How to Knit a Heart Back Home Read online

  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.

  The 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 ch
ange 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.

  “I’m coming!” Lucy unlocked the door from the inside and swung it open. “Jeesh, Elbert. You’re early today.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been at Tillie’s since six this morning. And you know that I . . .”

  “You hate their bathroom.”

  “They don’t clean it. Not so it smells clean. Not like yours . . .”

  Elbert had already pushed past her, and his voice trailed off as he bolted into the bathroom. Lucy didn’t hear him lock it. Why would he? Elbert was one of a group of customers who treated her store as if it were their home. Elbert wouldn’t lock his bathroom door at home—why should he do it here?

  Lucy turned on the stereo. It was a Chopin kind of day. Most Saturdays were.

  Elbert came out a few moments later, smiling beatifically, still tucking in his shirt. “That’s better. Man, that was a lot of coffee today.”

  He went and poured himself yet another cup from her first pot, which had just finished brewing. At eighty-four, Elbert was no spring chicken, but he still had some of his hearing and all his own teeth. He reminded Lucy of a seed catalog, colorful, cheerful, simple. His eyesight, he was happy to tell anyone who would listen, was just fine, and he trained that vision on any lady pretty enough to grab it.

  But he was sweet. He hummed sometimes, without knowing it, and he brought her little presents for the store: a bouquet of local flowers that he’d pilfered out of gardens along the way, or a box of crumbled cookies for her to put out with the coffee.

  Lucy flipped the sign to Open, and rolled the postcard rack out. She’d keep an eye on the skies and rush it back inside if it started to rain, but she wouldn’t roll the clearance cart out at all. She didn’t want to risk ruining a whole cart full of books, even on sale, in a spring shower if she could help it.

  As she put out the postcards, she saw Greta Doss and Mildred Elkins turn the corner and head in her direction. They smiled. Mildred shook a white bag in the air.

  Lucy sighed in happiness. She never let herself buy donuts, but if someone else wanted to get her one, well, who was she to stand in the way of their joy? Mildred knew her special weakness was the thick, gooey bear claw. Happy Donuts stuffed theirs with almond paste and raisins, just the way Lucy liked them.

  As much as an octogenarian could, Mildred scampered up to Lucy, thrusting the bag at her.

  “See? No calories if someone else buys it for you!” Mildred was always pleased when she made this joke, like she’d never made it before. Lucy laughed as hard as always. Small price to pay for a bear claw.

  “Come on in, ladies. Elbert’s already here.”

  Both Greta and Mildred groaned. They made fun of Elbert Romo behind his back, calling him Elbert Oh-No, and to his face they mocked that he ate every meal at Tillie’s. But Elbert was the oldest surviving single man in town, and the three of them spent enough time together at the Book Spire to qualify them as actual friends, even if none of them ever admitted it out loud.

  Elbert stood as Lucy ushered Mildred and Greta inside. He always stood when a lady entered or exited, or when they sat down or stood up at the reading table. His knees creaked and popped ominously when he did, and Lucy told him not to do it, but he said, “That would be like not breathing air, my dear.”

  Mildred took a serving plate out from the cabinet below the coffeepots. She ripped open her other white bag and placed four donuts on it, a glazed, two chocolate crullers, and an old-fashioned. Greta took the mugs they always used off their hooks and filled them with coffee, adding cream to Mildred’s and nothing to her own.

  Both women moved then to the table and sat with contented sighs.

  Greta, the younger of the two women, had been a schoolteacher for many years, and had never married. She’d taken care of her mother until she died, thirty years ago. Right around the same time, Mildred’s husband had dropped dead of a stroke, and after finding out about some bad investments he’d made, she’d had to sell the house to pay things off. She’d moved in with Greta then, and the pair had been inseparable ever since.

  Greta was the quiet one. In Lucy’s mind, she was like an Edwardian novel: leather bound, tiny print. It might be difficult to turn the fragile pages, but the color plates made it worth it.

  Mildred, on the other hand, was a child’s picture book: colorful, and loud. She never wore anything that wasn’t bright, and she said that if she wore a pink blouse, she didn’t want to hurt red’s feelings. So she wore red pants with a purple sweater, an orange scarf at her neck, topped with a green jacket and blue hat.

  “Lucy!” Mildred called imperiously.

  Darn. Lucy had thought she might get the new magazines out. Oh, well, it would have to wait. She’d never hurt their feelings by ignoring them.

