8. Monday
CHAPTER 8
MONDAY
M argaret Elizabeth Sullivan McArthur was good at many things: she was a notably fast reader, she always arrived to her destination on time, and she could reliably finish a New York Times Saturday crossword in under 20 minutes. She was also quite good at recognizing the things she was bad at, although there weren’t very many of them. She could not cook. She had no aptitude for languages. And she was really, really bad at Feelings. Usually, each of these deficits caused her very little trouble, and she mostly ignored them. Occasionally, when on a long project in Paris or Belgium, she would have the fleeting thought that she should at least become conversational in French, but then she’d head back to London and her Duolingo streak would end.
As for cooking and Feelings, Maggie ate a lot of takeout, and her day-to-day work dealt in systems and statistics, not emotions. As to the rest, dating apps presented an endless deck of reasonably attractive, moderately interesting people who could keep her company for a night or two. Her job kept her on the move, anyway. The minutes she tracked for work never added up to more than a few weeks in any one city at a time. She’d tried to do long distance once, right after grad school, and her girlfriend had decided to do someone much shorter distance instead. So, as far as Maggie was concerned, blowing off steam with people she was unlikely to catch Feelings for was a feature not a bug.
Today, however, being Not Good at Feelings presented something of a problem. Because what, exactly, did you say when you popped in, arguably about two weeks later than you should have, to catch up with the love of your recently-unexpectedly-deceased-aunt-whose-summer-camp-you-have-taken-over-on-an-emergency-basis’s life? Fuck if Maggie knew.
So, that morning, Maggie had called upon the spirit of Emily Post and, by what could only be spectral inspiration, had thought to Google “Asheville Florists.” She’d called the only one open at 8am, and when the woman on the other end of the line asked what she was looking for, Maggie had requested “whatever is most condoling and also available today.”
And now here she was, standing in the doorway of the Main Lodge’s crafts and weaving studio after the Lights Out Bell had officially chimed, brandishing a bouquet of lilies in lieu of coherently articulated emotions. It was people like her keeping florists in business.
Maggie knocked on the open door, startling Miss Lucille, who’d been sitting at a table facing a window on the far wall. She turned halfway around and peered sharply across the distance to see who had disturbed her.
“Oh dear lord are those for me?” Miss Lucille was a small Black woman with a grey pixie cut who, despite the heat, had wrapped a purple shawl around her flowy teal tank top and matching floor-length skirt. She looked at Maggie through round purple glasses that magnified her eyes and gave her a deceptively owlish appearance. Or perhaps it was appropriately owlish. Winnie the Pooh characters aside, owls were not to be fucked with, and neither was Miss Lucille.
“Um. Yes?” Maggie held out the bouquet awkwardly.
“They smell hideous.”
There was a beat of appropriately dead silence and then Maggie began laughing uncontrollably. She laughed like the time she’d been rejected from her first choice college after scoring a perfect 2400 on her SAT. She laughed like the time she’d lost track of her first boyfriend at a house party and found him hooking up with her main rival on the cross country team in the room where everyone left their coats. She laughed like the time her aunt had really shitty luck, and now Maggie was in an unincorporated community in rural Henderson County bringing horrible-smelling flowers to her not-quite-widow.
She laughed like sometimes there was nothing else to do but cry. And Maggie McArthur did not cry.
“My god, they do. They’re awful,” Maggie said, gulping down air. “The florist said lilies are traditional for funerals.”
Miss Lucille, who had crossed to the entrance while Maggie was giggling hysterically, plucked the bouquet out of Maggie’s hand, marched it over to a trash can, stepped on the pedal, and dumped it in, pressing down on the lid for good measure. “Traditionally they mask the smell of the dead body.”
Miss Lucille continued back to the corner where Maggie could now see she’d been working on threading a stack of small frame looms. “Don’t feel badly, Margaret. Flowers are a racket. And most of them are poisonous to cats anyway, so I can’t keep them at home.”
Miss Lucille sat and picked up the loom she’d been working on when Maggie had arrived. Maggie hovered awkwardly just beyond the threshold.
“I…oh.” Maggie had prepared several somewhat trite phrases about how she was so sorry to have missed the funeral and how the ones we love never truly leave us, which she had planned to deliver with the flowers. She had not prepared for a botany seminar, and her brain was struggling to take the sharp left turn.
“At least it wasn’t another casserole. For heaven’s sake, Peggy was bitten by a snake. I didn’t get a tapeworm.”
“I don’t cook,” Maggie managed.
“Apparently neither do most of the people who have dropped off casseroles. Now stop standing there like you don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain and make yourself useful.” Miss Lucille thumped a palm onto the bench next to her.
Maggie sat, and Miss Lucille set an empty loom on the table in front of her and held out a ball of thread. “I’ve still got twelve of these to prepare.”
Miss Lucille showed her how to thread, or, rather, warp, the small frame looms so that they would be ready for the younger campers to weave. Maggie caught on to the basic idea quickly and found the repetitive work surprisingly calming. She didn’t even feel compelled to fill the silence that had fallen over them, so lulled was she by the rhythmic warping. When Maggie had finished two looms and Miss Lucille had sped through the other ten, she stood to leave.
“It was good to see you, dear,” Miss Lucille said, picking up the first of the two looms Maggie had warped. She began to unwind the thread, her expression hard to read. She didn’t seem to be annoyed at Maggie’s sorry excuse for assistance. Instead, something about the way she held the wooden frame, gently undoing the work that had taken Maggie the better part of an hour, seemed almost affectionate. She shook her head fondly. “Your aunt never had any aptitude for the craft either. But she used to come up here to help me, summer evenings, all the same. I taught children to weave on badly warped looms for years before I told her that I loved her for her heart but certainly not for her handicrafts. She brought books to read after that.” A sad smile ghosted across Miss Lucille’s face for just a moment as she pulled the last of the thread from the frame.
She looked so small, just then, like she might drown in all the teal and purple fabric of her shawl. She had never been a large woman, but her presence had always filled the room. She had always taken up space.
Before Maggie had time to second guess the impulse, she bent down and kissed Miss Lucille on the cheek. “I’ve been in an awful reading slump. Maybe I’ll see if I can do something about it.”