How to Knit a Heart Back Home (11 page)

“Worth a lot?”

Lucy placed the book reverentially on the counter. “Oh, yeah. But I’d never sell it. No one lets this book go. Look at this.” She opened to the Lighthouse pattern. “Who wouldn’t be dying to make this?”

Whitney frowned, a slight crease forming between her nicely shaped eyebrows. “It’s really pretty, I guess. If you like a sweater that looks like it needs shoulder pads.”

“That was just the style then. It’s amazing. I’ve never been able to even read the pattern before. I can’t wait to read it, let alone cast on for it.”

“Isn’t there some kind of black market out there? Someone making photocopies?”

“No!” Lucy was horrified. Then she considered the question. “Well, yeah. Some people make photocopies of patterns, but it’s under the table and it’s not cool. But no one, no knitter worth her stitch markers would ever make a copy of a pattern from this book. The first knitter who saw the sweater would want to know the story of how the knitter found the book. Then they’d want to see it for themselves. . . . It would get ugly, fast.”

“What else is in that box?”

She shrugged. “Who cares?”

“Come on, finish it. What if there’s another copy?”

What if there was another copy? Lucy would keel over and die, that’s what. Right after she called every knitter she knew to rush to the store for an insta-auction.

But the box didn’t hold much more. Just a large packet of papers, tied with a piece of nondescript gray yarn. Each page was covered in tiny, handwritten script.

Lucy squinted. She pulled the first page out of the bunch.

It was a pattern of some sort.

“Do you know what those markings mean?” Whitney leaned forward.

Lucy nodded. Of course she knew what they meant.

“You do? Is it some kind of code?”

Lucy laughed. “The code of my people.”

“What?”

“It’s a knitting pattern. It’s really familiar. Hold on a second.” Lucy kept reading. She read down to the bottom of the page, then turned it over. “This is so weird. I swear I’ve never seen this pattern before, but it reminds me of someone. And it’s missing a part. There’s nothing on the back. There must be another page—there aren’t any sleeve directions on here.”

She pulled out the next brittle page.

“Do they match?”

“No, this is only half a pattern.”

“For what?”

She took a moment to glance over the papers again. The dry smell tickled her nose. “Looks like a cardigan. It’s funny, though . . . the way it’s written is familiar. I swear I know who wrote this.”

“You can tell?”

“It’s like a signature. Some people have stronger styles than others. I’d take a bet this was Eliza Carpenter.”

“Who’s Eliza?”

Lucy gaped at her. That’s right, there were people in the world who hadn’t been raised to revere Eliza as the modern-day patron saint of knitting, weren’t there? She’d forgotten that. She tapped
Silk Road
and then turned it over to show Whitney the small picture of the older woman with the long silver braid on the back cover.

“Cade MacArthur’s great-aunt. She revitalized knitting in this country, took it mainstream. How could you live here and not
know
her?”

“She looks vaguely familiar. Is she the one who started that whole knitting-is-the-new-yoga thing?”

“That’s just a fad—there were knitters before, and there’ll be knitters after. Eliza self-published her patterns in the fifties and taught her readers how to design patterns themselves, using unconventional design ideas. She moved knitting from fussy to easy, attainable, wearable. And she wrote with a voice that was entirely unique. And she was local. You know, Abigail’s knitting shop? That was Eliza’s cottage, so we take even more pride in her than most knitting areas do. We
claim
her.”

Lucy heard the passion in her own voice and tried to tone it down for the non-knitter.

Whitney asked, “You knew her?”

It felt weird to Lucy that she and Whitney were talking. They rarely spoke alone like this. “A little, I guess. She and my grandmother were knitting friends. Eliza moved south about ten, fifteen years ago, to San Diego, and she died there not that long ago. But when she lived here, when I was in my teens, my grandmother would close the bookstore and would take us kids to spend long afternoons on Eliza’s ranch. Mom and Grandma and Eliza would knit in the parlor while the boys tore around outside. I usually wanted to be alone, so I read books up in the hayloft more often than I knitted with them.”

