Chapter 8
Abigail squinted at the street numbers inlaid on the brass plaque next to the door of the white-washed house she was approaching. The dark green leaves of whatever impressive climbing plant had claimed the spot were gorgeous, but they also made it very hard to read. Her phone flashed with the same unknown number it had earlier that day.
From Unsaved: Abigail, stop staring. Yes, you’re at the right house. The front door is open. I do not want to get up from where I’m sitting—I’m very tired. Close the door behind you. Mrs. L. Foggarty.
She blinked as she read and re-read the message. Who signs off a text message with their full name? she wondered as she pocketed the phone and opened the latch on the low wooden garden gate.
Mrs. Foggarty had texted her that morning to say that the crochet sunflowers Abigail had ordered when she had first arrived in Newport were ready. The woman hadn’t been joking when she said it would take a while, but Abigail didn’t mind—two of the three were for her daughters, after all, and they wouldn’t be around to have them for a while anyway. She wrenched her mind away from how long it would be until she saw the girls again; it wasn’t the right time to get sentimental. She felt strongly that Mrs. Foggarty would have something to say about it and that it probably wouldn’t be all that complimentary.
As she opened the unlocked door, Abigail leaned in and called out, “Good morning, Mrs. Foggarty! It’s Abigail!”
“I know who it is,” Mrs. Foggarty’s voice echoed from somewhere towards her left. “I just watched you walk up the garden path.”
Abigail sighed. She had never met someone so seemingly deliberate in her unfriendliness. The house was somehow exactly as she had been expecting it to be—overtly tidy and strictly quiet in its decor.
“Of course, sorry,” she called out, walking in the direction of Mrs. Foggarty’s voice.
“As you’re coming here anyway, bring me that bag of green yarn. You should be arriving...” Mrs. Foggarty paused for a few seconds. “...now.”
The bag to Abigail’s right was, in fact, full of green yarn. She shook her head in disbelief and picked it up before continuing on her way. As she entered Mrs. Foggarty’s sitting room, she saw that the neatness of the rest of the house had stopped at the doorway to the sitting room. It was still clean, almost obsessively so, but plastic draws lined the walls and were clearly full to bursting with yarn and fabric.
“Hi,” Abigail said, approaching the floral-patterned armchair near the window. “How are you?”
Mrs. Foggarty was cocooned in a thick shawl draped around her shoulders. It wrapped around her and peaked out from underneath the stable table that rested on her knees.
“Fighting fit,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “so don’t get any ideas.”
Abigail blinked at the comment, trying to decide if Mrs. Foggarty was joking or if she didn’t remember her—did the woman have Alzheimer’s? She rolled her eyes at Abigail, accompanied by a loud tutting.
“Calm down; it was a joke,” she said, gesturing at the green yarn. “Clearly, your sense of humor needs work.”
“Oh, uh... sorry,” Abigail replied, handing over the bag.
She didn’t get a reply, so Abigail just sat back and watched while Mrs. Foggarty dug around in the bag until she emerged with a beautiful deep green.
“Ah ha! Perfect,” she said, grinning at the green, “now, bring me your sunflowers.”
“Uh, where...” Abigail asked, looking around her, confused.
Mrs. Foggarty glared, “Use your eyes, child. They’re obviously close by, or I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Sorry,” she apologized as she turned and started looking.
As Mrs. Foggarty had said, there they were, sat next to each other on the couch behind Abigail. Despite the woman’s unique communication style, Abigail couldn’t help but feel like it was all worth it as soon as she picked up Sid’s black sunflower and felt how gorgeously soft it was.
“Come on, I don’t have all day,” Mrs. Foggarty barked from behind her.
“Sorry,” she said again, becoming annoyed with just how often she seemed to be apologizing to this woman.
“Give,” Mrs. Foggarty said, holding her hands out like a child at Halloween.
Smiling at the image, Abigail handed over the soft sunflowers she’d ordered. Black for Sid and Violet for Hannah, which matched the traditionally colored one she had chosen for herself. She cocked her head and squinted at what Mrs. Foggarty was doing. She had turned the black sunflower over and was threading a long needle with the thick, luscious green.
“So,” she said, “how have you been? I haven’t seen you at the market?”
Mrs. Foggarty snorted, “The committee is worried we’re getting too same-same. So there’s a roster now.”
She said roster like she was cursing in church.
“Oh, that’s rough,” Abigail said, “and it’s been at least a month since I saw you so...”
“Seven weeks!” Mrs. Foggarty exclaimed so loudly that Abigail jumped in surprise.
Mrs. Foggarty looked at her over her round glasses, then gestured at Abigail with the long needle, “Why are you still standing?”
