome Frenchman! Fresh baguettes and wine in bed! His hands always had flour in the creases and I would trace them, pretending I could see into the future.

“One night I said, ‘Teach me to make that bread I love.’

“So we went downstairs and he showed me. Watching a man knead dough and create bread from just flour and water and yeast is the sexiest thing imaginable. Because he had to be at the bakery at four a.m. to begin baking the bread, he always brought me back to Claude and Camille’s around three. But this morning I stayed and made the bread with him. It was as if my hands had finally learned what they were meant to do. I could feel the change as I worked the dough. How it grew less sticky. How it took new forms and properties. When I got home it was almost six and I was giddy. I would be a baker. I was meant to be a baker.

“I had forgotten that Camille and the girls had gone to meet Camille’s parents for a weekend in Brittany, on the coast. So when I quietly entered the apartment and found Claude sitting there, obviously awake all night, I thought something terrible had happened.

“I even forgot to speak English. I began to tell him, in French, about my discovery, how I had to find a baker to apprentice with. My hands tingled from the feel of the dough in them.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said—privately, that’s what he always called me; he didn’t think Scarlet suited me. This name, he told me, it’s too ridiculous— ‘I thought something terrible had happened to you. I thought you had been killed or hurt.’

“His English sounded, oddly, harsh.

“Je suis désolée,” I said.

“He covered his face in his hands and began to laugh. ‘I think you’ve been savagely murdered and all the while you’ve been baking bread.’

“I didn’t see what was funny. But I forced a smile. I caught a glimpse of myself in the oversized mirror and saw that I was covered with flour.

“As if he read my mind, Claude said, ‘You have flour everywhere.’

“And he got up and walked over to me and began to brush the flour from my sweater and my hair and my arms. That was when it began, the thing I knew would happen. I have wondered many times over the years how I knew with such certainty that this man and I were to be linked forever. And I have never been able to find an answer. I was so young when I arrived in Paris. And unsure of so many things. Yet this one thing I knew absolutely.

“That weekend, with Camille and the girls away, we made love in that particular way that new lovers have, as if nothing exists outside each other.

“This was long ago now. Twenty-two years. What I remember is Claude making us an omelette and how we ate it in my bed, cold. I remember how thoughts of running away with Claude began to fill my mind. I remember how on Sunday afternoon he held my face in his hands and said, ‘You know you must leave here, Rouge. We cannot be like this with Camille and the girls.’

“He didn’t mean, of course, that I had to leave right then. But that is what I did. I packed my suitcase, the same one that I had arrived with two years earlier, and I left that apartment with Claude’s fingerprints and kisses all over me. It was raining, a warm rain that diffused the lights of the city. Like the blurry colors of a Monet painting. Like tears. I went to the only place I knew to go: the bakery.

“Denis took me in. I told him I had fallen in love with someone, that I needed a place to stay for a while. He said something like, ‘C’est dommage,’ nothing more than that. I slept on his sofa and helped to bake the bread. And I began to meet Claude in his office in the afternoon, where, on a scratchy Persian rug, we would make love to the sound of a typewriter pounding in the office next door and students rushing down the hall, arguing or worrying or laughing.

“I went on this way, in a happy blur, for a month or so. Summer came and I learned to bake croissants and pain au chocolat, the intricacies of butter and dough, the delicate balance of sweet and sour. I did not ask about Camille, though I did inquire about the children, who I missed sorely. Especially the little one, Bébé. By this time she was eight, but small like her mother, with that fine hair that tangled easily and skin so fair that the pale blue veins shone just beneath. She carried a doll, Madame Chienne, everywhere with her. A rag doll that was loved away in spots, like my own dog Pal. Véronique was more polite, but less imaginative, and though I got on well with her, it was Bébé whom I adored. Claude brought me pictures that she’d drawn, and read me little stories she wrote. And I suppose in my fantasy of Claude running away with me to a place with golden sunshine, Bébé came too.

“Denis wanted me to go to a small village near Marseille to apprentice with an old man who Denis himself had worked with. This man, called Frère Michel by everyone, was famous all over France for his cannelles, the small sweet cakes made by nuns in the fourteenth century with vanilla bean and rum and egg yolks. They are made in special fluted tulip-shaped molds, and Frère Michel still used the wooden ones his own grandmother had used.

“I thought, I must go and take Claude with me. The only image I had of the south of France was one I had invented from van Gogh paintings and travel posters that hung in a travel agency window near the bakery. I could imagine walking through fields of towering sunflowers with Claude, or wandering the Roman ruins together. I could imagine the two of us plunging into the blue sea naked, then drying in the hot sun on pink rocks. But I could not see myself without him.

“So I let Denis talk about Frère Michel and cannelles, nodding as if I was considering the offer, until the day I realized that I was most certainly pregnant. On this particular morning, I awoke sweaty and suffocating in the hot apartment, and I felt a flutter, like a butterfly had burst from its cocoon and set off in flight. I put my hand to my stomach and my butterfly fluttered against it.”

