How to Knit a Heart Back Home (2 page)

Lucy clapped her hand over her mouth. She would
not
be sick here, not in her brother’s bar. She slid off her bar stool and dashed past the pool table into the women’s room, where she knelt in front of the toilet. She just made it.

A few minutes later, she splashed cold water on her face. In the mirror, she barely recognized herself. She was pale—white, really—with high pink spots on her cheeks. Her eyes looked too big for her face. Dammit.

No. She didn’t do that all the time. Most car fires didn’t have someone trapped inside. When she took the pager four days a month, the medicals she ran were usually older people with difficulty breathing, or fall victims. She’d had a couple of CPR calls, but they’d been elderly, expected deaths.

Lucy didn’t wrestle her pregnant friends out of the jaws of imminent death regularly.

And he hadn’t recognized her. Of course he hadn’t. She looked like hell. And why would Owen Bancroft remember who she was? He’d left town right after his high-school graduation. Sure, he’d kissed her. It was a kiss she’d never forgotten, even though she wished she could, but there was no way he remembered it, not after all these years. Most people had interesting lives, after all.

Lucy grimaced at her reflection and made her way back out into the main room. As she passed the table where her mother was knitting with her friends, her mother stopped her.

“Honey, do you know anyone that wears a size-eleven shoe?”

Lucy’s mouth dropped open. “Really, Mom?”

Toots Harrison nodded, her knitting needles flashing. “I got some cowboy boots at the thrift store that are divine, purple and red and green, but I can’t find anyone that they really belong to. They’re so big.”

“Did you see what just happened out there? To Abigail?”

Toots closed her eyes and nodded happily. “It was so good she got out in time. I wonder if
she
has big feet. Do you think she does?”

Lucy sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll ask her when I see her, okay?”

“Okay, darling.”

Lucy made her way back to Molly and crawled up on her bar stool.

Jonas handed out the last shot from his free tray and leaned across the bar. “You gonna live, kiddo?”

She nodded. “Don’t call me that.” Her voice only wobbled a little bit, but Jonas wasn’t paying attention to her anyway.

The lights blazed as power was restored. The jukebox kicked back on, blaring “I Will Survive,” mid song. Lucy squeaked, startled.

Silas swaggered past Lucy’s bar stool. He held up his shot glass and raised his eyebrows.

“You had your round,” said Jonas. “Pay up for the next one.”

Silas flipped Jonas off with his free hand. But they grinned at each other, and Lucy watched something pass between them. There had always been a bond between the brothers, something that Lucy was used to being left out of. She looked down into her empty glass and decided against a refill.

Jonas turned to Lucy and said, “That guy that helped out, that was Owen Bancroft, wasn’t it? He was in my class, so he was a year older than you, right? Do you remember him?”

“Maybe.” Lucy shrugged.

“He was a bad seed, that one.”

“Oh, my God,” said Lucy. “You sound about a hundred years old. And weren’t you the one who got busted with weed in Mr. Dwight’s shop class, speaking of bad seeds?”

“Yeah, but Owen barely graduated. And then there was his dad, with the drugs and arrests, and dying in prison and all.”

Lucy dropped her gaze to the top of the bar again. “Just because his dad screwed up didn’t mean no one could trust him.” She could feel Jonas staring at her but she didn’t look up.

“You seem to remember him pretty well, huh?”

“Are you serious? That’s the one you told me about, right? The one? From high school? Your bad boy?” said Molly, nudging Lucy in the side.

“Hey, I gotta go.” Lucy stood, grabbing her knitting bag. She shoved the sock into it unceremoniously, knowing she was losing stitches that she’d regret later.

Molly raised her eyebrows but stood also. “I’ll go with you. I’m on call in the morning, and I hate being woken by the phone.”

Silas was looking deeply into the jukebox. Lucy kissed him on the cheek. He looked surprised, but as usual, he didn’t say anything. Then she went around to the back of the bar and kissed Jonas’s cheek, too. His face relaxed and he laughed and flicked her with the cloth he was holding. “God, Luce.”

Lucy waved at her father, but he was already back to watching the game.

