Chapter Seventeen #2
“Something like that.” Especially for me and Logan. “Speaking of twins, I was hoping I could come by the airport sometime
and meet your grandmother. Formally. I’d just love to hear about Amelia from her own twin sister.”
Cleo’s expression goes carefully blank. “Yeah, maybe. Sometime. I’m not sure she’s up to it right now. Talking about Amelia
hurts too much. But I’ll let you know.”
It feels like a brush-off, but also plausible, because who would want to talk about their dead twin they loved very much?
If Harrison can’t bring himself to talk too much about Amelia—or couldn’t until today—I can’t imagine how bad it must be for
her actual twin.
Grief here in Midas seems to be a lot of pretending it doesn’t exist, and since I always assumed that was why Dad didn’t talk
about Mom much, it’s comfortable. Familiar. “Okay.”
Cleo walks with me down the alley to the little house. She stands in the doorway, surveying everything in her quiet way. Logan
isn’t here, so I leave him a note of where I’ll be. Then I grab my knitting project from my room and we walk back over to
the store together.
Once we come in through the back, Cleo all but pushes me inside the main part of the store. Nora is flitting around the room,
mostly focused on the long table where a group of women are clustered around with happily patterned knitting bags and mounds
of brightly colored yarn and half-knitted projects before them. Sips are arranged down the center of the table.
There are four older women I don’t recognize sitting at the table already. Three of them are clustered together next to each
other, heads inclined toward one another. The other one sits off to the side, her chin up almost in defiance.
I decide immediately that she’s my people, trying so hard to pretend like it doesn’t matter that she’s been excluded.
The front door opens. To my surprise, Marleen strides in with a very obvious project bag, a foamy bit of neat stockinette
visible on top. This is some kind of knitting project. Marleen is clearly a knitter.
I don’t know why this surprises me—I know anyone can be a knitter and I think everyone should be a knitter—but it does. I did not expect to see Marleen at the Knit and Sip.
She nods at Cleo, then does an amazing impression of someone who just doesn’t see me standing there. Again.
And again, it doesn’t particularly feel mean or pointed, just weird.
She moves to the table and sits between the trio and the lone woman.
One of the trio leans toward her, her white hair gleaming in the overhead light. “Marleen, tell me it isn’t true.”
“What isn’t true?”
Everyone is fussing with their knitting projects. I see a beautiful fade, probably a sweater. There’s a colorwork yoke that
I recognize as one of the popular patterns that everyone was wearing at the Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival last fall. I see
some delicate lace on what I think is a shawl. I see a pile of mittens and the start of a double-pointed needle cast on that
suggests matching hats are in the offing. I’m dying to see what Marleen is knitting up, but she’s still settling into her
seat.
Cleo moves forward to take a seat, so I follow suit. Next to the lone woman, of course. I smile at her as I pull out my fun
little stash-busting cowl.
My new friend is not impressed with me. She looks down her nose at me, in fact.
That one woman from the trio is still leaning toward Marleen. “Braxton told me Jack is taking the scotcheroo off the menu.”
Marleen’s lips firm.
“It isn’t true,” another woman from the trio says, but she’s looking at Marleen like she’s afraid it is.
“It can’t be true,” the third woman asserts. She’s the one with the mittens. “The scotcheroo is a staple.”
Marleen says nothing to the trio of women.
“It’s good it’s off the menu,” the solitary woman says with a sniff. “A dessert as big as your head is a decidedly bad decision,
and a waste besides. We shouldn’t encourage people to eat like that.”
The trio gasps. This must be sacrilege. And since I’ve decided I have an affinity for the lone woman and her shocking opinions
on scotcheroos, I decide to add what I’m sure will be more sacrilege. “What’s a scotcheroo?”
Every single pair of eyes in the store turns to me. Slowly.
There is shock. There is horror. The solitary woman who disapproves of the giant scotcheroo puts a hand over her heart as
if I’ve personally wounded her.
“We’ll get you one tomorrow,” Marleen says gruffly. And this is the first time she has spoken to me or acknowledged my existence
since that very first day, when she did not kick Logan and me out of the diner for not waiting to be seated.
And I am starting to wonder if I am very, very, very slowly earning this woman’s approval.
Scotcheroos must be very important.
“Because they are not taking it off the menu,” the white-haired one says. Forcefully.
Marleen says nothing.
