How to Knit a Heart Back Home (31 page)

Irene looked into the sink. “Didn’t want to go.”

It
was
his mother. She was here for the moment. “But he lied. And hurt you. All the time. And he had nothing to give you.
Nothing
.”

“Love is love is love.” Irene sounded disgusted with him. But at the same time, her hands never slowed, still pushing and rubbing his under the water.

And Owen, in a blinding moment, got it. Even if his dad had had the world’s shittiest way of showing it, his father had loved his mother. And Owen was rocked to the core as he realized for the first time in his life that his mother had loved his father back.

And as she scrubbed Owen’s hands with hers, her arthritic, knobby fingers cleaning his as they had a thousand times when he was young, he understood something else: Irene loved her son, but she would never say it.

She’d chosen his father that awful night. But she’d put his father in jail when it mattered, and she’d always loved her son.

Owen leaned hard against the toilet tank as the truth sunk in. “Thanks, Mom. You did a good job,” he said gently.

“That girl needs the boxes.”

Owen said, “What?”

“Eliza boxes.”

“
Lucy
?”

“For her. Eliza’s boxes.” It was a long string of thoughts for his mother, and the words were sharp.

Owen’s brain stalled like a car running out of gas.

“Mom, do you—”

The water was getting colder, and Owen added more hot. He’d be lucky to have any skin left, but Irene’s pale eyes that met his in the mirror were completely clear, without shadow.

“Mom, do you mean the boxes in your storage unit?”

“Eliza made you socks. She always said you’d come home. To me. To her.” Then Irene looked down and said. “Clean. All clean.”

Owen dried both their hands on the scratchy white towel hung on the rail. “My hands are clean now. You did a wonderful job. And I’m home now, Mom.”

He beamed at his mother, and Irene gave him a shaky smile back. The shadows were back again, behind her lids. “Turtles.”

“You bet,” he said. “Turtles are totally where it’s at.”

Not tonight. Today had been too much, and he’d been a royal asshole at the bookstore. No surprise there. Tomorrow. He’d go to Lucy tomorrow. They’d probably never know what Eliza Carpenter had meant by leaving those papers with his mother. But it was enough that she had.

And love was love was love, according to his mother. God knew Irene Bancroft wasn’t the best model for romantic bliss, but maybe telling Lucy what his mother had said about Eliza would be enough to gain a small fraction of forgiveness, to earn back a small bit of her trust. He hoped to God it would.

Because it hit him with the force of a bullet. Bancrofts weren’t good at this. Owen was in love with Lucy Harrison, and he was scared to death.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Use a bright light to look for moth holes. Face them head on. Admit that you have a very, very serious problem. You might have to have a wee cry. I wouldn’t blame you.

—
E. C.

L
ucy slept fitfully that night, fighting through dreams of tubas blaring and babies crying. She woke, wishing the bookstore were open, but it was Monday. Of course, she was the owner. She could open the Book Spire if she wanted to. But that would be admitting failure somehow, and she grimaced at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth.

She could handle a day off, right? She wasn’t some crying fool, sick to the gills over some guy, lost and brokenhearted.

Why did it feel so much like she was, then?

Lucy eschewed making her own coffee in favor of heading for Tillie’s for breakfast. She pulled on the same dang pair of old overalls, Ruby’s bookstore cardigan and blue-and-green Keds. She made sure the fire-department pager was in her pocket—she had duty for the next twenty-four hours.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” she muttered to herself, as she pulled her door shut behind her. Mr. Kento across the street looked at her in surprise. Yep. Now even the neighbors who thought she was semi-normal would think she was batshit crazy, finally gone ’round the bend and talking to herself. Just as well.

As she sat at her booth in the diner while Shirley poured her coffee, Lucy fought back tears. There, at the front of the restaurant, was a big flyer advertising tonight’s intro class for the next session of the volunteer fire brigade training. Captain Jake Keller’s smiling face beamed down on the diner patrons, and even the handlebar mustache someone had penciled in on the poster couldn’t detract from the commanding presence he had. V
OLUNTEER
. S
AVE
L
IVES
. C
HANGE
Y
OUR
O
WN.