Instinctively, Mary paused in her knitting and placed one hand on her own belly, as if she could feel that familiar fluttering, the first sign of a baby there. She remembered lying in bed with Dylan and gasping slightly, taking his hand and pressing it to her stomach.

She nodded at Scarlet before she picked up her knitting needles once again.

“My first impulse was to go immediately to Claude. At this time of the morning he would be teaching, and I got up quickly to dress and meet him at his classroom with the news. The happy news. On the bus to the university I made a plan in which we went together to the south, and we lived in that small town near Marseille, and I baked cannelles and madeleines, and Claude wrote the book he always talked about writing, and there in the plan was a little girl, not unlike Bébé. And a small house near the sea. And almond trees, and olive trees, and wild fennel.

“But as I raced up the stairs to the building where he taught, something struck me and sent a shiver through me even on such a relentlessly hot day. I remembered clearly when I’d had my last period, and it was back in June on an evening when Denis and I were still lovers. I sat hard on the steps, feeling the heat of the sunbaked stone through my thin dress, forcing myself to think. But I knew that had been my last period, and that two weeks later I had slept with both Denis and then, in that first weekend together, Claude.

“That flutter rose in me again, this time filling my throat with bile. Around me, students rushed, carrying armloads of books, speaking French and German and Spanish. I could smell their sweat and their cigarettes, and again I tasted vomit.

“I don’t know how long I sat there before a cool hand touched my bare arm. I looked up into Claude’s face. He was wearing his glasses, those funny rimless half-glasses, and his blond hair was matted across his forehead.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said softly, ‘did I forget that we were going to meet?’

“I shook my head.

“ ‘You look so pale,’ he said, and touched my cheeks with the backs of both his hands. ‘Are you feverish?’

“I shook my head again. ‘It’s just so hot,’ I said.

“He helped me to my feet and held my elbow firmly for support. ‘Let’s get you some water, yes?’

“I let him lead me to his office. I had never been there in the morning, and I thought the Persian rug looked faded and worn in this light, that the color of the walls seemed dingy. I drank down the water he brought me without stopping, and then I immediately threw it up. Once I began vomiting I couldn’t stop. Claude grabbed the wastebasket and held it under my chin.

“A secretary appeared in the open doorway, wearing a concerned face. ‘Professor?’ she asked.

“ ‘This young girl is ill from the heat,’ Claude said. ‘She’ll be fine.’

“ ‘You have class now,’ the secretary said. ‘Shall I take her?’

“ ‘Call maintenance,’ Claude said, ‘to clean up here.’

“The secretary hesitated a moment before leaving.

“ ‘I was in the neighborhood,’ I said. ‘Silly of me. No breakfast. I just wanted to see your face.’

“Claude grinned at me. ‘Go and eat some eggs and a big café au lait in a cool café and you will be your old self again in no time.’

“I stared at him, puzzled.

“ ‘And we will meet here as usual at two o’clock,’ he said, straightening his shirt and tie, gathering his books and briefcase.

“ ‘Au revoir,’ he said.

“I nodded because that was all I could manage. This was the first time we had been together and Claude had spoken to me entirely in French.

“I almost didn’t go back that afternoon. But I could not stay away. In the hours in between seeing him, I took his advice and sat in a cool café and ate eggs and toast, and I thought about this baby. I would never know for sure if it belonged to Denis or Claude. For some women, perhaps, that would not matter. They could convince themselves that the father was of course the man they loved.

“But for me, I only wanted this baby if it was Claude’s. Denis meant nothing to me. What if I had the baby and it was like Denis, distracted and lazy? Then I would know that it wasn’t Claude’s and I would have to live a charade with Claude. No, this little one would never be born.

“By the time I arrived back at Claude’s office, the secretary away at her lunch, the outer office empty, I had decided not to tell Claude anything. I would get the name of a doctor and get this done quickly, pretending that it never happened. It seemed so simple that when Claude came in I threw myself at him, tearing at his tie and the buttons on his shirt, wanting only to fill myself with him.

“He laughed softly. ‘You are revived,’ he whispered in English.

“Of course, these things are never so simple, are they? That very evening I told Denis about my situation. Not the details of it, just that I was pregnant and needed an abortion. He studied my face, as if he could find there some evidence of his own involvement in this predicament. But I remained unreadable.

“ ‘I can arrange this,’ he said finally.

“He took longer than I had hoped and it was several weeks later before he handed me a name and address on a slip of paper right before we began to make the morning’s baguettes. I took it and thanked him, but he waved away my gratitude with his hands.

“ ‘Let’s not talk about this again,’ he said.

“I was happy to oblige.

