The Sweetgum Knit Lit Society

by Beth Pattillo

  “How much less than forever will it be?” Jake looked at her with the wide-eyed innocence of a nine-year-old boy.

  Merry chuckled. “A lot less than forever, honey. And Dad will be at your game tomorrow. He promised.”

  Her reassurance mollified Jake, who decided to risk a bite of the casserole. Merry watched out of the corner of her eye as he placed the tiniest bite imaginable on his fork, transferred it to his tongue, and then swallowed as if ingesting poison.

  “Did it kill you?” she teased.

  Jake frowned. “I don’t know. Depends on if it’s fast-acting or not.”

  Fast-acting? Where had he learned that? Courtney had probably been letting him sneak into her room again to watch the forbidden CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

  The rattle and hum of the garage door opening caught everyone’s attention.

  “Daddy’s home!” shrieked Sarah, her blond halo of curls flying as she leaped from the chair and raced out of the room.

  “Wait! I get to talk to him first!” Jake yelled, streaking after her. Only Courtney remained at the table with Merry.

  “Whatever,” she said with a flip of her stick-straight hair over her shoulder. Her darker blond mane would have been as curly as Sarah’s if she didn’t ruthlessly attack it each morning with her two-hundred-dollar ceramic flat iron.

  Merry took the opportunity to wolf down her meal. Rarely did she have the chance to eat her food while it was still warm. Jake and Sarah had Jeff pinned down in the kitchen, and she could hear the two children battling for their father’s attention and Jeff’s deep-voiced responses. He wasn’t the lead bass in the church choir for nothing.

  By the time Jeff appeared in the dining room doorway, Merry was finished with her meal. She hopped up, empty plate in hand. “I’ll fix yours. Go ahead and sit down.”

  Jeff smiled his thanks, but he wasn’t nearly as chatty with her as he’d been with the kids. He did greet Courtney, who shrugged and responded with a sullen, “Hey.”

  Merry’s eyes met Jeff’s across the dining room. They exchanged a mutual grimace at the trials of parenting a teenage girl, and then Merry hustled off to the kitchen for Jeff’s dinner. When she returned, Courtney had disappeared, leaving her alone with her husband for the first time in the very long week since the indicator on the little test stick had turned pink.

  “You’re home earlier than I thought you’d be.” She set the plate in front of him. “Do you want some iced tea?”

  “That would be great.”

  Jeff was still as handsome as he’d been the day she married him almost fifteen years ago. How unfair that women battled the aging process with every weapon at their disposal while men simply evolved into a deeper degree of masculinity.

  “Mom!” Courtney’s shriek traveled down the stairs and into the dining room. “Make Sarah get out of my room!” A high-pitched preschooler wail immediately followed.

  Jeff dropped his fork. “Is it too much to hope for a little peace and quiet when I come home?” Weariness tinged his voice and his expression.

  “Mo-om!” Courtney’s second wail competed with her sister’s sobs.

  The dryer buzzed from the laundry room off the kitchen, signaling that Jake’s uniform was clean.

  “Mom, can you get that?” he called from the family room, where he was no doubt killing an alien life form on his PlayStation 3.

  Merry felt the first tear slide down her cheek, quickly followed by the second. Jeff looked at her, and though he tried to hide it, she could see his frustration.

  “I quit,” she whispered, the words mixed with the salt of tears on her tongue.

  “What?” Jeff stood and picked up his empty plate. “What did you say?”

  “I quit.” More forcefully this time, a bit bolder. The words felt good in her mouth, slipping from her lips.

  Jeff did manage a faint smile. “Are you having a midlife crisis?”

  Merry laughed, a sharp, short bark that sounded as caustic as she felt. “Hardly.”

  Now Jeff’s brow knitted together in concern. He wasn’t a bad man—just an overworked one.

  “I’ll do better,” he said. Merry saw that look of panic edge into his eyes, the look men got when they thought their wife might leave them home alone with the kids.