It goes on like that, though the topics ebb and flow around small-town things I don’t understand.
Sometimes Nora leans over my shoulder and tries to explain who people are or why some drama is important, but she’s mostly busy making sure everyone’s glasses are full, and helping with this project or that snag.
Sometimes she knits her own project, a very complicated top that she barely seems to pay attention to—yet her stitchwork is sublime.
I let my hands lead me. I sit back and listen to the conversation as it swirls around me. I don’t have to pay much attention
to my project—it’s an easy knit in the round—so all I have to do is knit and breathe and take a sip, too, every now and again.
Or nibble on a cookie that Nora tells me are from the bakery down the street.
And for the first time since we drove in here that night, I’m part of something in Midas that has nothing to do with demons.
I get to knit and admire finished mittens and listen to the stories that these old women tell, like they’re just another form
of spinning and stitching.
Marleen is the first person to make noises about leaving. It still takes her another thirty minutes to get out the door, and
a lot more talk of Jack’s menu choices, but once she’s gone, the older women start to pack up, too.
Then I watch them all shuffle out into the dark, cold night. Like they have no fear. Like it’s just an inky October night
in a pretty little small town and the only demons are costumes for the kids and the Trunk or Treats. This settles in me all
wrong.
“Do they not know there are demons?” I ask once the door closes behind the last of them and Cleo flips the lock. “They don’t
see it? Feel it? Because they’re not foundlings or part of founding families?”
“I don’t think Paula would believe in demons if they came up to her and introduced themselves,” Cleo says, speaking of my
solitary friend with a thing against scotcheroos, whatever they are.
Also, she was not the least bit friendly.
“No, probably not,” Nora agrees. “Ruth and Sylvia married brothers from a founding family, but as far as we know, they all stopped believing somewhere at least a generation or two back,” Nora says, neatening up the table.
I move to help, while Cleo stands by the store’s display windows, staring moodily into the dark.
“What about Marleen?” I ask, unable to tamp down my curiosity about this woman who refuses to acknowledge my existence unless
it’s the most desperate of situations—like not knowing whether I’m allowed to sit down or not having tried a Midwest delicacy.
“Marleen lands somewhere in the middle,” Cleo says from her spot at the window. “In all things.”
I stop rearranging the line of notions and knitting tools that make the usual centerpiece and look at her. Her gaze is still
on the dark street. “How do you land in the middle on demons?”
Cleo shrugs. “Marleen’s never going to dismiss anyone who talks about it or believes in it, but personally? She doesn’t buy
in to that shit. That’s a direct quote.”
“Her parents moved away when she was a baby,” Nora explains, following after me and moving the little pots and boxes onto
long trays that she places just so on the table. “She grew up over the border in Wisconsin. Met her wife there. When they decided to move back, anything she
might have believed was muddled in the going and returning.”
That makes me think about how I still need to call my father. To see what he knows. What he doesn’t. What might be muddled.
And figure out how our grandmother has photos of us when he might have no memory of her.
But every time I speak to him, I don’t know how to bring it up. I don’t want to worry him any more than he’s already worried
about Logan and me hanging out in Iowa. Voluntarily.
“Earth to Lexi.”
I blink and find Cleo and Nora both studying me—each now with a glass of wine in their hands. Nora extends a glass to me and I take it with a sheepish smile, careful not to let the red wine slosh onto the yarn all around me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I was thinking about my dad. I still haven’t explained any of this to him, and I don’t know how. You know,
without the inevitable slide into talk of experimental therapies and medications for my psychotic disorder.”
They’re both looking at me like I’ve just announced the man is a serial killer. I think about it and guess that I’ve made
my dad sound that way, which isn’t fair at all.
“He’s just looking out for me,” I assure them. “I mean, you could probably chalk up a lot of my perceived inappropriate behavior
and supposed lack of impulse control to being young and stupid, and he did, but the older you get the more concerned and diagnostic everyone becomes. My dad and stepmother mean really well, but they worry about me. Especially compared to Logan.”
Cleo’s expression darkens. Nora looks even more horrified.
And now I realize how I’ve made Logan sound.
“No, Logan is . . . I mean, I know the way he can come off.” Except I don’t really, because the way he comes off to everyone
everywhere is great and perfect and golden. Except around these people, for some reason. “Logan is . . .” I find myself trying to find words for the enormity of everything