Chapter 4 #2
Grandee won’t let me throw it out. We do yard work the rest of the evening while we wait for our wool to dry.
My mother leaves after dinner, with my grandmother mumbling something about how she must be real proud of herself.
And when I lie down, I fall asleep immediately for the first time in weeks.
Christopher, the rooster, crows as soon as the sun is up, but I’m already awake. The door to my bedroom opens, and Grandee looks at the bunched-up sheets like she expects me to be there, but I’m standing in front of my closet fully dressed.
“You’re up.”
“I am.” I don’t smile, but I feel like it’s implied.
We drink coffee and eat toast on the porch while she talks to the sheep.
“Lorelai, you cannot bully Logan like that. He deserves some sprouts, too.”
Luke starts baaing at Logan, and Grandee gets up to separate the feed.
“You baby them,” I tell her, but then, she babies everything she loves in that gruff way of hers. Actions and words don’t always have to match. Sometimes one is heavier than the other, and Grandee has always been one for doing.
She narrows her eyes at me and asks, “How’d you sleep last night?”
And that’s when I realize she’s babying me. Right now.
She doesn’t smile either, but it’s implied. “Come on.”
The wool is dry, so we spend the rest of the day spinning it into yarn. The fibers on my spool are beautiful even if yellow seems to be the dominant color that’s seeped into everything.
And when it’s done, Grandee and I sit by the fireplace and pull out our blankets. Enormous baskets tucked around the room hold our family’s projects, our history. Everyone has one. Me, Linden, Grandee, even my mother. Linden’s mother took hers when she left.
I’ve been working on this blanket as long as I can remember, a patchwork of stitches and colors and differences in thickness that reminds me of certain moments in my life, almost like a keepsake of time. It’s where I learned to crochet.
Grandee’s blanket is twice the size of mine. Maybe bigger. The colors fade and change. I’ve always loved it, but she’s never finished.
The blankets aren’t done until we are. Someone else will sew in our final stitch, and then it will be done, like our time in this life.
We’ve been doing this for so long that Grandee and I sit down without talking. Her in a large leather chair with puffy arms and a sunken-in cushion, and me in the blue wingback closest to the fireplace. Linden always works on either the sofa or the love seat, but she’s not here.
Grandee and I begin.
The only sounds are the rustle of yarn and our breath against the crackling of the fire. Stained glass from an aunt that was really into it seventy years before me paints everything in faded colors that fall onto the room. This is my church.
“After this,” Grandee starts, “you’ll go back to school?”
I’m so surprised by the question that I don’t respond for several seconds. The only sound is the near-silent slide of my yarn as this moment is being stitched into her blanket. “What?”
“School. You’ll go back?”
I don’t speak. Max’s face appears in my thoughts, a frown carving into his features, and my throat constricts as I keep my eyes on my work.
“Nieve … you need to move forward. The only way to do that is to go back to school.”
Forward.
As if that’s something a person can do when every beat of your heart is one someone else isn’t taking. I don’t know how to move forward, because my life has stopped. I’m stuck in this place where I can’t seem to let go of what happened only a few months ago.
And I’m not sure I want to move on if moving on means moving away from him. “I don’t want to,” I tell her.
Stitch, stitch, stitch.
“Then what do you want?”
Maybe it’s how tired I am or that I’m here crocheting through this, but for some reason, I tell her the truth. “I want to go backward. I want to be with Carter again. I want…”
How do I even say the things that I want? Impossible things. Things that make me sound like I want to …
“I don’t have to worry about you hurting yourself, do I?” she asks seriously.
My response is automatic. I don’t even think about the word as I say, “No.”
“Because it would be totally understandable if you were feeling like that.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” I hate that I can’t make her understand how I feel. “I miss him. I want … I just want Carter.”
For a long time, she stares at me. Time seems to fold around us as her dark eyes search past my words and grow clear, finally seeing the answer she’s looking for.
“All right.” She nods and stands, taking my blanket off my lap.
When she pulls at the yarn, I can’t help the noise that escapes me.
The pink and green yarn that was stitched into the blanket is spooling at her feet as it starts to unravel.
On instinct, I reach for it, wanting to rip it away from her.
She turns her back to me and keeps pulling and pulling and pulling until she stops and snaps the cord.
“Grandee!” I can’t even fully process what is happening.
She tosses the yarn into the fire with a nod and says, “There. Now add the stuff you made today.”
I’m … confused doesn’t begin to describe how I feel about what she’s done. Our blankets are sacred things. Rarely does anyone even touch them other than the owner. And she’s just destroyed a year of stitches. “Grandee, what the hell?”
She only shrugs at me as if she hasn’t just committed sacrilege. “Now you can do your work from today. You can start over.”
My mouth opens and closes as I stare at the wool popping and sizzling in the fire.
All the moments from the past year.
When I came home from school and couldn’t stop thinking about Carter.
The weekend Linden and I swam in the freezing pond on a dare.
The Valentine’s Day that Carter and I snuggled up and I added five stitches.
The stitches that reminded me of what his hands felt like, what his voice sounded like, what my heart felt like.
She destroyed them all.
Grandee is looking at me as if she’s done me a favor. Her face is filled with kindness when she says, “This is a new opportunity. Take a deep breath. Start over, my love.”
But I don’t want to start over. I don’t want to do anything. I’m tired, and my emotions feel like they’re sitting in a pile burning—like the logs in the fireplace. I stand and walk to the stairs. “Maybe in the morning.”
“You can add your new yarn now,” Grandee tells me. “I think you’ll like it better.”
“No.” I’m firm when I say it, but I know she can hear how broken I am underneath that one word.
So I go to my room and bury my head under the covers.