“Well... I didn’t want to presume...”
The older woman snorted again and, without looking, reached beside her and found the stem of a magnifying light, which she pulled towards her. ”Oh no, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
She was unsure how she’d gotten that wrong but gratefully took the offered seat.
“Thank you,” she said, hoping that that was at least the right thing to do.
When no reprimand came from Mrs. Foggarty, she assumed it had been. Abigail was still deciding on whether or not to speak again when Mrs. Foggarty spoke, though her attention didn’t waiver from the needlework.
“Why are you still here?” she asked, “Don’t you have things to do in California?”
Abigail had almost forgotten that she was supposed to have known Mrs. Foggarty from when she lived here and the questioning silence she now found herself in made her wish she’d started a conversation about almost anything else.
“Well, I finally had the opportunity to come in and address some things at my house,” she said carefully, “and so I’m here working on making it the best it can be.”
“With Byron?”
The question sounded innocent enough, but there was a flicker of amusement on the woman’s face.
“No,” Abigail answered, “not specifically. He’s the contractor who was recommended to me ten years ago, and he’s been great. When I decided to come up here, he seemed like the obvious choice to help me out.”
“He’s a good one, that Byron,” Mrs. Foggarty held the sunflower at arm’s length to check something before tutting and returning it to its place on the stable table, “And just why has it been a decade since you visited?”
She shifted in her seat; what on earth gave this woman the right to interrogate her like this?
“Yes, he is,” Abigail replied, “and, well, you know… I had kids, and a career…”
“Pfft,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “so does everyone. That’s not a reason for you to stay away. Why wouldn’t you come back here?”
Abigail pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth. She wouldn’t be rude to this woman. She would not—
“and don’t try to fob me off either. I really want to know—”
“Frankly, because the thing that ruined my life and nearly killed me happened to me here and the last time I came up was because my parents had gone and died within six months of me having unexpected twins and nearly dying again—this time in childbirth!”
Mrs. Foggarty looked up at her sharply, “That’s more like you.”
“Excuse me!?” Abigail exclaimed, nearly rising from her seat.
“You really don’t remember me, do you?”
Mrs. Foggarty had stopped whatever she was doing to the sunflowers and stared at her from across the room. She wanted to be mad at her for being so rude, but the expression the old woman was wearing was just so weirdly sincere.
“No,” Abigail said, “I don’t. If you did know me back then, you probably heard that I was injured in the crash. I have memory issues still.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “I didn’t know that, no.”
“Then you can’t have known me that well,” she said, unintentionally sharply.
A huff of laughter was all she got in return for that.
“I suppose I can see how you would think that,” Mrs. Foggarty said, returning to the sunflowers, “and I suppose I didn’t really know you. Only for a year or so.”
Abigail stared at her. Had she really known her—properly—before the crash?
Mrs. Foggarty had turned to the second sunflower now and was busily rethreading.
“I... who are you?”
The old woman laughed, “Jacob Givens was such a nice young man. It was a pity he ended up the way he did, but I don’t need to tell you that. He was always running out on his parents to be with you and your little friends, and they didn’t deserve him either.”
Abigail”s confusion was mounting now, blocking out the offense she’d taken to the woman’s rudeness.
“He was a good person. Why didn’t they deserve him?”
Mrs. Foggarty shrugged, “I don’t patch up students and tell.”
“Wait, you were a teacher?” Abigail exclaimed, “Isn’t that exactly what teachers are supposed to do? When they think a child is being abused?”
Mrs. Foggarty smiled wryly at her, “Of course, but not to other students, child.”
Abigail squirmed. How had she ended up feeling so stupid in this conversation?
“So, you were his teacher?”
“Both of yours, technically,” Mrs. Foggarty replied, “though I’m not surprised you don’t remember me; you spent most of my class sketching instead of practicing. Always had some snappy comment to make, such a petulant child. You never had any patience, always ended up snapping at people—just like you did then.”
“Practicing....?”
She narrowed her eyes at the old woman, trying to force her memory back to senior year.
“Dah duh dah,” Mrs. Foggarty sang quietly, “dah dah dee dah, duh duh dee...”
Abigail blinked against the tears of frustration welling up in her eyes. She hated pushing herself to remember when she knew it wasn’t likely to work, but as Mrs. Foggarty hummed a tune she recognized, snippets of images came back.
“You were the creative arts director....” she said suddenly.
“Almost,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “but not quite.”
Abigail stood, “No, no, I remember you now! You caught me and Jacob making out behind the scenery screens when we were supposed to be doing something to the lights.”
