How to Knit a Heart Back Home (6 page)

She led him down the dim hallway and out the front door. Owen thanked her and then headed down the walkway toward where his Mustang was parked on the street.

Standing on the steps of the parsonage, Lucy paused and listened. She looked over the small white headstones flanked by overgrown roses, almost lost in the deepened dusk.

She couldn’t hear anything but the wild beating of her heart, and there was no stopping the grin that spread across her face.

Owen Bancroft was back. Hot
damn.

Chapter Five

When your knitting makes you cry, at least you have something with which to mop up your tears.

—
E. C.

O
wen hated the sign in front of his mother’s residence: W
ILLOW
R
OCK
, A H
OME FOR
A
LL
.

It wasn’t a home, it was a fucking capital-H Home, that’s what it was. It was what his mother had always lamented about
. When I’m old, you’ll just put me in a home. No one will care about me. I’ll die alone if you put me in one of those.

Then he had done exactly that. His mother’s nightmare had come true, but it was the only thing he could do, the only avenue left open to him.

It still broke his heart, every time he thought about it. She hadn’t been here long before the shooting, and while he was recovering, he’d stared up at the ceiling from his hospital bed in San Francisco, two hundred miles away. The first thing he’d done as soon as the doctor cleared him to drive was to head straight for Cypress Hollow, the three-hour trip making his hip and knee burn like acid was being poured into the bones.

His mother hadn’t registered who he was that day, nor had she the next day, or the next. He’d had to go back north and leave her behind, but at least he finally knew she was in good hands.

This time he would stay a little longer. Not that she’d know it.

He should get out of the car. Drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, he tuned the radio dial, searching for a song on the radio, any song that he could cling to for another minute. He’d take just about anything. An eighties pop song, nineties grunge. Just one song. Couldn’t he find one on this wasteland of a radio dial in among all the commercials?

With a curse, he flipped the radio off and jerked the keys out of the ignition.

He supposed he could use those Windex wipes to work on the windows. . . . No. It was time. Every day he did this. Dammit. He could be a grown-up. For the love of God.

His fingers itched to restart the car and drive back to the Book Spire, to talk to Lucy Harrison some more. He never would have guessed that seeing her would have made him feel like a dumb eighteen-year-old again, but that’s how he’d felt. Like that kid he’d been that awful night, running away from home, getting the hell out of town, hitting the highway in his Mustang with no intention of ever coming back to Cypress Hollow, regretting that he’d never see Lucy Harrison again. That same blank ache that he’d almost forgotten about.

Dammit.

Owen got out of his car and locked the door even though people here left their keys in the ignition in case a neighbor needed to borrow the car. But old habits ingrained by years of city living died hard.

Miss Verna was on duty tonight. Good. At least there would be Oreos.

“Owen! I haven’t seen you for months!” She bustled out from behind the desk to hug him. She smelled of chocolate and plastic utensils.

“I’ve been by, but I keep missing you.”

“Janie told me you were in town. I’m so glad. How long are you here this time?”

“I just rented a place. I’m staying for a little while, until I figure where I’m going next.”

Miss Verna clapped her hands to her prodigious bosom. “Oh! That
is
good news. We deserve to celebrate! Go see your mama, and then I’ll bring you both some cookies and milk.”

“Greatest place in the world,” Owen said, and kissed her cheek. He didn’t mean it though; he never did.

Willow Rock was a small facility, only eight residents. Right now, most of them were in the TV room. He wondered what people did with their elders before television existed to keep them quiet. He sure as hell didn’t want to spend his dotage staring at
Judge Judy
, but he supposed it made things easier for everyone.

His mother didn’t like TV either. But that’s not what made her the most difficult patient the nurses had. She would have been anyway.

Irene Bancroft had always been a pain in the ass. Even when she was younger, when Owen was still in school, she was famous for shooing kids away from her prized rosebushes. She spent most of her time out in the garden, but it didn’t make her sweet, like it did the other gardening ladies in town. It seemed to make her cranky. The only thing that made her crankier was the winter cold and rain. She became an indoor cleaning machine during those cold months, and it had been hard for the teenaged Owen, struggling to keep his muddy shoes off the carpet and his dirty clothes off the floor.

The only time he’d ever seen her crankier than that was when he’d moved her here, but after the two small fires she’d accidentally set, he’d had no choice. To pay for moving her into Willow Rock, he’d had to get power of attorney and sell her house, breaking her heart.

But now he was here. He could start trying to make it up to her.

His mother was standing at the window staring at the curtain when he entered her room, her back to him. She looked fragile, but her back was still straight.

More than he could say for her mind.

“Mom, it’s me.” She jumped as he switched on the overhead light but she didn’t turn around.

“How are you doing, Mom?”

She flapped a hand at him as if he were interrupting something, as if he were bothering her when she was in the garden. He’d seen that particular flapping too many times in his life to count.

“Hey, Mom, if you want to look out the window, you should pull back the curtain, huh? It’s dark out there, but I bet the outside is more interesting than looking at that brown fabric.” Owen reached for the curtain cord and pulled.

The floodlights in the backyard lit her face. His mother, for one second, looked like she did back then, back when she could still tell time and remember his name on a regular basis.

Then she pulled back into herself. She moved to the left, out of the light. “I had a good view of my garden. Now I can’t see it. Ruined.”

She stalked to her bed, head held high, and sat. “Home.”

“Did you already eat?” he asked. Dinner was served so early in this joint, sometimes at four-thirty or five. But he supposed it made sense; it probably helped the staff get them to bed at a reasonable hour.

“Waiting for the bus.
Home
.”

The statement never failed to hurt, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Normally, he chose to ignore it completely. Every once in a while he could get her turned around and on to something else.