  “I don’t know if I can do it anymore, Jeff.” She hated that she cried when she was angry or upset. Why couldn’t she just rant and rave like her father had? Maybe she should try throwing a few dishes or punching the back door just to see if it helped.

  But she couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. Not Merry McGavin. Wife of one of Sweetgum’s prominent attorneys. One-time president of the PTA. Chair of the Christian education committee at church.

  “I’ll sort things out with the girls,” Jeff said. “Why don’t you go take a shower?”

  What she really wanted to do was talk to him. Like they used to do, when they were dating. When they could spend hours in each other’s company and never run out of conversation.

  “Okay. Thanks.” A shower would feel good, and she knew it was the best offer she was likely to get.

  Jeff stepped toward her and bent down to kiss her forehead. “Sorry for being such a grouch.”

  “It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t really. Because she was pregnant, and she was afraid to tell her husband. Because the little cracks in her relationship with Jeff—normal, ordinary flaws—now seemed to be multiplying and spreading. And because the life they had built together, which had once seemed to her as strong as an oak, had somehow become as fragile as a house of cards.

  Hannah squinted against the darkness to make out the last few words on the page. She ached from sitting on the bare ground outside her mom’s bedroom window, but the porch light had burned out again, and only the soft glow from the opening above her head held back the night. She ignored the muffled noises coming from the room above. Gentry Carmichael would leave soon. He never stayed the night. And Hannah wasn’t going back in that trailer until he was good and gone.

  She frowned as she concentrated on the words that blurred in front of her tired eyes. Something about limes and that stupid Amy wanting money to treat her friends because they had all taken their turn buying limes for the other girls. Hannah rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, and they came away stained with flakes of dried mascara. She’d probably sleep through class again tomorrow, and Mrs. Windbag (otherwise known was Mrs. Winston) would yell at her.

  Limes. What a stupid excuse for a treat. Hannah let out an exasperated sound and closed the book. If the porch light had been on, she would’ve brought out her yarn and needles from their hiding place underneath the sagging wooden steps. She’d been practicing a lot after school before her mother got home from work, and she thought it looked pretty good. Kind of thick and stiff for a scarf, not soft like she’d imagined, but at least you had something to show for your time when you were done. Not like hanging out at the cemetery with Kristen after school, waiting for the boys to show up with flasks and cigarettes. It hadn’t been worth it, just for the chance to borrow Kristen’s iPod.

  Since her encounter with the librarian, instead of going to the cemetery after school to make out with some loser behind a headstone, she sat in the sun with the yarn and needles in her hands. She’d replaced the brown paper sack from Munden’s with a Ziploc bag she’d scored from the school kitchen. Sealed tight it kept the wet and the bugs away.

  A door banged inside the trailer, and footsteps clomped toward the front door. Finally. Midnight had come and gone long ago. Quickly Hannah slid away from the pool of light and around the corner of the trailer into the darkness.

  Gentry appeared on the porch, as thick around the middle as he was in the head. He’d never paid much attention to her until last summer when she got her chest. Since then he stared at her—no, at them—in a way that made her feel as if she needed a good scrubbing.

  She clutched the book in one hand and held her breath as he thumped down the steps and walked
toward his pickup truck. He knew she was out there somewhere in the darkness, waiting for him to leave. Sometimes he came looking for her, and she had to run off into the woods for a good long while. Most of the time though, like tonight, he showed no sign of remembering that she existed. He cranked the truck’s ancient engine, stoked the gas pedal a couple of times, and reversed out of the dirt driveway.

  Those girls in Little Women, those sisters, they didn’t have any idea what real life was like. Sure, their father was off fighting a war, but they had a mom who cared if they came home. They had a rich old aunt who would die someday and leave them a ton of money. And they had each other.

  Hannah had nobody. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago, and she wasn’t about to forget it.

  With a sigh, she closed the book and hoisted herself off the ground. If she was lucky, her mom would already be snoring when she sneaked down the hall to her bedroom.