  “What’s on your mind, Mildred?” Lucy asked.

  “Were you there last night?” Her fingers flashed as she held her knitting in her lap. She was doing something with two strands, knitting with both hands.

  Would it help to play dumb? Lucy wasn’t sure. “Is that Noro? What are you making?”

  “Does this look like Noro? You’re not stupid, child. Jamieson’s. Sleeve. And don’t give me that. At the bar. Did you see the crash? Did you really get stuck inside? And did Abigail really lose three fingers and a toe?”

  “God!” Lucy lost her breath. “No! Where did you hear that?”

  “On the news.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Mildred shrugged. “Okay. No, we heard it from Phyllis Gill, who was there.”

  “She’s legally blind,” said Lucy. “And she must have had a few too many. Because in no way, shape, or form did that happen. There was a crash. Abigail was trapped. But she got out, and then the car burst into flames.”

  Mildred and Greta both looked disappointed.

  Lucy shook her head. “Don’t you think that’s exciting enough? Just the way it is?”

  “Well, at least you were there,” Mildred said. The most tech savvy of the eighty-plus set, she pulled out an iPhone and started tapping notes out on it. “What were her injuries? I may talk about it in my podcast later, and I want the details. And was Irene Bancroft’s son there, too? Back from the City?”

  Elbert said, “Never liked Irene’s husband, that Hugh Bancroft.”

  “Well, no one minded when he died,” said Mildred.

  Greta gasped. “You can’t say that.”

  Mildred keyed something into her cell phone with extra force and looked up. “I can. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

  Elbert nodded. “And if the son is back in town . . . You know what they say about apples and trees, after all.”

  Greta said, “But he became a police officer, didn’t he? In San Francisco. And I think Phyllis said he helped get Abigail out of the car, too.”

  Mildred raised her eyebrows and kept staring into her phone. “You really think that being a cop makes him trustworthy? In a big, corrupt city like that?” Then she hit a button on the phone twice and looked up at Lucy. “So. What was Owen really doing there last night?”

  Lucy reached for a pen but it slipped from her fingers, falling to the slate floor with a small clatter. “Mildred, I have so many things I need to do. I’m going to let you three catch up this morning, and we’ll call the hospital later, how about that?”

  She rolled the dolly stacked with magazine bundles to the periodicals area. Now was not the time to think about Owen. Lucy knelt on the floor and reached down to grab some extra Interweave Knits that had slipped to the very back of the rack. As she hauled them out, she took a moment to survey her store. The lower-than-usual viewpoint made everythin
g look different. It pleased her, but it took her a minute to realize why.

  When she’d first started coming here regularly to help her grandmother, she’d probably been as tall as she was now, seated on the floor. The two huge front doors seemed even bigger than usual and the stacks of books looked so much taller and more impressive and exciting. This was what she’d fallen in love with.

  She’d spent so much time as a child at the bookstore with her grandmother, curled up in various corners reading or scribbling story ideas on scraps of spare paper, that it had been a natural transition into working here through high school. She’d been the one to talk her grandmother Ruby into carrying new books, as well as the used books she specialized in. Lucy had ordered the microfiche from Ingram, and opened an account with Baker and Taylor. Ruby let Lucy make the decisions, and Lucy would carefully order one bestseller and watch, thrilled, as it was paid for and carried out of the store. So she’d order a few more authors, until she had a good sense of what her customers wanted.

  The Book Spire might be mostly used books, but Lucy took pride in being able to order almost anything for anyone. When internet selling had hit the book trade, she’d seen the magic in it from the start. Now, even out-of-print books were available, at a price, leaving little she couldn’t track down for her customers.

  There. That was the last of the magazines. She looked over at the table. The three of them were still fine. Elbert was trying to talk to Greta about fly-fishing, and Greta was staring at a spot on the ceiling just over his right shoulder.

  Lucy stayed sitting on the floor.

  A spot of sun had broken through the overcast sky, and she was sitting directly in its beam, like a cat warming itself. Her grandmother, had she been here, would have come over and stood in the sunlight with her. Her feet had always been cold, and Lucy had loved watching her follow the stained-glass-colored sun puddles all over the store.

  The left door creaked, letting someone in. Lucy didn’t move from her spot. She was half hidden by the second magazine shelf, and she’d be able to spy on whoever it was. For a moment, she felt six years old.