Her mother was with the knitters, their needles flashing as their heads bobbed, rehashing what had happened. Lucy blew her a kiss. Her mother reached up, grabbed it and mimed putting it in her pocket, and then blew one back.

At the crash, police officers were filling out forms, and a tow truck beeped as it backed up toward Abigail’s car.

“How are they possibly going to move that?” Lucy pointed.

“That’s what they do.”

“What if Abigail was still in there? What if she was . . .”

“Then they probably wouldn’t be towing it yet,” Molly said. “Geez. It’s all fine, okay? It was exciting! Different! Weren’t you just complaining it was too quiet? And then you had to work on a day you weren’t even scheduled to volunteer. But you loved it, didn’t you?”

Lucy didn’t say anything. The damp ocean air was cool. In the distance, the surf crashed in rhythm that Lucy knew like her own heartbeat. She wrapped her scarf more firmly around her neck, bringing it up over her nose.

“So Owen
is
the guy you told me about from high school,” said Molly. “Didn’t you say he was in San Francisco?”

Lucy shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it.

But Molly wasn’t going to be put off, just like that. “He was your bad-boy crush. The only one you ever had.”

It hadn’t felt like a crush at the time. It had felt bigger than that. Oh, kids were dumb. “Yep, not like you. You chew up bad boys and spit them out for breakfast.”

Molly laughed. “I like a challenge. Or three.”

“He never knew I was alive.”

“Not true,” said Molly. “You said he kissed you. And that you saw stars.”

It hadn’t been that simple. “Why do you like jerks, again?”

Molly shrugged. “They’re just more interesting sometimes. They need more. And they give a lot, too. But I do end up going through them quickly, that’s for sure.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then Molly veered sideways and nudged Lucy’s shoulder with her own.

“Some calls are harder than others, and when a friend is involved, it’s always worse.”

“You’ve had to handle calls with people you know?” Lucy was surprised. She’d never heard this. “Were you scared?”

Molly’s face was soft as she turned to look at Lucy. “Hell, yeah.” Molly worked for a language-translation line, translating Cantonese into English for 911 centers around the country. “I recognized my aunt’s voice even before I heard the client ID. My uncle wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t even tell my auntie who I was, who was helping her, I just had to translate the other dispatcher’s words and translate my aunt’s words back.”

Lucy stared. “Did he make it?”

Molly shook her head, her eyes searching the dunes.

“I’m so sorry.”

Molly seemed to shake herself like a dog after the rain. “Oh, hell, girl, now I don’t even have to stop stirring the chili while I’m translating, you know that.”

Molly’s old Victorian loomed in front of them.

“Any home sales recently?” asked Lucy. Anything to change the topic. She should never have brought it up. She felt raw.

Molly grimaced. “Someday I won’t have to have two jobs, right? Nothing in a month. But Cypress Hollow is a beach town. That’s why I moved here. It’ll get better.”

“Yeah, so you say. And anyway, you moved here so you could live in Eliza Carpenter’s hometown. I know the truth.”

“It’s the knitting vortex. It sucked me in. Now go home. You’re in a mood, and I’m tired of you. Love you, though.” Molly wrapped Lucy in a bear hug. “You’re fine, honey. You did good tonight. Okay?”

Lucy nodded and hugged back. She stood at the gate and watched Molly run up the porch stairs and heave open the massive front door.

Then she kept walking.

She turned her head to look back down the hill at the moonlight reflected off the ocean, and smelled smoke in her hair. The fear rose again, threatening to bring with it the nausea.

Home. She wanted to be home, on the couch, her fingers wrapped around her bamboo needles, the merino flying through her hands, a book balanced on her knees, safe, with Grandma Ruby’s sweater around her. That was the only good place for her.

Chapter Two

Sometimes a knitter needs the familiar feel of her favorite wooden needles in her hands—the ones worn and bent. Like favorite shoes, they fit no one else but her.

—
E. C.

T
he next morning, Lucy walked past the bar on her way to open the bookstore. The power pole was still leaning. Most of the glass from the crash had already been cleaned up by the streets department, but shards still glittered by the storm drain.

Abigail almost lost her life at this spot. Lucy almost saw her die.