“That week, Claude and his family were away in Spain. How perfect, I thought. I had begun to read everything as a sign about who the father was. Claude’s absence during the abortion made it clear that Denis was the father. But on the very day it was to be done, as I combed my hair in preparation to leave, the phone rang and it was Claude—a sign that the baby must be his. My heart beat fast as I listened to him speak into a pay phone in a café at the beach.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said, ‘I am miserable without you. I will never be away from you like this again. I’ll figure out a way for us to be together. Do you believe me?’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said.

“ ‘I love you,’ Claude was saying, over and over again.

“He did not stop until I said it to him.

“ ‘I love you too, Claude,’ I said, the words burning my throat.

“When it was done, I was made empty. The weight stayed on me. My hips and waist were thick, my breasts larger. But beneath that, was stone. Or worse, nothing at all. As soon as I woke from the anesthesia, I knew in my heart that it had been Claude’s child after all. The nurse gave me something to calm me, but I couldn’t stop crying.

“This new me, empty, overweight, unhappy, tried to continue life as it had been before. Denis and I baked bread in the early morning. I met Claude in the afternoons, and could hardly appreciate the changes in him. The declarations of love, the promises of a future together. One day he pinched my waist, and teased me that I was growing too fat and too happy.

“ ‘You look the way you did when I first saw you,’ he said when I pulled away from him. He made me turn back to face him. ‘That day I knew,’ he said, serious now. ‘I knew you were going to change my life.’

“ ‘I knew too,’ I said.

“Soon afterwards, after the weather had turned crisp and cool, Denis once again asked me about Frère Michel. ‘He will take you on,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t waste time if I were you. He’s very old. He won’t be around forever.’

“I looked into Denis’s face. He had flour across one cheek, and flecks of sticky dough on his apron.

“ ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’

“Can you believe it when I tell you that I went a week later and I never told Claude? I saw him those last afternoons. I listened to his ideas for us to have a life together. He would pay for an apartment for me to live, and it would be ours. He would go to America to teach and I would come with him; he had done it before, why not again? Perhaps, he sighed, he would leave Camille, get a divorce, marry me.

“I said nothing. I let him make love to me as if it was not the last time. Then I went directly to pick up my bag at Denis’s apartment, and from there to the train heading south. On that train I thought about nothing. Not what I was doing. Not what I had done. During the nights before I left, I wondered how Claude and I would be linked forever. Was it through this baby who would never be born? Or was it through our love? Did love’s energy continue even after the lovers separated? These thoughts kept me awake. But once I was on the train south, my mind stopped.

“On a whim, I had stopped at a yarn store near Denis’s apartment and bought a skein of light blue mohair and a pair of bamboo knitting needles. As the industrial cities passed my window, and cypress trees appeared beside barren fields of wheat and flowers, I knit. My hands seemed to knit away the noise that had kept me awake, to erase the questions for which there were no answers.

“My story could have ended here. In many ways, I wish it had. I arrived in the village, a village so small it is not on any map, and made my way to Frère Michel’s. People from all over France came to his bakery for his cannelles. They had perfect contrasting textures—the crunchy exterior, the almost-custard interior. The shop was filled with villagers, city people from Marseille, tourists holding guidebooks, vacationers. And Frère Michel, wrinkled, toothless, bent like a question mark. He yelled at people to be quiet, to make a better line. He threw out the ones who complained or pushed. He was a hateful man who baked heavenly pastries.

“I had my own house, a shed, really. One room with a bed and a table with one short leg and two chairs. When spring came I made a garden in the back and grew oregano and lavender, tomatoes and beans. My skin turned brown from the sun. I lost the pregnancy fat. All of it seemed long ago. I ordered more of that blue mohair yarn from the store in Paris and I kept adding on, knitting a blanket that I could eventually wrap myself in many times over.

“At work, Frère Michel screamed at me. I was an idiot. Too stingy with butter, unable to gauge when it was the proper time to take the dough for the cannelles from the refrigerator. His yelling did not bother me. He was teaching me something, after all. Cannelles are very tricky to bake. The sugar must be molten enough to form the shell, but if it’s too hot it will burn. Over time I learned that one day wasn’t enough for the dough, and four was too many. I learned to brush the old molds more generously and to whisk more firmly. I could tell by instinct when to remove the batter from the heat, or when it was too humid to bake them that day. The tourists liked to practice their English with me, despite Frère Michel’s grumblings.

“Then one day, in the dead of summer, Claude walked into the crowded shop. He was thinner, his face creased with worry. A big man, he seemed to fill the shop when he entered.

“ ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find you?’ he said quietly.

“I untied my apron and walked around the counter, through the crowd. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said, not wanting a scene.

“Frère Michel yelled at me to come back, but I took Claude’s hand and walked with him down the crooked village street, through the field to my little house.

“ ‘I hate you,’ he said once we were inside.

“And then we were kissing each other, and it began again in a new way. He had left Camille, believing my disappearance came from a lack of trust in his promises. He had his own apartment near the university. He wanted to marry me as soon as the divorce was final, after Christmas.