Her hands jumped in her lap. They had never been still. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and her lips moved, as if she were trying to say something.

This was what he hated most.

Owen tried the stop-gap method—the small TV that neither of them would have normally chosen to watch. He flipped through the channels until he found something that caught her eye, a show on home renovations.

“You like that, Mom? You want to watch with me?”

But within two or three minutes she was slumped again, her shoulders rounded, looking toward the windows.

“Anything good happen today, Mom? That you can remember?”

Silence.

“I met a girl named Lucy and she knows knitting people who know you. I bet she knits, too. This whole town is crazy for it still, aren’t they? I guess it wasn’t just some fad here, huh?”

Irene didn’t even so much as blink.

“You used to knit, remember? Remember that lady who used to come over? What was her name? You used to sit outside in the garden and knit for hours. She brought me a book once, when I was a kid, about a magical knitting needle that made . . . God, sweaters into gold and then back or something. . . . Mom, do you remember her? Eliza somebody?”

No dice.

Sitting on the bed, she cleared her throat.

“Mom, you okay?”

“Not here most of the time now, am I?”

“What?”

She turned to face him. Her eyes, a rheumy blue, met his, clear for the first time.

“How did you get hurt?”

She was here. His mother was with him, right now. Miss Verna had told him this happened sometimes: times when she knew exactly who she was and that she was sick.

“I was shot, Mom. In the hip. And leg.” Just saying it made the joint burn below him where he sat.

“Shoulda been an accountant.”

Owen laughed, feeling an almost painful stab of joy. This was his mother, not some old woman concerned about a garden she didn’t have anymore, a home that was lost, but here, now, criticizing him. It felt like coming home.

“Who shot?” Irene’s voice was sounding confused, and Owen wasn’t sure she was tracking the conversation anymore, but he desperately wanted her to be able to.

So he took a moment to frame the answer. “An ex-cop gone bad shot me.”

Irene didn’t say anything.

“He’d been a friend of mine. A really good friend. I’d just found out about him when it happened.”

Irene’s eyes stayed on his. Was she still listening to him? If so, she was probably judging him, sure, but there wouldn’t be anything new or strange about that.

Keep talking, keep her present.

“He was high, and when he found out we were at his house to take him in, he went crazy.”

Owen broke off. No matter how present his mother was, he couldn’t tell her this story. He couldn’t even think about the story, not about how it had really gone down.

“He died,” said Owen. “And I got shot.”

“You killed him?” Irene’s voice wavered. She really
had
been tracking the whole conversation. God, if it wasn’t so macabre, he’d feel like breaking out the champagne.

“I don’t know, Ma. There were a lot of people shooting.”

“Maybe you did.”

Owen felt like he’d been shot, all over again. Only higher this time. In the chest.

“Maybe.” He paused. “Mom. I’m okay. Let’s not talk about this. Tell me something else. Tell me about how your nights are.”

She looked blankly at him and pulled at the sleeve of the pink robe she insisted on wearing most days. It was wearing thin at the elbows and had strings hanging from the hem.

“Why don’t you wear that other pink robe I bought you? The new one? It’s warmer.”

“Gave it away.”

Owen felt anger rise inside him. No. He took a deep breath.

“Who did you give it to?”

“Don’t know.”

“Great, Mom.
That
makes sense.”

“Am I going to stay here until I die?”

Shit. Owen looked at his tennis shoes. Her feet were bare on the tile floor. “Will you put your slippers on, at least?”

“Is my house still there, Owen? How are my roses?”

His mother’s voice was, for this moment, like it used to be. Sharp, steady. Her eyes were piercing again, and looked straight into him.

“The house is still there, Ma.” It wasn’t a lie. The house itself was still standing. He hadn’t looked at the roses.

She went limp with relief. Her hands stopped twisting and dropped, still, into her lap. She almost smiled.

Then she looked up at him, sharply. He didn’t have time to mask the guilt he felt.

“Whatever.” She looked back out the window. Her eyes went unfocused again. “Cops. And aphids.”

Time for the big guns.

“I’m thinking about planting a Moondance tree rose. I’m going to do it in very dry soil. I don’t plan on giving it much water, and I don’t like to prune. Do you think it will do well?”

She frowned and looked right at him and then she said, “Ridiculous. It will die. You can’t.”

His mother sat up straight, perched on the side of the bed, her bare feet together, her hands moving in her lap. She told him about roses with halting, jumbled words that didn’t always match, but their meaning was clear enough to her son. Owen sat in the chair next to the bed and let her talk for as long as she could.

Chapter Six

Every once in a while, knit in the dark. Or even better, by candlelight. It makes picking your work back up again the next day that much more interesting.

—
E. C.

F
or the second time this week, we’re at the bar,” said Lucy. “Does that mean we have a problem?”

Molly shook her head. “It just means we need a coffee shop in this town that stays open later than six o’clock. Thank God your brother put in the espresso machine.”

Jonas was behind the bar, doing something with the register, and Silas was in the side booth near them, reading a book that had a dragon on the cover, his signature red earflap cap pulled low over his forehead. Otherwise, with the exception of two drunk college-aged guys playing pool and a canoodling couple that Lucy was trying desperately not to look at, the bar was almost empty. The cool spring night had turned drizzly, and most people in town appeared to have stayed home for the evening. And the two who had their hands all over each other probably should have done them all a favor and stayed in, too, Lucy thought.

She took a sip of her latte. “I wish this was a decaf, though. I’m going to be up all night.” She shook her bar sock in the air. “Although insomnia would help me finally finish this, I suppose. And I’m carrying the fire-department pager tonight, since Nadine has the flu, even though it’s a work night, so I could be called in at any time. Suppose it’s all right it’s caffeinated.”

“Is that really what’s going to keep you awake?”