How to Knit a Heart Back Home

by Rachael Herron

  Owen took a breath. Slowed his heart further, moving the calmness into his abdomen. Seeing it exactly as it would happen.

  He broke leather on his holster as he had a million times in training drills and on the street, and his Glock filled his hand as easily as air filled his lungs. Finger next to the trigger, not on it, but close, always so close.

  And suddenly, it wasn’t easy anymore.

  An image of Rob flashed into his mind—Rob, dying, bleeding. The report of the guns. The blue of the uniforms huddled around him, the roar of confusion, the stench of panicked sweat.

  Owen’s gun felt foreign. His gut clenched.

  Fuck that.

  He spun around the door and into the shed, his arm outstretched. His legs were strong, his stance unmovable.

  “Freeze! Police! Hands up!” he roared. His voice filled the small metal shed. His finger ached to pull the trigger, and at the same time, he was terrified he would.

  The man in front of him was bent over something—all Owen could see was the ass of his jeans. He dropped what looked to be a pair of bolt cutters. His hands flew up, and then he froze, his back still to Owen. A red hat, something familiar . . .

  “Lace your fingers behind your neck. Now! Back toward me, slow. Slow! ”

  Owen backed out of the door, into the yard. “Keep coming backward toward me. All the way out of the shed. One false move and I’ll blow your fucking head off.” He knew his words were true. He knew now he would shoot. Fifteen years of being a cop, and he’d only had to actually fire once. And he’d shot his best friend.

  “No, n-no. B-borrowing.”

  They all said that they were just borrowing something, picking up something promised to them.

  “Turn around.”

  The man turned.

  Silas. The red bobbles dangling from the end of his cap jumped.

  Owen’s breath left his lungs as if he’d fallen from a great height. “Fuck. Oh, fuck.”

  “What the hell?” said Lucy from behind him.

  “Fuck,” said Owen. There was no better word—it didn’t exist. No apology was going to take care of this one. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  Silas opened and shut his mouth in what looked like fury.

  Owen holstered the gun. He tried to snap the leather and found himself completely unable to manage it. His fingers felt like pieces of cold meat dangling at the ends of his hands. “Why were you in there anyway?” His voice was rougher than he intended it to be.

  Lucy spoke instead of Silas. “I keep the hedge clippers in there. He was going to help my mom later. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”

  Hell.

  “So, you mind explaining what exactly is going on here?” Her voice was cold as she faced him.

  “I’m sorry. I thought your brother was a burglar. I saw him creep into the backyard.” Owen spoke the words, knowing them to be true, but he wasn’t thinking about them. He was thinking about the fact that he’d almost shot Silas.

  He’d almost shot Lucy’s brother. In cold blood. An unarmed man, who’d been in a place he was legally allowed to be.

  “Didn’t . . . c-c-creep.”

  Lucy looked madder than a pissed-off yellow jacket. “I can’t believe this. And I only find out because I forgot the bank drop and came back for it.”

  “I couldn’t be more sorry. I just looked down and saw him, and I thought . . .” Oh, shit.

  But it was too late. She’d picked up on it. Of course she had.

  “You looked down?”

  “Well, I was—um—”

  “Looking for something? My bedroom doesn’t look down here.”

  “I . . .”

  Lucy’s eyes shot ice. “The only upstairs room with a view of the backyard is the spare room.”

  Owen didn’t say anything. His heart was racing as if he’d run up a hill.

  “I see. Find anything you like?” Lucy’s cheeks went red. “You violated my privacy.” She sounded more disappointed in him than anyone had ever been, and he’d let a lot of women down in his past.

  “Not . . . cool,” said Silas, who looked a lot more comfortable now that the gun was put away. “Wait . . . in your bedroom?”

  Lucy ignored her brother and stared at Owen.

  Owen said, “Lucy, I won’t even try to offer an excuse. I’m a cop. We’re nosy, and . . . I needed to know that you were legit. That everything was . . .”