“I felt I was ready to say yes. I could put what had happened behind me. We would have other children together. I would open a small shop and make cannelles and madeleines the way they did in the south. Our life together unfolded so clearly that I became gripped with happiness.

“Just like that, my simple life changed. Every weekend Claude came south from Paris and we began to make plans together. I wrote my parents that I was engaged. We would have a real wedding, we decided. My family would come from America. Frère Michel would bake our cake. Giddy with our new life, Claude decided that when he came the next time, he would bring the girls. Véronique was mad at him, he explained. But Bébé was excited and missed me. He rented a cottage on the sea and I would join them there in a week.

“I couldn’t stop speaking of our future to the regulars who came in each morning. The old women pinched my cheeks and made jokes about how rosy sex made them. Frère Michel grumbled that I was stupider than ever now that I had fallen in love.

“That Friday I took the local train to the village where Claude and the children waited for me. It was early September and the southern light had already begun to change. I arrived under a purple sky to find an eager Bébé and a sullen Véronique at the station, and Claude holding a bundle of lavender for me. I felt like a bride already, carrying the stalks of small fragrant flowers and walking hand in hand with Claude.

“Bébé chattered about her new puppy and the storybook she was writing and how she had thoughtlessly left Madame Chienne back in Paris. ‘Nothing feels right without Madame Chienne,’ she said sadly. ‘Do you think it’s bad luck to not have her with me?’

“ ‘Of course not,’ I assured her. ‘Madame Chienne does not like the sea.’

“Véronique said almost nothing. I decided to let her be angry instead of coaxing good cheer from her.

“In the morning, we hiked the mile or so to the beach. The hike was arduous—the path was rocky and the sun was hot. When we finally arrived, we put our blankets under the shelter of a cove of rocks, and prepared for a swim. Almost immediately, Claude realized that we had forgotten to bring the lunch he’d so carefully prepared; he wanted everything to be perfect and he’d gone into town early for fresh bread and to choose good meats and fruit at the outdoor market there.

“ ‘We’ll go back to the house for lunch,’ I said. ‘It’s no big deal.’

“ ‘No, no,’ Claude insisted, ‘we must have a picnic here, and swim to that sandbar, and stay until late.’

“He stood and put on his funny Indiana Jones hat. Like all Frenchmen, he wore a tiny Speedo bathing suit and his stomach hung over it slightly.

“ ‘You look funny and beautiful,’ I told him.

“He explained to the girls that he would be back with lunch and then he kissed me hard on the lips. I heard Véronique mutter as she pulled away from him.

“ ‘She’ll have to get used to it,’ he told me. He kissed each girl on top of her head and began the hike back.

“ ‘Papa!’ Bébé called after him. ‘I’ll collect sea glass for you!’

“ ‘Wonderful!’

“The three of us swam for a long time in the cool water. We could see our legs and toes flapping about beneath it, and hundreds of small fish swimming around us. Even Véronique enjoyed our time in the water. Then, feeling lazy, I stretched out on one of the hot rocks and closed my eyes.

“I woke to find Claude kneeling beside me with the backpack of food at my feet.

“ ‘Rouge?’ he said. ‘Where are the girls?’

“I sat up slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, scanning the beach. ‘Isn’t that Véronique down there?’ I pointed.

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, relieved.

“He opened the backpack and spread the cloth, and the food, and took out a bottle of white wine. I watched as Véronique made her way back to us.

“ ‘Funny,’ I said, standing. ‘I don’t see Bébé.’

“Claude got to his feet and yelled to Véronique. ‘Where is your sister?’

“ ‘I can’t understand you,’ she yelled back. ‘Speak French!’

“Claude began to run toward her, and I followed close behind.

“ ‘Ta soeur!’ he yelled.

“ ‘She was there, looking for sea glass,’ Véronique said.

“We looked at where she pointed. A small cove now filled with water from the tide.

“ ‘Bébé!’ Claude called, racing down the beach.

“Was it a premonition of tragedy that I had that first time I saw Claude and knew that we would be linked forever? I can’t say. But the little one, Bébé, was gone and I was to blame.

“They found her washed up on another beach the next morning. We don’t know what happened because it happened as I slept.”

“Oh,” Mary said, and it sounded more like a moan than a word. Her heart seized in on itself as she thought of this other lost child, and she said, again, “Oh.”

“We never discussed what happened next,” Scarlet said. “I simply came back to the States, alone. He blames me, of course. Why shouldn’t he? I’m guilty. I didn’t watch his daughter and she died. I can never make that right. The guilt used to keep me up at night. It used to drive me crazy. I would try to rewrite that day, that morning. In this version, I would make myself stay awake. We would build sand castles, Bébé and I, with elaborate turrets and moats filled with seawater. And Claude would come back to the beach with our lunch, and we would eat it together, all four of us. And we would swim in the ocean and grow brown under the hot sun. And we would fill our bucket with shells and sea glass. And we would live happily ever after.

“But, of course, then morning would come and I would be left with the real story and the awful true ending.”