For one second, right where Abigail had been lying last night on the pavement, Lucy’s knees refused to lock the correct way. Her gait felt wrong, as if she were drunk. She looked down to steady herself, and there, next to a dropped matchbook, was a stain. Abigail’s blood.

Everything went dark. She sucked extra air in through her mouth and touched the outside wall of Jonas’s bar. It was fine. Everything was fine. It was a great morning to be alive, wasn’t it? If she could keep the fluttering in her stomach to a minimum, and if she didn’t pass out right here and now, it would be an even better morning.

Come on, now. A member of the prestigious Cypress Hollow Volunteer Fire Brigade didn’t act this way. Lucy knew that. She could handle blood. She could dress a wound and apply pressure to a hemorrhage and hold people down in the back of the ambulance, even when they were begging and screaming bloody murder. For someone who normally flew under the radar—quiet old bookstore Lucy—Captain Keller always said he was impressed with how she came through under pressure.

So what the hell was this about?

Her brother’s bar was shut up tight. Jonas would be in soon, though—even in Cypress Hollow, some people drank in the morning. When he’d bought it, he’d changed it from a seedy run-down bar filled with old men and a perpetual cigarette-smoke haze to a clean, friendly gathering place. Drinkers and teetotalers alike met at the Rite Spot to have Trivia Night, to play board games, to toast weddings and mourn deaths. On Friday nights, Jonas hired live bands to play, and on Sunday mornings, he opened early so the book club could meet over donuts and coffee. Lucy’s mother’s knitting group met there on Thursday mornings, and if some of them added a little Baileys to their coffee, no one ever complained.

But for now, it was still closed, and no one would mind if Lucy leaned against the post next to the front door and pretended to read the list of bands lined up for the next month. The words swam in front of her eyes, though, as the images from the night before played against her eyelids: Abigail’s open, bloody mouth; Owen’s hands, working against the metal frame of the car door; the flames underneath the engine.

It was okay. Gooseflesh rose along her arms and legs, and her heart raced again as she looked at the stain on the sidewalk, but she told herself it was all right. She pulled the yellow sweater her grandmother had knitted for her so many years ago tighter around her and resumed walking to work.

Lucy walked past Tillie’s Diner, the perennial town favorite. The main room, mostly booths, was already full of patrons, and she peeked in the plate-glass window to see all the ranchers in the side room. They gathered after their chores in the morning, as if they’d been there forever in their cowboy hats and lived-in jeans, gossiping about girls walking past the windows and the price of hay, and she tried not to think about the fact that every year, there were one or two less of them in the room.

She avoided looking at the old art deco movie theater, its red-and-yellow sign curving out over the street and back in again. The windows were boarded up and it broke her heart to look at it. And she hated how it matched the other closed-up, battened-down businesses that hadn’t weathered the recent financial storms.

The Book Spire was across the street. After she unlocked the huge front door with the biggest key on her key ring, she flipped on the overhead lights. The building, constructed at the turn of the twentieth century, was originally a small Gothic Revival church. Its central stained-glass window used to showcase a dour Jesus, but when Lucy’s grandmother Ruby bought the desanctified church, she’d had the Lord removed and replaced him with the stained-glass image of a pen breaking a sword over a tower of brilliantly colored books. Ruby had kept some pews as seating, lined with cushions. The nave and narthex held dark wooden bookshelves now instead of hymnals, but the air was still scented with the ghost of incense and lilies.

Lucy moved into the coolness of the store, flipping on the standing lamps and three space heaters, trying to shake the images of the downed power pole and broken glass out of her mind.

Owen Bancroft was back.

Starting the coffee was the most important thing now. Besides the books, she was known for it: strong and dark, but never bitter. She ordered a special blend of beans from a roaster up the road. It was pricey, but worth it.

She counted out fifty dollars’ worth of change left over from the woefully slim deposit yesterday, enjoying the everyday sound of paper money whispering, the coins clinking. She placed the till in its drawer and then swept. Blessed normalcy. It soothed her.

Until a rap at the front glass made her jump.

Already? It wasn’t even nine yet. But Elbert Romo looked like he couldn’t wait. He jiggled the handle of the door and tapped again.