Chapter Eleven
EVAN LEAVES ON THE third afternoon. He stands in the kitchen doorway with his coat and keys, glances toward the living room where I’m reading on the couch, then faces me.
“I should go home,” he says. “You’re cleared for normal activity. You don’t need me underfoot.”
“Thank you for being here.”
He nods and leaves. Dave watches him go without lifting his head. Oscar barks once from the study. The house adjusts to the absence.
THE DOCTOR CLEARS ME at the follow-up. The hematoma is resolving. Normal activity, normal schedule, and no restrictions. I go back to the workshop. I go back to commissions.
O’Hara Miniatures now has a website. Amy built it during the three days I was resting, using a template and photographs she’d been collecting since the charity auction.
She manages inquiries, schedules commissions, and tracks invoices part-time alongside her work for Dad.
Dad has appointed himself Director of Historical Accuracy, a title Amy printed on a card and taped to his study door. He pretends to be annoyed. He’s not.
The first Saturday after I’m cleared, Evan shows up at nine with tools. Dad lets him in without comment, which represents a diplomatic upgrade I didn’t authorize. Evan asks what needs doing. Dad points him toward the garage.
I’m in the workshop wrapping a commissioned room box for shipping when Evan appears in the doorway. “Can I help?”
“The tissue paper is on the shelf. The box needs a layer of bubble wrap inside before the room goes in.”
He picks up the bubble wrap. He starts cutting.
“Not that much,” I say. “You’ll crush the trim if the padding is too tight.”
He stops. He looks at the wrap, then at me. “How much?”
“One layer along the bottom. Two along the sides. Leave a half inch of clearance at the top.”
He measures. He doesn’t eyeball it. Instead he takes the ruler from my workbench and marks the bubble wrap before cutting. Dad appears in the garage doorway holding Oscar and his coffee.
“You’re measuring bubble wrap,” Dad says.
“Penelope said a half inch of clearance.”
“She’s right. The last courier damaged a chair rail because the packing was too loose. One of my research books also arrived with a cracked spine from inadequate padding. I don’t trust couriers. I barely trust the postal service.”
“Dad, the postal service has nothing to do with this.”
“The postal service has everything to do with everything, though that’s a separate conversation.” He sips his coffee. “The wrap looks correct. You may proceed.”
Evan wraps the room box. He holds it at arm’s length while I inspect the padding, the same caution he used when washing Dad’s dishes, every plate handled as though it might be the last one Jean touched. I adjust one corner. He watches how I do it and files the correction.
“Next time I’ll know,” he says.
“Next time you’ll ask first.”
He looks at me. The response landed differently than I meant it, harder and more pointed. I can see him absorbing the distinction. Knowing isn’t the same as asking. He nods.
OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Evan comes for dinners.
He attends appointments. Since the twelve-week scan, he’s been at every appointment I’ve invited him to attend.
He and Dad argue about Chessman on Saturdays while I work in the garage.
I listen while they work, my father and my husband building something I didn’t authorize.
I’m not sure whether it reassures me or frightens me.
At the twenty-two-week anatomy scan, the tech confirms it’s a girl, though we’ve known since the hospital. Two in a row is impossible to dismiss as a mistake.
Evan is beside me. He doesn’t cry this time. He smiles at the monitor, private, unguarded, and the difference registers. The first ultrasound, he cried when the baby became real. Now he smiles when the baby is on the screen. She’s a girl. She’s our daughter.
The tech asks if I’d like to call anyone with the news.
I think about my mother at the grocery store when I pass the tea she liked and in Dad’s garden when the peonies bloom.
She would have been the first call. She would have cried, then asked about names, then told Dad.
Dad would have done exactly what he did at the twelve-week appointment, which is retreat to his study and have a moment.
She would have started knitting something yellow because Mom always knitted in yellow for babies, regardless of sex, because she believed babies should look like sunlight before anyone decided what color they were supposed to be.
“I’ll tell my dad in person,” I say to the tech.
I FIND THE BLANKET on a Thursday.
I’m looking for extra towels in the hall closet at Dad’s house. The closet is a time capsule. Mom organized it five years ago, and nobody has reorganized it since. The towels are on the second shelf, behind a stack of Jean’s gardening magazines and a box I don’t recognize.
The box is small, cardboard, and unmarked.
I pull it out because it’s blocking the towels, and inside is a knitted blanket, unfinished.
Soft yellow yarn, the color of early-morning sunlight, half-completed on a set of bamboo needles Mom preferred.
The stitches are even and careful. I would know her work anywhere.
Mom cast on this blanket without knowing whether I’d ever marry or have a child.
She began it with hope, good yarn, and the assumption that the future would eventually require her preparation.
The needles are still attached. The last row is half-finished, as though she set it down planning to come back.
She didn’t come back. The colon cancer diagnosis came three months later.
She spent her last year in treatment, entered hospice, and died before she could return to it.
This blanket sat in a box in the hall closet while her daughter married a billionaire, got pregnant, and moved back into the house where the blanket was waiting.
Dad didn’t know it was there. He comes into the hallway when he hears me crying, Oscar at his heels. He looks at the blanket in my lap and he stops. “Jean...”
“She started it. She never finished it.”
Dad sits on the hallway floor beside me. His knees creak. Oscar squeezes between us. Dave appears from the living room and lies down at my feet, pressing against my ankles.
“She bought that yarn at the shop in Eastport,” Dad says.
“There was a knitting phase. She made me a scarf that was four feet too long, and I wore it for three winters because telling her it was too long would have started a conversation I wasn’t prepared to have.
” He touches the edge of the blanket. “I didn’t know she’d started this one.
She must have put it away before the diagnosis. Before she knew.”
I hold the blanket in my lap and try to imagine my mother sitting in this hallway, in the living room, or in bed next to Dad, knitting yellow yarn for a grandchild who existed only as hope.
She didn’t know I’d meet and marry Evan or get pregnant.
She just believed I would need this someday, and she started it.
Then the cancer came and took her before she could finish.
“I’m going to finish it,” I say.
Dad nods. He doesn’t say anything else. We sit on the hallway floor until Oscar gets bored and goes to bark at the mailman.
DAD HAS A DATE ON SATURDAY night. “Her name is Barb,” he says, adjusting his collar in the hallway mirror. “She’s a retired school principal. Amy found her on the internet.”
“Amy found you a date on the internet?”
“Amy created a profile without my knowledge and presented me with three candidates. Barb was the only one who didn’t mention cats in her biography.” He smooths his hair. “I’m told she’s ‘fun and active,’ which at my age could mean anything from tennis to surviving a flight of stairs.”
He comes home at nine-thirty. I’m in the workshop. He stands in the garage doorway with his jacket over his arm and Oscar in the crook of the other.
“How was Barb?”
“She insisted on splitting the check and tipped forty percent.” He pauses. “I respect the math. I don’t understand it, but I respect it.” He looks at Oscar, then at the blank spot on the kitchen wall where Mom’s calendar used to hang. “Jean would have liked her.”
He’s quiet for a long time. “We’re not ready,” he says.
He goes upstairs with Oscar behind him. I sit in the workshop with yellow yarn in my lap, a miniature crib on the table for a box I’ll make for my daughter, and my mother’s unfinished blanket waiting for me to pick up where she left off.
My daughter will sleep under a blanket her grandmother began and her mother finished.