The day had turned to dusk. Outside Scarlet’s wall of windows the sky was slashed with violet and lavender. Mary had dropped a stitch early on, and a run of emptiness climbed up the center, cutting through the happy wool like a scar.

“I know about your daughter,” Scarlet said. “I remember reading it in the paper. Meningitis, right?’

“Yes.”

“We have this in common,” she said softly.

There was a small silence. Then Mary said, “Her name was Stella.”

Neither of them was knitting anymore.

“I’ll show you,” Mary said, her voice shaky.

She opened the bag at her feet and from it took the picture of Stella she carried everywhere with her. It wasn’t the most recent photo, or even the most beautiful. It was just the one that looked the most like Stella, her head cocked, smiling broadly, her eyes bright beneath her tangled hair.

Scarlet’s breath caught.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Lovely.”

They sat side by side, and watched the sky grow dark.

4

The Knitting Circle

For several weeks Mary did not go to the knitting circle. A kind of inertia took hold of her, and even though when Wednesday night neared, she thought of going, she could not get herself there. She admired Scarlet, who, after losing Bébé, after losing everything, had managed to make something of her life again. Rouge—and how that name took on such significance now, Mary realized— was always crowded. Why, Mary had written a rave review of it when it first opened, marveling at the butteriness of the croissants, the intensity of the hot chocolate. She wanted to find inspiration in Scarlet’s story, but her still-new grief kept her paralyzed.

Alone in the late afternoons, Mary tried not to think about how six short months ago she would be picking up Stella at school, watching her run down the front steps with her impossibly oversized backpack, her collection of key chains jingling. She would be swooping her daughter into her waiting arms. Trying not to think of these things, Mary picked up her needles and knit. Scarves unfolded in her lap—fat ones; textured ones; eyelash scarves made of thin strands of yarns knitted together—one glittery and multicolored and one soft and fluttery.

On warm autumn days like these, she and Stella would go to the playground on the corner. Or they would walk to the small library up the street and fall into the plump cushions in the children’s section and read. Mary remembered these things as evening approached. She remembered them, and she knit.

On one of these afternoons the phone rang and Mary answered it. Often she didn’t. She let the machine pick up and listened as friends checked in on her, offering cups of tea, afternoon movies, martinis. But on this afternoon she answered because outside her window she could clearly see her neighbor Louise, and Louise’s three children, placing their just-made jack-o’-lanterns on their front stoop. The excited giggles from those kids made Mary want to run across the street and smash those goofy carved pumpkins. Even worse: Halloween was two days away.

“It’s Scarlet,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I thought you might want me to pick you up tonight.”

“Knitting,” Mary said.

“Six o’clock?”

Beautiful-colored leaves floated down from the tree in Mary’s yard. She watched them lift, hover, fall.

“Sometimes,” Scarlet said, “you need to get out of the house. Out of your brain.”

Mary thought of that day at Scarlet’s, of Scarlet’s story about Claude and Bébé.

“Okay,” Mary said. “See you at six.”

Dragging a comb through her tangled hair, Mary imagined sharing her own story with Scarlet. She would tell her about Dylan, and how they had found each other late in their lives; how Stella had been their one chance to make a family. Perhaps she could tell Scarlet what kind of father Dylan had been, how he liked taking Stella grocery shopping, just the two of them. He would bring a lemon to her nose and have her inhale its scent. He taught her how to tell when a melon was ripe, how to choose an avocado, how to order meat from the butcher. After Stella died, Mary took over the grocery shopping, wandering the aisles alone. The sight of a father there with his little girl safely strapped into the cart, nibbling on blueberries or crackers broke her heart. Somehow Mary believed that maybe Scarlet would understand what she and Dylan had lost.

When she thought of her, of Scarlet, she saw her in the south of France, happy. That happiness had lasted only a moment, Mary knew. It seemed to her she’d had Stella for only a moment.

Staring at the stranger in the mirror, Mary sighed. Her face was rounder, her hair duller, her eyes flat. It was another person who used to like what she saw when she looked in a mirror, who playfully added mascara to her lashes and sparkly blush to her cheeks. Mary dug around in her cosmetics bag until she found the hot pink tube of mascara inside. But it had caked from lack of use, and she couldn’t find her blush at all. Who was she kidding? she thought. She looked bad, she felt bad, and she was not ready to talk about any of this to anyone. She had paid a grief counselor a hundred dollars a week for almost two months and all Mary did was sit and cry, which was what she did at home for free.

Mary scrawled a note to Dylan, Gone knittin’, and left it on the kitchen table. At ten after six, Scarlet pulled up in front of Mary’s house. A new friend, Mary thought as she carefully locked the front door. Just that day Jodie had finally called and said, “I don’t know what to say. Should I ask how you are? Should I mention Stella or not? God, Mary, I am so sorry to let you down.” And Mary had said, “No, no, I’m fine. Really.” The lie had burned in her throat for the rest of the afternoon.

