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

“What a welcome,” he whispered into her hair.

She held on to him hard. She hated being alone now, and she hated her neediness.

“Smells good,” Dylan said.

“Me?” Mary said, flirting. “Or dinner?”

“Both,” he said.

“Can you believe it?” she said, walking to the stove. “Eddie wants me to chase some food truck around town.”

“And?” Dylan said too hopefully.

“And write about it,” Mary snapped. “As if I could write about the importance of a taco,” she muttered.

She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the boiling water and bit into it, testing. She tried not to think of Stella standing at her side, her pasta tester, the way she would bite into a strand and wrinkle her nose with seriousness before pronouncing it was almost ready. “Two more hours,” she liked to say.

“It might be fun,” Dylan said, but she could tell his heart wasn’t into having this argument again. It had become a pattern with them, his frustrated urging for her to go back to work, her anger at him for being able to work at all. A few times it had grown into full-blown fighting, with Dylan yelling at her, “You have to try to help yourself!” and Mary accusing him of being callous. More often, though, it was this quiet disagreement, this sarcasm and misunderstanding, the hurt feelings that followed.

Mary sighed and drained the pasta, stirring in the sauce she’d made—onions, crushed tomatoes, pancetta. As she grated cheese over it, Dylan opened a bottle of wine.

“I can’t get used to it,” Mary said, turning her attention to the salad, drizzling olive oil over the greens and sprinkling sea salt. “The silence.”

Dylan stood, head bent, while she struggled to explain how the kitchen, the house, the world felt to her without Stella in it. But finally she shrugged, and finished dressing the salad. Words, her livelihood, her refuge, even at times her salvation, were now the most useless things in the world. Dylan couldn’t understand that.

Stella would be singing while Mary finished making dinner. Or she would be showing off her work brought home from kindergarten that day. She would ask for an apple, sliced and peeled, to nibble. She would ask for a cup of water. She would make noise. Guiltily Mary remembered her impatience with these distractions. How could she have grown impatient with Stella?

Mary heard her loud footsteps as she brought the food to the table. The screech of the chair as Dylan pulled it away from the table. Mary’s own sigh.

“Your latest creation?” Dylan said, motioning to the scarf.

He was trying to move past the awkwardness. She knew that, but she still smarted from it.

“How’d you make that pattern?” he asked, impressed.

“It self-stripes as you knit.”

“My wife, the knitter,” he said.

Mary was acutely aware of the sounds of chewing, of forks on plates, of their breathing.

“I wonder about those women,” she said after a time, softening. “At the knitting circle.”

“What about them?” Dylan said.

“You know, who they are. There’s this one woman, Beth. She’s so rigid. Hair in place. Clothes pressed. Lipstick. Apparently she does everything perfectly.”

Mary didn’t mention the few facts she had gleaned about Beth. The four children in matching sweaters who smiled out of a posed studio photograph she’d passed around. Four children! Mary had thought, shuddering at that abundance, that good luck.

“I’m certain she has one of those houses, those center-hall colonials with the big square rooms and window treatments.” She flushed, embarrassed. “God,” Mary said. “Listen to me. I hardly know the woman. I hate her because she has so … so much.”

“I do it too,” Dylan said. “When I see a father walking with his little girl on his shoulders I want to yell at him. How could he have this privilege? This blessing?”

His voice trembled and Mary touched his hand lightly. Who are we becoming? she wondered.

After a moment, she said, “You know that great bakery? Rouge?”

“With the really buttery croissants?” Dylan said. “And those special things? What are they?”

“Cannelles,” she said. “The owner’s in the knitting circle. Scarlet. She’s lovely. Long red hair, like … like …” She’d show him, Mary thought. She was a writer after all, surely she could come up with a good description. “Like rusty pipes,” she said finally.

“Rusty pipes?” Dylan said, grinning. “That sounds very lovely.”

Mary slapped his arm playfully. “It is lovely. And she has these cheekbones. Real style. She must have lived somewhere fabulously sophisticated.”

Dylan put his hand to her cheek. “You’re lovely,” he said softly.

Mary let him pull her close. Whenever they kissed, she wanted to cry.

“Holly left us cupcakes,” she whispered when their lips parted. “A dozen of them. She colored the frosting toxic orange.”

“Later,” Dylan said.

They left the half-empty plates on the table and together went upstairs to bed.

Her hands needed to do it. It was as if the movement of the needles coming together and falling apart took away the horrible anxiety that bubbled up in her throughout the day. Just when Mary began to consider the challenge of tassels, her mother called.

“Sometimes I miss the leaves changing,” her mother told her. “Those gorgeous colors. The cactus are beautiful in their way, but still.”

“I’ve done it,” Mary said reluctantly. “I’ve learned to knit.”

“Ah,” her mother said. “So Alice called.”

When Mary didn’t reply, her mother said, “It’s good, isn’t it? They say to some women, religious women, each stitch is like a prayer.”

Mary had no interest in discussing spirituality with her mother. “How do you make tassels? I’ve made this scarf and I think tassels would really complete it.” Plus, Mary added to herself, I’m about to lose my fucking mind and I think if my hands stay busy it will help and I’ve even thought about sitting here and knitting scarves until I die.

“Simple,” her mother said. “Take some leftover yarn and cut it all the same length and then make bundles of three or four of those. Tie them along the hem in good strong knots.”

“How many, though? How close together do I tie them?”

“Be creative, Mary. Do whatever suits you.”

Mary frowned, eyeing the hem of her scarf.

“I have Spanish at eleven,” her mother said. “Better go.”

“Right,” Mary said.

One day, a few months after her mother had stopped drinking, Mary came home from school and found her sitting on the sofa rolling yarn into fat balls. By this time, her father had started to recede from the family, as if once her mother stopped drinking he no longer had a role there. When Mary left for college, her parents got divorced, but their separation from each other began before that.

“You’re knitting?” Mary said.

“I used to knit socks and hats for the GIs,” her mother had explained.

“What GIs?”

“During World War Two. Betty and I would walk down to the church and sit with all the other girls knitting. It was very patriotic.”

“So now you’re going to sit here and knit all day and send socks to soldiers in Vietnam?”

“Babies,” her mother said softly. “I’m knitting hats for the babies in the hospital. The newborns,” she said, holding up a tiny powder blue hat.

For the rest of that year, small hats in pastel colors piled up everywhere, on end tables and chairs and countertops. Then they would disappear and her mother began new piles. Eventually she knit striped hats, and white ones flecked with color, and then zigzag patterns.

“She’s lost her mind,” Mary whispered to her best friend Lisa.