  She cut him off. “You were a cop. I think everyone but you is aware of that. The sooner you get that through your head—” Lucy shook her head as if to clear it. “I can’t believe you did that. Snooped. And then almost shot my brother.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I’m going to get the bank drop. I need both of you gone when I come out.”

  Silas wandered toward the gate, as if to give them some privacy. But Owen held his ground.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said, again. “But I think I’m so thrown by the thought of you being an EMT, fighting fires. It made me wonder who you were, I guess. I can’t handle the thought of you being in danger. I don’t want you to ever be at risk. Ever. I couldn’t be with someone who . . .” His voice trailed off. He meant the words to carry the weight of his worry. He needed them to carry everything he meant, all of his heart. But instead they landed with the force of an anvil, and he knew he couldn’t take them back.

  Lucy met his gaze.

  It was cool out here. He could see the outline of her nipples under the thin cotton of her tee shirt. A blue and orange college football shirt was right up there with overalls in the category of garments he never would have thought sexy. But he was wrong again. He forced his gaze to stay on her face.

  “Just go,” she said.

  If she’d shot him in the heart, it would have hurt less.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Patterns are good and well, but when you know how to knit, forget about them. Use them as a jumping-off place. Don’t live in them. If you lose a page, take it as a sign.

  You always know best.

  —E. C.

  Elbert Romo was standing in front of the Book Spire, tapping his toes and jiggling.

  “Hurry, hurry,” he said.

  “One of these days I’m not going to let you use my bathroom. I’m just flat-out going to refuse and let you explode out here on the sidewalk.” But Lucy opened the door for him. He raced through the dark store in front of her.

  “Wait!” Yesterday she hadn’t put away the . . .

  The postcard stand left in the back room crashed to the ground, and the next thud was Elbert.

  “Goddammit! Elbert! Are you okay?”

  More thuds. Lucy snapped on the lights. Elbert was already up and racing again for the bathroom. “I’m fine!” he called as the door slammed behind him.

  Postcards littered a six-foot radius. There wasn’t a single one that had landed with its mates. It would take hours of sorting.

  Lucy couldn’t imagine being in a more foul mood. She was spoiling for a fight—she could feel it in her veins.

  Five days now, she’d been like this. Five days of leaving her cell phone off inside her overalls pocket. Five days of avoiding Owen.

  He could have easily come into the bookstore, she knew that. He must have walked right past the door as she was inside, working. He was mere paces away, at any moment, inside Grandma Ruby’s parsonage. He was inside the space she knew as well as any building in the whole world. But he must have been avoiding her, too.

  The bookstore, usually a balm in times of trial, wasn’t helping her. Sitting in the children’s section on the cushions didn’t soothe her nerves. Knitting in the craft zone when the store was empty only ended in dropped stitches. And even though Lucy knew it was probably only her imagination, her customers seemed as petulant and cranky as she was. Mildred and Greta had had a heated argument about which cast-on was better, long-tail or cable, which was unlike them. Lucy hadn’t even dared to insert her own opinion, emotions had been so high.

  And at t
he end of each night, as much as Lucy’s body longed to run down the path and throw herself into Owen’s arms, she walked home instead.

  Lucy had taken action, had made that decision once. She’d acted foolishly five nights ago, she’d dealt out those cards. And it proved exactly why she didn’t make rash, hasty decisions, why she kept things the same, why she stayed safely in the same box, keeping things the same way, year after year.

  Because when she didn’t, men pulled guns on the wrong people in her backyard. For Pete’s sake.

  Owen had told her she shouldn’t be on the volunteer fire brigade, which meant he didn’t understand her at all. That he couldn’t be with someone who was. But wouldn’t that be exactly what he would understand? The need to help? To rush in? Why didn’t he get that?

  And he’d snooped in her house while she was gone, which meant he didn’t trust her.

  Worst of all, he’d held a gun on her brother. It would have been something she could forgive if she’d trusted him with that gun, if it had been a simple misunderstanding, if it had been what he’d said it was—a case of Owen thinking he’d caught a burglar in the act.

  But Lucy had been able to read the doubt in Owen’s eyes. Owen hadn’t trusted himself. He’d almost shot her brother—he’d almost made a deadly error, at the cost of her little brother’s life.