She turned the pages, looking at the smiling face of Joshua, Eliza’s husband, leaning against the railing of the house Cade and Abigail now lived in, wearing a rugged Aran that looked so thick it seemed like it had been knitted right off the sheep, barely spun at all. Lucy touched the page. When she was a kid, Eliza had always taken the most interest in her knitting. Lucy’s mother and grandmother taught her to knit, of course, but Eliza was the one who came to stand behind her, moved her arms so she held the yarn in her left hand, “Like me, so you don’t flap like a chicken. There, isn’t that nicer this way? Now you can read at the same time.”

And once, Eliza had given Lucy a hand-tooled leather-bound journal from Italy. “To record your dreams. I noticed you write. Keep writing, and you’ll remember your life. If you don’t write things down, it’s like they never happened.”

A sudden film of hot tears sprang to Lucy eyes. Where was that old journal of hers? Up in the attic at home? She should find that. In honor of Eliza.

Words and knitting had always been her favorite things. They still were.

Whitney pointed at the stack of loose papers. “So that’s good?”

Lucy snapped back into the present. “Oh, hell, yes.” She looked again at the two pages. The reality of it began to sink in.

This was more than good. This was huge.

She sat on her high stool behind the counter.

If this was really Eliza’s work . . .

She pulled out more of the sheets. More patterns, all in the same delicate hand. She shuffled pages. There had to be at least twenty, maybe thirty patterns here, as well as pages that appeared to be journal entries or letters. None of them, at first glance, looked anything like Eliza’s other published patterns, although they shared a similar voice. Lucy didn’t recognize any, and she practically knew Eliza Carpenter’s patterns by heart.

The bell on the door jingled. Mildred Elkins and Greta Doss entered.

“What did you forget this morning?” Lucy called.

Mildred waved both hands over her head. “My umbrella! My purple umbrella!”

“Is it raining?” Lucy hadn’t even noticed that it was overcast.

“No! But it might someday! And I love that umbrella. Do you have it? Oh, hello, Whitney. How are you?”

Before Whitney could even open her mouth, Mildred said, “Greta, go look under the table, I’ll check the bathroom.”

Greta, quiet as usual, nodded and checked the table. Mildred came out of the bathroom, satisfied.

“Got it. Thank goodness. What are you two up to?”

Lucy had a flash of brilliance. “You’d recognize Eliza Carpenter’s handwriting, right?”

Greta smiled at Mildred, who shot a look back at her. “One of our favorite people,” said Greta in a soft voice.

Mildred used her umbrella, striking it on the floor for emphasis. “She certainly was. What do you have there? Move, young lady.” Mildred pushed a startled-looking Whitney out of the way.

Mildred took the loose pages out of Lucy’s hands. She only glanced at the first page before laughing.

“Oh, Greta, look. This is Eliza.” She held the page up, first to Whitney and then to Lucy. “This is Eliza.”

“How certain are you?” Lucy tried not to get excited, but it was almost impossible.

“Two hundred percent. I have letters from her at home that we can compare, but I know with all my heart that these are Eliza’s.” Mildred riffled through them and then handed them to Greta. Shaking her head, she said, “I’ve never seen these.”

Lucy clapped her hands and jumped off her stool. “I knew it! I knew it! This is the most exciting thing ever!”

Whitney laughed.

Lucy blushed. “Okay, it’s not your kind of exciting, I’m sure.” Coming around the counter, she stood next to Mildred, looking over her shoulder.

“Unbelievable,” breathed Greta, as she examined several sheets.

“And look,” said Lucy. “
Silk Road
.”

Their jaws dropped.

“Where did you get all this?” Mildred demanded.

Hell.

In the space of a second, Lucy thought it through. She couldn’t keep the boxes. It wasn’t right to keep it, to profit on such a treasure, when she hadn’t fully looked through them before buying them from him.

And everyone in the whole world would want these papers. There would be a run on them. Knitters from all over the globe would descend, wanting to study them, to examine them, to parse their contents and take them away from her. Lucy wouldn’t be the right person to keep them.

No one would let Lucy keep these. Nor should they.

Lucy swallowed her disappointment. It had been lovely to own them for even a moment.

“I bought them from Owen Bancroft. Boxes from his mother’s storage unit.”

“Oh, the luck of you!” Mildred banged her umbrella against the tile floor. “This is unbelievable. Are there any more?”

Dumbly, Lucy shrugged. Oh, if Irene had more treasures from Eliza stashed away . . .