Eddie had called and Mary had lied to him too. “You know,” she’d said, “I’m doing so much better. Really I am. Maybe I’m ready to come back to work.” “Uh-huh,” Eddie had said, knowing better.

As she approached Scarlet’s car, she saw that someone else was already in the front seat beside Scarlet.

“You remember Lulu?” Scarlet said after Mary slid into the backseat.

“Of course,” Mary said, trying to hide her disappointment.

Lulu’s platinum blonde hair was newly razor cut in uneven chunks, shiny from some expensive hair care product like wax or mud that kept it looking slightly dirty. She had on black again: a leather motorcycle jacket, turtleneck, skinny pants, and boots.

Mary settled back into the seat, wishing she hadn’t come.

“Lulu’s loft is right beneath mine,” Scarlet said. “She’s a glass sculptor.”

“Really?” Mary said.

“You moved here from where?” Lulu said. Her voice sounded like she’d been smoking and drinking whiskey her entire life.

“San Francisco,” Mary said.

“Have you noticed,” Lulu said, turning slightly, “that everyone in this city is from somewhere else?”

Despite herself, Mary relaxed. Lulu wasn’t so bad. It was Mary herself who couldn’t relate to anyone.

“A glass sculptor,” Mary said. “That seems so … I don’t know, to work with such a fragile material seems impossible.”

“The beauty of glass,” Lulu said almost dreamily, “is that it’s remained unchanged for hundreds of years.”

“She trained in Venice,” Scarlet said.

“Maybe you’ll show me your things sometime,” Mary said.

“Maybe,” Lulu said unconvincingly, looking straight ahead.

“Wait!” Beth said. “I brought pictures.”

She pulled a set of glossy photographs from a large envelope. Four children—two boys standing behind two girls—smiled stiffly out from them, all wearing matching red and green sweaters. Did she get her kids’ picture taken every fucking week? Mary thought.

“Have you ever seen such perfect children?” Harriet said softly.

Yes, Mary thought. Yes, I have.

Mary hated the way Harriet looked at Beth, as if she were the only person who’d ever had children. She watched Harriet watching Beth’s proud face. No, Mary decided, she looks at her as if she might disappear.

Scarlet glanced at the picture politely, then passed it on to Lulu. “Nice,” Scarlet said without much conviction.

“What a brood!” Lulu said.

Beth laughed. “I always wanted a lot of children.”

“She graduated magna cum laude, you know,” Harriet said.

Beth shrugged off the boasting. “In early childhood education. It wasn’t too challenging. It was just what I loved.”

“She loves kids,” Harriet said, her voice so tender that Beth flushed with embarrassment. “Of course, I worry about her,” Harriet added. “She does too much.”

Mary rolled her eyes and lost track of what she was doing.

“Did I just knit?” she said. “Or purl?”

Scarlet leaned over to help and locked her eyes with Mary’s. She wants to take that picture and tear it to shreds too, Mary thought.

“The knit stitches look like little Vs,” Scarlet said. “See? And the purls look like bumps.”

“Like pearls,” Harriet said.

“So I just purled?” Mary said.

Scarlet grinned. “No, you just knit.”

Mary settled back and concentrated. Purl two. Knit two. Beth’s voice swirled around her. Purl two. Knit two.

“Chris is my comedian. And Nate is my athlete. He plays three sports …”

Purl two. Knit two. Purl two.

“… Caroline is the scholar. She always has her nose in a book. I don’t know where she got that …”

Knit two. Purl two.

“… And what can I say? Stella’s my baby. We named her after my grandmother, you know, and believe me, she’s the only Stella in her nursery school.”

Mary stared at the yarn in her hands and gulped. It looked unfamiliar suddenly, and she wasn’t even sure what she should be doing with it.

“If I could only keep her four forever,” Beth said with a sigh.

Scarlet kneeled in front of Mary. “Do you need help?” she said softly.

“I, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Mary said.

“You just purled two stitches,” Scarlet said, her voice calm and even. “Now you’re going to knit two stitches. Then purl two.” She didn’t move until Mary finally knit two stitches. “Now knit two,” Scarlet said softly. “Now purl two. Now knit.”

“Come with us for martinis,” Scarlet said as they drove back to Providence.

Exhausted, Mary said, “Maybe another time. I didn’t even tell my husband I was going out.”

“See?” Lulu said. “Husbands are a grand liability, Scarlet. They keep you away from martinis.” Lulu pointed out the window. “Look!”

The moon hung full and orange in the sky ahead.

“Blue moon,” Lulu said.

“Looks red to me,” Scarlet said.

“No, no,” Lulu laughed. “A blue moon is the second full moon in the same month.”

“Lulu knows more fun facts than anybody I know,” Scarlet said.

“Correction. More useless facts,” Lulu said, her gaze focused out the window.

Two hundred and twenty-eight thousand children and young adults die every year. Sixty thousand children a year under the age of six die. Two thousand children a year die from bacterial meningitis. The children who live often lose limbs or hearing or eyesight.