She loved volunteering with them. It was part of who she was. Sure, it was a sleepy town, and in the last four years, she’d only been able to actually help on a few fires, and usually she only did rehab on them—fire watch, handing out sandwiches afterward. Mostly the pages that went out were handled by the people actually paid and on duty—the volunteers handled backup. But she
had
handled real medical calls. Difficulty breathing. CPR, those few times, and it hadn’t been like it had been with her grandmother. She’d known what to do, she’d trusted in her training, and in the volunteers at her side.

But Owen didn’t trust her, obviously. Not to help people. He’d actually said that, in her backyard. He couldn’t be with someone who put herself in danger, he’d said. Because she might hurt herself ? Or someone else? Which one did he mean?

He’d said once that he thought she was brave. Guess he’d changed his mind.

Damn.
She’d even chased her own best friend away, for God’s sake. She had no idea how she was going to fix that, or even if she’d be able to.

She remembered seeing Owen’s hand shake, the gun still in it, still pointed at his brother, and wondered if he’d felt the same way. Too late. Too broken.

What if they’d just screwed everything up so badly there was no going back?

Lucy ate her eggs without tasting them and choked down half a piece of toast. At the back of the diner, a small group of women waved at her. Lucy waved back—she sometimes knitted with them on lazy Monday mornings. Betty, a rather new knitter and already a very good spinner, smiled and held up a promising-looking scarf. Janet, a local superstar known for her imports of luxury fibers, raised an important-looking eyebrow and winked. Mildred and Greta, always present at most of the local knitting groups, blew her a kiss each, but Lucy just paid her bill and slunk out of the restaurant, shooting the group an apologetic smile. She just couldn’t handle small talk right now. They’d ask about Owen, she knew they would, and if even one of them hugged her, she’d come undone, and she
wouldn’t
cry now.

No. No crying. Absolutely not.

Outside Tillie’s, two seagulls squabbled over half a bagel, one pecking the other viciously, the other not giving up, beating and flapping its wings in a great show of loud force. Lucy shooed them, using her feet to drive them apart, then she broke the bagel into two pieces, throwing them in opposite directions.

“Gah,” she said, looking at her fingers. The Rite Spot’s doors were open. The bar, even at this hour, probably had a patron or two. She’d use Jonas’s restroom to wash her hands, and maybe use the opportunity to ask her brother what he thought he was doing, if he was even thinking at all. God knew someone in this town should look before they leaped.

Or how about just not leaping at all? How about staying nicely in one spot where it had always been safe, how about that?

Jonas was behind the bar reading a book. For once he wasn’t moving, not cleaning, not wiping anything down.

Lucy held up her hands. “Washing! I’ll be right back.”

When she came back out, she tried to get a look at the book Jonas was reading. “What’s that?”

Jonas looked up and pushed the book beneath the counter.

“Was that . . . ? You didn’t buy that from me; I’d remember. If you bought that on Amazon, I’ll burst into tears, and you don’t want that. This is not my day.” Lucy meant it.

“No, no. It’s just . . . I borrowed it. Not my normal thing.” He held it up a J. R. Ward vampire suspense.

“Those are fun. Dark and scary.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Nothing wrong with them.”

“If you’re a
girl
.”

Lucy shook her head. “You’re right. Absolutely. I forgot. You’re such a vapid specimen of a man that reading a romance is obviously going to turn you into a female. Well, good. I always wanted a sister.”

“Shut up.”

“They’re good books.”

Jonas leaned forward and lowered his voice so the old man at the end of bar wouldn’t be able to hear. “They’re
great.
They’re like candy. I can’t put them down. Molly gave me one the other night at her house, and I’m totally hooked. This is my fourth already.”

Perching her bag on top of the counter and leaning a hip on a bar stool, Lucy took the only opening she might get. “About that.” Then she took the J. R. Ward book out of Jonas’s hands and smacked him, hard, along the side of the head, before putting it back into his hands.

