Ann Hood - The Knitting Circle - The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year

PART THREE

Patterns are more specific about decreasing than increasing. Decreases done in certain ways slant the stitches to the right or left. For many patterns this is an important element; for others it doesn’t matter at all that much . —NANCY J. THOMAS AND ILANA RABINOWITZ, A Passion for Knitting

5

On Halloween night, Mary stayed in bed and watched TV. Even as the doorbell rang and children’s voices chirped, “Trick or treat!” to Dylan, Mary stared at the television.

Downstairs, Dylan marveled at miniature Spider-Men and Harry Potters. He claimed each witch the scariest, each princess the loveliest. Mary did not think of the way that Stella always chose a winged creature for her Halloween costume: butterfly, bumblebee, fairy. She did not think of how meager that list was, how it should have grown over the years, adding bats and ladybugs, raptors and dragonflies.

Eventually Dylan came upstairs.

“What a crowd!” he said. “We never have such a crowd.”

“Usually we’re among them,” Mary said without looking at him. “We’re trick-or-treaters.”

He stood in front of the television, holding a pastry box tied with string.

“Someone got mixed up and gave us candy instead of the other way around?” she said, taking it from him.

She pulled the string from the box and opened it. Inside, nestled in a tight row, sat three cannelles.

“Scarlet brought them?” Mary said.

“I found them on the doorstep. No note.”

Dylan sat beside her on the bed.

“What a terrible night,” he said.

Mary handed him one of the pastries and took one for herself, letting its perfect sweetness fill her mouth.

“It might have been better if we’d done it together,” he said, not looking at her. “If we’d both been down there.”

Mary shook her head. “I told you I couldn’t,” she said. “You could have hidden up here with me.” She tried not to sound defensive.

But Dylan said, “I guess I can’t hide from everything like you can,” and she heard that too-familiar edge in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Mary told him, though she wasn’t certain what she was sorry about: sorry that Stella had died and she couldn’t handle it? Sorry she couldn’t be more like him in the face of this?

“I’ll fight you for the third one,” Dylan said, changing the subject, letting their frustration lie there between them.

“One holiday down, and an infinite number to go,” Dylan said, licking crumbs from his fingers.

“And my mother’s threatening to come for Thanksgiving,” Mary said, her hands shaping the string into the Eiffel Tower.

Too early one morning her mother had called. “I’ve been invited to eat with Saul and his family,” she’d said, “but if you want me there, there I’ll be.”

“Saul?” Mary had said, cranky. She hated starting the day with a phone call from her mother. “Who’s Saul?”

“I’ve only mentioned him a few hundred times,” her mother said. “A neighbor. A friend. His children, all three of them, come down from Houston for Thanksgiving. With their spouses. And their children.”

“Lucky Saul,” Mary said.

“Eight grandchildren. He’ll have a full house, that’s for sure. I said I’d make my sweet potatoes. The ones I do so beautifully? The casserole? And of course help with the turkey.”

“It sounds like you should stay there then,” Mary said. Her first year without Stella, and didn’t all the books and groups and advice about grief warn that all the firsts were the worst? Couldn’t her mother figure that out when everyone else seemed to know it?

“That’s what I thought,” her mother was saying. “You and Dylan should get away. Go to Havana. That’s the place to forget everything.”

“What if I don’t want to forget?” Mary said, closing her eyes against her mother’s voice, against the sun that was beginning to show its bright face in her bedroom window, against the whole world beyond her bed.

“I understand,” her mother said. “But running away for a bit won’t erase anything. It will just take the edge off a little. I remember that trip your father and I took—” she began.

But Mary didn’t care about some long-ago vacation, or about her mother’s philosophies on loss.

“Mom, you don’t know anything about it,” Mary interrupted.

“This was a long time ago,” her mother continued. “Before you were born. We went to Key West. And we walked on those little streets with all the palm trees—”

Her mother sighed, then spoke again.

“Cuba. Havana, Cuba,” she said. “I hear it’s time to go to Cuba.”

“Thanks,” Mary said. “That’s really great advice.”

A few minutes after she’d hung up, the phone rang again.

“You can’t take your knitting on the airplane.”

“Mom?” Mary said.

“In case you go to Cuba. They don’t allow you to bring the needles on board anymore.”

“I’m not going to Cuba, Mom,” Mary said.

“Mrs. Earle said that they let you bring circular needles. But you’re not working on those yet, are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “I’m not flying anywhere.”

Lying in her bed Halloween night, Mary imagined flying somewhere. She thought of Stella last Halloween, a perfect fairy, all sparkles and tulle. And then she thought of herself, so earthbound, so stuck.

When her mother called again, Mary was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, willing herself to take off, to actually burst through the roof and into the sky.

“I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving,” her mother said. “I don’t want to make it worse for you. It’s going to be bad. I know that. And for the life of me I know that I can’t make it any better. Stay with your husband. I’ll barge in on Saul and his family. Next year will be a whole other story.”

“That sounds great,” Mary said. “Have fun.”

She hung up the phone and stared hard at the ceiling, as if she could by sheer force break a hole in it and see all the way up to the sky.

On Thanksgiving morning they drove to Dylan’s sister’s house in Connecticut. The night before there was enough of a snowfall to leave a perfect dusting on the yards and trees of Sara’s neighborhood. The houses, set back from the street, emitted warm yellow light from inside, and lovely puffs of smoke from the chimneys. A few had already strung small white Christmas lights around their doors and windows, and these twinkled in the gray afternoon.

“It looks like a movie set,” Mary said, hating it here.

“Yeah,” Dylan muttered, “a horror movie.”

She thought of Beth from knitting. This was where she would live. She and her four matching children, her Stella .

They pulled into the driveway behind Sara’s Volvo wagon. One like it sat in every driveway here. Sara had an annoying habit of referring to her things by brand—the Volvo, the Saab. Her purse was the Kate Spade; her shoes were the Pradas, the Adidas, the Uggs.

Sara stood on the front steps, dressed head to toe in camel, ready to pounce on them.

“Hey, you two,” she said. “Can you believe it? Snow on Thanksgiving? I had to pull my Uggs out of the attic.”

She hugged them both in turn, firmly, the kind of hug Mary had come to learn was meant to express sympathy.

Fires roared in each fireplace of each room they walked through. So perfect was each fire that Mary concluded they must be gas, not real wood ones. But then a log crackled and sent blue sparks against the screen. Maybe the fires were the only real things here.