Mildred jabbed her forefinger into Lucy’s arm. “You
ask
him,” she hissed. “You ask him as soon as you can. And then you put them in a safe-deposit box until you decide what to do with them.” Mildred pulled her iPhone out of her crocheted purse. “I have to Twitter this.”

Whitney smoothed the skirt of her dress. “So those looseleaf papers? They’re knitting patterns?”

Lucy nodded.

With a butter-couldn’t-melt voice, Whitney said, “So if they’re unpublished, wouldn’t they revert back to her estate? You said she was local?”

Mildred gave Lucy a stricken glance. “Don’t tell Cade,” she hissed. “We can hide them.”

Lucy sank into a chair at the table. She’d have to tell Cade and Abigail. Soon. Of course she would. But she wanted just a moment more with them—to hold them, to read them, to pretend they were hers.

But even though the words galled her, she said them anyway. “Whitney’s right. And I’ll talk to Owen. We’ll tell them.”

Waving her hands modestly, Whitney fluttered toward the front door. “I just do what I can to help. Now I have to get back to the shop. I’m sure Thomasina’s overwhelmed, with a line a mile long. Please, ladies, have a cupcake, won’t you? Lucy, we’ll plan our little party soon. We’ll combine our business savvy soon enough, won’t we? We can take over Cypress Hollow together!”

Cold day in hell, thought Lucy, but she nodded.

Then she lowered her head to the papers, letting Eliza’s quiet voice sing in her ear.

Chapter Nine

A mother’s needles, in particular, are the strongest needles of all.

—
E. C.

A
t Willow Rock, Owen’s mother was crying.

Miss Verna whispered, “She’s been like this for about fourteen hours. Nothing is stopping it.”

“What’s she upset about?”

“No one knows. She doesn’t seem to want anything, she’s not even angry. She’s just crying.”

It was awful. Owen looked at his tiny mother, lying curled up on top of the narrow twin bed, weeping into her pillow. She didn’t heave with sobs, she just cried quietly and shook.

He sat on the bed next to her. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Mom. It’s me.”

Nothing but more tears.

Somehow, somewhere, this was probably his fault. He took a deep breath. He was here now. That was the point.

For one second Owen allowed himself a dangerous fantasy—that a woman was here next to him, and that she loved his mother, also. That she could lean over and say something,
do
something, and ease whatever pain his mother was in, just by saying the right womanly thing. And if, in that brief daydream, that woman happened to look a lot like Lucy, well, it was just a damn fantasy, right?

But dreams didn’t come true, Owen knew that for sure. Especially his. And he needed to stay the hell away from Lucy Harrison—he could feel it. Bancrofts didn’t deserve much in this town—he needed to remember it, and get out fast, as soon as he knew his mother would be all right.

He took a deep breath and shook off the thoughts that had gone in a direction he hadn’t wanted. “Mama. What’s wrong? Is there anything I can do?”

“Will you drink something, Mrs. Bancroft? You’re gonna dehydrate yourself with that crying.” Miss Verna held out something that looked like an adult version of a sippy cup. Owen hated it, but he supposed it was necessary.

Irene just turned her head farther into the pillow and cried.

Owen looked up at Miss Verna. “Really? Hours?”

“Without even falling asleep once. Just crying. I didn’t sleep much myself, too worried about her.”

“Does the date mean anything today?”

“Honey, she don’t know what the date is today. Or any other day.”

That was true. It was a stupid question.

“Can I take her out?”

“You could . . . But . . .”

“What if I took her out for a ride? We could go get a
drink.
” Owen put air quotes around the word for Miss Verna’s benefit, but his mother, who couldn’t see him, seemed to pay attention. Her crying grew quieter.

Miss Verna said, “Well, I don’t think she seems in any mood to go. But you could ask her.”

“Mama, do you want to go for a ride?”

Irene turned her head on the pillow and nodded.

Miss Verna helped him change Irene from her nightdress and robe into jeans and a sweatshirt. It was exactly the kind of sweatshirt she would have hated when she was younger, but his mother had changed drastically over the years. Instead of mocking clothing covered in animal appliqués, she was drawn to the puffed fabric, running her fingers constantly over the design, speaking to the animals as if they were real.