“Dammit! What was that?” Jonas rubbed his ear.

“What the
hell
are you doing with my best friend?”

“None of your damn business!”

“It
is
my damn business if both of you get hurt and come crying to me and I have to decide which one to have lasagna night for, and my lasagna isn’t even that great, but it’s the only comfort food I make, which’ll mean I’ll have to eat it forever and ever while you two rotate through my house on alternating nights.”

“Or we’ll be fine. She’s a big girl, Lucy.”

“
I know.
That’s what worries me. I love her with all my heart, but she’s the Big Bad Wolf and you might be . . . Well, you might be carrying a basket in the woods. Do you have any idea . . .”

“How many men she’s been with this year? Last year?” Jonas nodded. “I have a more current tally sheet than you do. Molly doesn’t tell you everything, you know that?”

Lucy sat up straighter. “She does, too!”

“No, she doesn’t. She tells you four of five. She says you flip out regularly on the fifth so she leaves him or her out.”

“
Her?
”

“Well, she usually leaves all the hers out when she’s talking to you. Hang on.”

Lucy took the 7UP Jonas slid to her while he went to serve a couple of beers to some truck-driver-looking types. She looked across the bar at her own reflection in the mirror, but quickly looked away. She had no idea whether or not Jonas was successful or not with his business. She’d always supposed he was, but she realized now that it was possible he was hanging by a thread. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he had a hard time trusting himself. Maybe she hadn’t been looking hard enough at things that mattered, maybe not for a long time.

Was it always about control? And what the heart wanted?

Funny, last week, when she’d made love with Owen, as soon as she’d reached for him, even while she’d felt like she was spiraling out of control, she’d known exactly what she was doing. What she was choosing. What she was doing with her heart.

That was the worst part of it all.

Her stupid heart.

Jonas was back. “So what’s all this really about? Is this about you and Owen?”

Lucy scowled. “Of course not. Besides, you hate him.”

“Yeah. But I’ll get over it if he’s what you want.”

Eying Jonas suspiciously, Lucy sipped the 7UP, feeling the bubbles on her tongue. Then she said, “I don’t believe you. You’re trying to trick me so I’ll leave you alone about Molly.”

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere, that’s the thing. And I watched how he looked at you yesterday during that party Whitney threw at your store.”

“How? What do you mean?” Lucy leaned forward.

“He looked at you . . . Okay, this is going to sound wrong, no matter how I say it, so I’m just going to say it, okay?”

Lucy nodded, hard.

“I don’t even know if you remember. You know when Dad was on that trip to New York and there was something wrong with his plane, and it went down, but everyone was okay? And then he flew home and we picked him up at the airport? You know how Mom and Dad looked at each other?”

Lucy swallowed. She
did
remember, of course she did. She’d been clinging to her mother while they ran through the terminal, but then the gate’s doors had opened and Toots had dropped her hand and covered her own mouth with a cry like Lucy had never heard before. And then her father was there, and her parents had looked at each other before running through the crowd to embrace, as if they were home.

It was the look she’d always measured everything else against. Butterflies beat inside Lucy’s chest.

“He looked at you like that. No matter what he was saying, that’s how he looked at you.”

“Oh.” The butterflies turned into sparrows that turned into something bigger, brighter. Something necessary and essential and scary as hell.

“And quit worrying about me and Molly. We’re fine.”

“But . . . you know she . . .”

“Eats men for dinner and spits them out behind her as she walks away. I know. But Lucy, have you maybe considered that that’s all I want? Friendship and a fuck?”

Lucy’s eyes widened. “Jonas! You don’t talk like that!”

“We’re just having sex, Lucy. No strings. For either of us.”

“That’s what you say, but—you want a girlfriend! To get married again someday! That’s what we want for you!”

“No strings, Lucy. That’s what we both want. And it’s okay for us to do that. It had been a really long-ass time for me. I love Molly as my friend, and she’s incredible in bed.”

Lucy held up a hand. “There’s a line that I can’t cross in discussing sex—anything in regards to you. Or Silas. Or our parents.
Ew.
”