  Lucy couldn’t trust Owen. And Owen didn’t trust her.

  And now at the store, all her emotion didn’t seem to fit inside her body, her head. She tried to tamp it down, but it boiled under her skin. She whacked her shin on the book cart that was parked in exactly the same spot it had been left in for the last ten years and cursed, violently. It didn’t help.

  Elbert Romo came out of the bathroom, none the worse for his tumble. “Coffee ready yet?”

  Lucy sighed. “It’s ready, Elbert.”

  Tunelessly whistling like he did every morning, he grabbed the latest copy of People and flipped through it, dropping the blow-in subscription forms on the floor as he walked.

  Mildred and Greta came in. They smiled at her and poured themselves a cup of coffee and sat with Elbert at the table. Mildred took out a piece of knitting that looked like it was made of plastic rope. She held it up. “Dish scrubbies. They’re tearing up my hands, but you can wash them in the dishwasher to clean them!”

  Greta rolled her eyes.

  Mildred said, “I saw that. What?”

  “I keep telling you. If it’s a dish scrubby, then why on earth would you wash it in the dishwasher?”

  Mildred humphed and kept knitting.

  Lucy took a deep—and what she hoped was a steadying—breath. It just made her choke instead. She coughed for a moment.

  Just something to do. That’s what her store was to them, wasn’t it? Just a place to hang out, to kill time. It was one of multiple places in town where people could find coffee in the morning: the Rite Spot usually had coffee for whatever meeting it was hosting, and Tillie’s most popular meal of the day was breakfast.

  She didn’t even charge them for the coffee. She thought about changing that—suddenly asking for money for refills—then she thought of the sad eyes that Elbert would give her, and the soft dollar bills that Greta would press into her hand, the quarters that would slide across the countertop. They might even stop coming altogether. She knew they were all on fixed incomes.

  Lucy closed her eyes and listened to the click of Mildred’s needles and the scratch of Greta’s pencil as she worked the crossword in the paper that she’d bought down the street at Tillie’s—not even from Lucy’s stack.

  Whitney was probably right. They should work together. Whitney was a smart, savvy professional woman who was making a good life for herself from a small-town business.

  While Lucy was losing money on coffee.

  She sighed again.

  Well, at least Lucy could use the time to work on the book. She brought the knitting bag full of Eliza’s papers out of the back room and set it on the counter, next to the register. The ideal place to work would be at the large table, but that looked good and occupied already, what with Elbert, Mildred, and Greta all sitting there.

  Lucy squared her shoulders. She was a writer now. She had a book to put together.

  She had to find the sleeve part of the bookstore cardigan pattern. It would be the first pattern in the book, holding the place of honor, if she was able to find it. She set down her cup of coffee to her right side, and to her left she placed the sweater swatch; then she centered a dusty, cat-hair-covered box in front of her on the counter. Sigur Rós played on the stereo and when she looked out the narrow clerestory windows, fog that looked like gray angora fiber drifted by in wisps.

  Lucy opened the flaps of the box, the last one she’d found in Owen’s storage unit. The one with the mouse, or rat, or whatever it was. At the thought, hairs rose all over Lucy’s body and she shuddered, but she kept going.

  Three whole packets of Eliza Carpenter’s notes were in the box, scattered in among old romance novels, tied with lengths of faded blue handspun yarn.

  She tugged at the first knot and started to read.

  Oh, the voice. That had always been Lucy’s favorite thing about Eliza Carpenter, that personable voice that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. She didn’t tell the reader to use U.S. size-8 needles—she asked them to find their very favorite pair of needles and adjust the pattern to suit the joy of their own hands.

  It made for reckless knitting sometimes. But always beautiful.

  What if she were not only to rewrite these lovely patterns into different sizes, in standard writing, coding each the way knitters expected to find them—what if she also somehow managed to pull out the sections of Eliza’s voice and leave them intact?

  Lucy’s mind started to race as she put pieces of patterns next to jotted notes, mixing the pages she’d been carrying around with these newly found ones.