“You know,” Mary said, her voice quivering, “a martini sounds like a great idea.”

The bar was downtown, on a block of deserted buildings, tucked away without a sign or awning. Inside, it was crowded and smoky and the three women had to stand crushed close together at the bar.

Two oversized martinis later, a small table opened and Lulu pushed her way to claim it. Mary was starting to like Lulu. She reminded Mary of her old self, the one who had something to say about everything.

Sitting with a fresh round of drinks in front of them, Mary said to Lulu, “I can’t believe you ever left the city. It seems like a perfect fit for you.”

Lulu fished an olive out of her drink and popped it in her mouth. She ordered her martinis dirty, extra olives and their juice.

Mary frowned, wondering what she had said wrong.

“Beth can be a bit much,” Scarlet said, breaking the awkward silence. “The matching sweaters. The pictures.”

“Always with the fucking pictures,” Lulu said.

Mary’s stomach tumbled, remembering Beth’s voice. What can I say? Stella’s my baby …

“Mary?” Scarlet was saying, her hand resting tenderly on Mary’s arm. “Are you all right?”

“I should get home,” Mary managed.

“Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” Lulu said.

Later, standing in her bedroom doorway, dizzy and melancholy, Mary studied her husband’s sleeping face. It had become topographical from grief. Even in sleep he wore his sadness plainly. CNN blared from the television, talk of wars and distant tragedies. Mary walked over to the television and turned it off, sending the room into darkness except for the blue moon that lit up the sky.

PART THREE

Knit Two Together (K2tog)

Patterns are more specific about decreasing than increasing. Decreases done in certain ways slant the stitches to the right or left. For many patterns this is an important element; for others it doesn’t matter at all that much. —NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ, A Passion for Knitting

5

Lulu

On Halloween night, Mary stayed in bed and watched TV. Even as the doorbell rang and children’s voices chirped, “Trick or treat!” to Dylan, Mary stared at the television.

Downstairs, Dylan marveled at miniature Spider-Men and Harry Potters. He claimed each witch the scariest, each princess the loveliest. Mary did not think of the way that Stella always chose a winged creature for her Halloween costume: butterfly, bumblebee, fairy. She did not think of how meager that list was, how it should have grown over the years, adding bats and ladybugs, raptors and dragonflies.

Eventually Dylan came upstairs.

“What a crowd!” he said. “We never have such a crowd.”

“Usually we’re among them,” Mary said without looking at him. “We’re trick-or-treaters.”

He stood in front of the television, holding a pastry box tied with string.

“Someone got mixed up and gave us candy instead of the other way around?” she said, taking it from him.

She pulled the string from the box and opened it. Inside, nestled in a tight row, sat three cannelles.

“Scarlet brought them?” Mary said.

“I found them on the doorstep. No note.”

Dylan sat beside her on the bed.

“What a terrible night,” he said.

Mary handed him one of the pastries and took one for herself, letting its perfect sweetness fill her mouth.

“It might have been better if we’d done it together,” he said, not looking at her. “If we’d both been down there.”

Mary shook her head. “I told you I couldn’t,” she said. “You could have hidden up here with me.” She tried not to sound defensive.

But Dylan said, “I guess I can’t hide from everything like you can,” and she heard that too-familiar edge in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Mary told him, though she wasn’t certain what she was sorry about: sorry that Stella had died and she couldn’t handle it? Sorry she couldn’t be more like him in the face of this?

“I’ll fight you for the third one,” Dylan said, changing the subject, letting their frustration lie there between them.

“One holiday down, and an infinite number to go,” Dylan said, licking crumbs from his fingers.

“And my mother’s threatening to come for Thanksgiving,” Mary said, her hands shaping the string into the Eiffel Tower.

Too early one morning her mother had called. “I’ve been invited to eat with Saul and his family,” she’d said, “but if you want me there, there I’ll be.”

“Saul?” Mary had said, cranky. She hated starting the day with a phone call from her mother. “Who’s Saul?”

“I’ve only mentioned him a few hundred times,” her mother said. “A neighbor. A friend. His children, all three of them, come down from Houston for Thanksgiving. With their spouses. And their children.”

“Lucky Saul,” Mary said.

“Eight grandchildren. He’ll have a full house, that’s for sure. I said I’d make my sweet potatoes. The ones I do so beautifully? The casserole? And of course help with the turkey.”

“It sounds like you should stay there then,” Mary said. Her first year without Stella, and didn’t all the books and groups and advice about grief warn that all the firsts were the worst? Couldn’t her mother figure that out when everyone else seemed to know it?

“That’s what I thought,” her mother was saying. “You and Dylan should get away. Go to Havana. That’s the place to forget everything.”

“What if I don’t want to forget?” Mary said, closing her eyes against her mother’s voice, against the sun that was beginning to show its bright face in her bedroom window, against the whole world beyond her bed.