“Well, yes, that’s true,” Mrs. Foggarty said with a laugh, “but I wasn’t the director, that was Mr. Foggarty, my late husband. I supervised afterschool practices on his behalf and created half the props used by his department. I was an assistant teacher assigned to the school as a whole but functionally monopolized by my husband.”
“What? Really? I don’t remember him at all...” Abigail said, “I barely remember the class, and the images I have of you are fuzzy... but they’re only of you.”
“Well,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “I may have been paying extra attention to you and Jacob, he was my nephew, technically speaking.”
She narrowed her eyes, “technically speaking?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Foggarty repeated, “technically speaking. Now, what are your girls’ names again? And who is getting what?”
“Uh, Sid is getting the black one, and Hannah, the violet one,” Abigail said, confused by the interjection, “but wait, how would someone only technically be your nephew?”
Mrs. Foggarty laughed again, short and sharp, “You always were just a little bit na?ve. Well, you see, my older brother was a mechanic, quite a few years younger than me. I practically raised him. Now, I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when a ten-year-old doppelganger of him walks up to me during one of my husband’s rehearsals and asks if he gets a sword because he’s playing Sir Lancelot.”
“Uh... okay?”
“No, I mean the spitting image of my brother,” Mrs. Foggarty said, looking at Abigail expectantly, “who was not, in any way, married to Mrs. Givens. If you get my drift.”
“Oh...” Abigail said, stunned.
“Yes, ‘oh’ indeed,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “though I can tell you he had rather more than that to say about it when I asked him about it.”
Abigail held up her hand, “But wait. From what I remember, Jacob always thought it was his dad cheating, not his mom.”
“Unfortunately, some folks were never told that an eye for an eye sends the whole world blind,” Mrs. Foggarty said, holding up the sunflower to inspect her work.
“Wow,” Abigail said, leaning back in her seat,
She hadn’t expected anything other than a terse conversation, and to finally collect her commissioned pieces from Mrs. Foggarty. Putting a rather huge piece of the puzzle together was throwing her off a little. What did this mean for the flashback she’d had? Was it Jake’s mom who hit him? No, she tried to remember Jake’s mom—she had always been so quiet.
“Was it his dad, who.... Do you know? The reason you had to patch Jacob up?”
Mrs. Foggarty shrugged, “I asked but he didn’t say. Here you go.”
She held out the sunflower for Abigail to look at. On the reverse of both sunflowers was a small, dark green leaf. As Mrs. Foggarty turned the creation slightly from side to side, Abigail could see that on the stitching pattern, there was a distinct S on the black one and a H on the violet one, though the yarn had all been the same color.
“That’s so clever,” she said, in awe, “how’d you do that?”
“Practice, the thread is twisted a certain way so it catches the light differently,” Mrs. Foggarty explained, “now, about Byron.”
Abigail winced. She was far more interested in what Mrs. Foggarty had to say about Jacob than any weird digging about whether she had a thing for Byron. As she opened her mouth to ask something about Jacob and try to derail Mrs. Foggarty, she was cut off by the woman’s sharp tone.
“As I said before, he’s a good man. I know you came here looking to escape whatever it is you’re running from this time, but let me just say to you—do not use that man to do it. He is kind and very good-looking. Relationships, however, are not exactly his forte.”
It was all Abigail could do not to roll her eyes; she didn’t need to be told by another person that Byron was some heartbreaking player—she had enough on her plate and did not need any man-related complications.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Foggarty,” she said, “that’s not going to be a problem.”
“Good,” Mrs. Foggarty said, “now, I’m quite tired, you should go. I hope your girls like the sunflowers.”
“Oh, of course,” Abigail said, turning to the door, “Mrs. Foggarty, I am sorry that I wasn’t able to remember you. If you need anything, please call—”
When no acerbic reply came, she looked over her shoulder at the older woman and saw that she had actually fallen asleep.
Silently, Abigail snuck over behind the chair, moved the LED magnifying lamp back to its original position, switched it off, and gently moved the half-full porcelain cup of coffee from the stable table to the coffee table next to her.
She truly felt bad for not remembering the woman properly; it sounded like she’d led an interesting life. Abigail paused at the front door—should she lock it behind her? What if Mrs. Foggarty didn’t lock it on purpose—or if she had a care worker coming who needed it to be unlocked... Thunder rumbled overhead and Abigail scrambled to get her umbrella out of her pocket and up before it started to rain. If only she’d spent less time talking about Byron and more time giving her information on Jacob... and his biological father.
Byron! Of course,she thought, snapping her fingers. Either he’d know if Mrs. Foggarty wanted her door left unlocked, or he would call her for some made up reason and make sure she was awake and able to lock it if that was what she wanted. Abigail smiled as the phone rang, stepping out into the rain and heading in the direction of the house.