  It could be more of a coffee-table book. Big glossy pictures of the sweaters, beautifully photographed. One page of Eliza’s conversational writing, facing Lucy’s scrubbed-up version? Or all together at the back?

  Then she wouldn’t lose passages like this one:

  Once, walking along the beach with Joshua, we clambered up a high, huge rock the size of a house and sat, staring at the ocean, watching the sunset. When we turned to climb down, we found we were stranded, the water too high and dangerous to swim to shore, even though it was less than ten feet away. I pulled my knitting out of my bag. His head was cold, and he’d forgotten his hat, as he always did, so I fashioned a double-stranded garter stitch rectangle that I put over his head, and fastened it with two cable needles. And then I did my own knitting, and by the time we got down, I had most of a sleeve, the cuff of which was stained by moss in a careless moment. I love that bit of discolored sleeve now, my souvenir of the night on the rock with my beloved.

  These vignettes were tucked among her patterns, as if Eliza had just wanted to put them somewhere, just in case.

  They would be the book. The patterns were what the world clamored for, but the parts that Lucy knew were the best were these, a non-pattern for a garter-stitch rectangle to fit a cold, loved head on an unexpected evening.

  A simple, one-stitch pattern like that, vying for space next to the next one—Lucy’s fingers drifted over the page titled “Seven Seas,” a shawl that was separate oceans of lace joined by rivers of I-cord that didn’t make any sense at all until the knitter attached the last little bit and shook it the right way, and then the shawl fell into perfect proportions to drape across cold shoulders on a breezy seaside evening.

  “Genius.” Lucy breathed the word. It would go perfectly with the “Cypress Hollow Lighthouse” sweater in Silk Road, the new companion piece. . . . Knitters would line up to make it, place it in their Ravelry queues, discuss it on knitting forums. She could see it perfectly.

  Lucy pulled out another packet of yellowed, folded sheets, tied together with three or four plies of a creamy handspun yarn. Eliza’s
dark, spare script was the best thing she’d seen today. At least she had this. Lucy placed her hands flat on the papers and closed her eyes. She breathed in slowly. She wouldn’t think of walking down that back path to the parsonage. But her traitorous cheeks heated anyway. Just thinking about him did this to her? She was pathetic. No better than when she was in high school.

  Think only of Eliza.

  Between a pattern for a raglan pullover and a cabled scarf was a page covered by a long paragraph.

  We had to put Old Daphne down today. She was a good sheep, my sheep, one of my very favorites. She never liked Joshua, which set her apart from the other sheep. They always love him. Instead, she was ornery and grumpy and liked only me and warm, sunlit grass. And her wool was the finest we ever raised. Even spun in the grease, it was lovely, and when washed and carded, it practically spun itself. A breath was all it took to lock the twist, and it always plied up into a lofty, bouncy, strong yarn that over the years has made three of my most favorite sweaters, including the one I’m wearing in the barn as I write this. I’m watching Joshua clean out her stall, pretending the end of her life doesn’t matter to him. But it does. He’ll tell me so later, and I won’t say I told you so.

  Another page, a sketch of a cardigan with a crazy zigzag collar at the top, and below:

  We had to call the fire brigade out yesterday afternoon.

  Lucy’s heartbeat quickened, and she held the paper closer to her eyes. What were the chances of this?

  Joshua has a stronger nose than I, and he smelled smoke while we were having coffee on the back porch. We thought it was Hooper’s controlled burn up on the ridge at first, but it turned out to be a small fire in my kitchen. It started in the electrical outlet next to the stove. I can’t remember, in all my years of living on this ranch, and everything we’ve gone through, ever being that scared. I felt like a goose. I still do. Joshua was perfect—threw baking soda on it, when I would have thrown a bucket of water. The brigade came out, volunteers, all of them, and they tromped around my parlor, and they couldn’t tell us anything that Joshua didn’t already know, since he put the wiring in this house with his own two hands, but it was them being here that mattered. It calmed me down like hands on a skitterish lamb. They were exactly what I needed. I can’t imagine this valley not having that brigade, and the town would be less without their bravery.