“I understand,” her mother said. “But running away for a bit won’t erase anything. It will just take the edge off a little. I remember that trip your father and I took—” she began.

But Mary didn’t care about some long-ago vacation, or about her mother’s philosophies on loss.

“Mom, you don’t know anything about it,” Mary interrupted.

“This was a long time ago,” her mother continued. “Before you were born. We went to Key West. And we walked on those little streets with all the palm trees—”

Her mother sighed, then spoke again.

“Cuba. Havana, Cuba,” she said. “I hear it’s time to go to Cuba.”

“Thanks,” Mary said. “That’s really great advice.”

A few minutes after she’d hung up, the phone rang again.

“You can’t take your knitting on the airplane.”

“Mom?” Mary said.

“In case you go to Cuba. They don’t allow you to bring the needles on board anymore.”

“I’m not going to Cuba, Mom,” Mary said.

“Mrs. Earle said that they let you bring circular needles. But you’re not working on those yet, are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “I’m not flying anywhere.”

Lying in her bed Halloween night, Mary imagined flying somewhere. She thought of Stella last Halloween, a perfect fairy, all sparkles and tulle. And then she thought of herself, so earthbound, so stuck.

When her mother called again, Mary was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, willing herself to take off, to actually burst through the roof and into the sky.

“I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving,” her mother said. “I don’t want to make it worse for you. It’s going to be bad. I know that. And for the life of me I know that I can’t make it any better. Stay with your husband. I’ll barge in on Saul and his family. Next year will be a whole other story.”

“That sounds great,” Mary said. “Have fun.”

She hung up the phone and stared hard at the ceiling, as if she could by sheer force break a hole in it and see all the way up to the sky.

On Thanksgiving morning they drove to Dylan’s sister’s house in Connecticut. The night before there was enough of a snowfall to leave a perfect dusting on the yards and trees of Sara’s neighborhood. The houses, set back from the street, emitted warm yellow light from inside, and lovely puffs of smoke from the chimneys. A few had already strung small white Christmas lights around their doors and windows, and these twinkled in the gray afternoon.

“It looks like a movie set,” Mary said, hating it here.

“Yeah,” Dylan muttered, “a horror movie.”

She thought of Beth from knitting. This was where she would live. She and her four matching children, her Stella.

They pulled into the driveway behind Sara’s Volvo wagon. One like it sat in every driveway here. Sara had an annoying habit of referring to her things by brand—the Volvo, the Saab. Her purse was the Kate Spade; her shoes were the Pradas, the Adidas, the Uggs.

Sara stood on the front steps, dressed head to toe in camel, ready to pounce on them.

“Hey, you two,” she said. “Can you believe it? Snow on Thanksgiving? I had to pull my Uggs out of the attic.”

She hugged them both in turn, firmly, the kind of hug Mary had come to learn was meant to express sympathy.

Fires roared in each fireplace of each room they walked through. So perfect was each fire that Mary concluded they must be gas, not real wood ones. But then a log crackled and sent blue sparks against the screen. Maybe the fires were the only real things here.

In one of the living rooms—Sara actually had three rooms that could be living rooms, all with carefully arranged sofas and love seats and overstuffed chairs, and small tables with magazines neatly lined up, or large books about amusement parks and Winslow Homer—stood Sara’s husband, Tim, and their two teenage sons, Timmy and Daniel, along with another family, who looked like carbon copies of them. Except Liz and Dave also had an unhappy-looking daughter, Sylvie, who stood alone sullenly eating miniature quiches.

“Ali’s with her roommate,” Sara told Mary conspiratorially. She said everything conspiratorially. “In Virgin Gorda. Poor thing, right?”

“Wow,” Mary said stupidly, which was how she said everything, she realized. “Virgin Gorda.”

“Get these two a Tanqueray and tonic,” Sara told Dave, after introductions.

“You bet,” Dave said in his overeager voice. He sold something Mary could never remember. Pharmaceuticals?

The boys all stared at their loafers, so Mary went to stand beside Sylvie.

“What grade are you in now?” Mary asked, finding comfort in the superfluous gesture. “Eighth?”

“Sixth,” Sylvie said between mini quiches. “I did junior kindergarten so I’m like a year older than everyone else.” She moved on to a platter of dates wrapped in bacon.

“Do you know about this?” Liz asked Mary. “It’s a wonderful way to build self-confidence and self-image. They do a year between kindergarten and first grade, working on social skills and reinforcing basic learning skills. Then they get into first grade and they are at the top of their class. Honestly, it’s the best idea ever.”

Mary nodded politely and gulped at her gin and tonic. Here was where she should feel smug at how self-confident Stella was. And smart. A kid who knew her own mind. A kid who sailed through kindergarten, printing her letters perfectly, writing her numbers just so, and coloring maps of South America and China in bright colors.

Tears stung Mary’s eyes and she turned, pretending to admire a painting that hung over the fireplace.

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