  Eugenie turned off the lamp in the living room and walked to the front door to double-check the lock. She was usually in bed by now, but tonight she was restless. She’d long ago fixed her supper and cleaned up the kitchen. Her clothes for the next day were laid out neatly across the other twin bed in her room. Since tomorrow was Tuesday, she would eat lunch at the café rather than bring a sandwich from home. Yes, she’d done everything she always did on a weekday evening, but still her routine felt incomplete, as if she’d forgotten to change her pocketbook to match her shoes or neglected to have the mail stopped the one week a year she visited her college roommate in Louisville.

  Incomplete. A nagging feeling that an important task had been left undone. She’d felt that more and more lately since the councilmen had begun to pressure her into retiring. But it wasn’t Homer and his ilk, really, that caused the feeling. No, there was some other reason. One Eugenie couldn’t put her finger on. And not being able to pin something down was an unusual condition for Eugenie.

  Wiggles, her ginger cat, meowed in protest when she slid him from the center of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The Sweetgum Courier lay folded on her nightstand, waiting for her. She would doze off halfway through its pages, waking sometime in the wee hours of the morning to lay the paper aside, turn off the lamp, and truly succumb to slumber. No one who knew her would suspect that Eugenie Pierce couldn’t face turning out the light and lying down in the darkness.

  The yarn flowed through Camille’s fingers like liquid silk. Her mother sat next to her, propped up in the hospital bed that dominated the tiny living room as she read aloud from Little Women. Camille might not have been too thrilled with Eugenie’s abrupt change of the reading schedule, but Camille’s mother was delighted. She’d actually giggled a little bit and said it was her favorite book as a girl.

  “We’re supposed to reform some terrible teenager by reading what Eugenie calls the ‘girlhood classics,’ ” Camille had told her mother with a frown. “I don’t know what Eugenie was thinking.”

  But Camille’s disapproval hadn’t dimmed her mother’s enthusiasm. Usually Camille was the one to do the reading aloud, so at least her mother’s interest in Eugenie’s choice meant Camille could make headway on the scarf for next month’s meeting. The stitch was fitting. Solid. Unchanging. Boring.

  Alex hadn’t called, not since the night of the last Knit Lit Society meeting. As each day passed, her anticipation turned to apprehension and then to anxiety. He’d promised to come back to Sweetgum, to take her out to dinner, but then he’d promised before and failed to deliver.

  “Camille?” Her mother smiled at her over the top of the book. “Should I stop? I don’t think you’re enjoying Little Women as much as I am.”

  “No, keep going.” She forced a smile to answer the one on her mother’s face. “I just spaced out for a minute.”

  “If you’re sure?” Her mother’s smile, like Camille’s feelings about Alex, turned anxious. “I know you must be bored.” Her mother repeated the words that sliced through Camille like a knife. Of course she was bored. She was twenty-four years old, stuck in Sweetgum with no end in sight, and torn every day between anger at her responsibility and fear of being released from it.

  “No, Mama. I’m not bored. Please keep reading.”

  Amy March, the youngest sister, might have found her happy ending with the wealthy man of her dreams, but Camille knew that only happened in fiction. No one in real life was ever quite that blessed. Yet even that knowledge wasn’t enough to kill the hope inside of her.

  Esther could hear Frank churning like a buzz saw in his sleep in the bedroom next to hers. She closed her book and set it aside on the pristine white satin comforter. Normally she fell asleep before Frank so she wouldn’t be bothered by his snoring. Even with a wall between them, she could hear the cacophony that told her he was lying on his back again without his special mask. Fine. If he wanted to kill himself, he could just keep on going the way he had been. Even the results of the angiogram hadn’t been enough to scare him.

  Frank had flat-out refused the open-heart surgery the cardiologist wanted to perform. They’d driven home from Nashville in complete silence. Even when they stopped at the mall to pick up his new suit that had been altered, they never spoke. Esther was furious, and Frank didn’t care.

  Esther’s fingers tightened on the covers, and she pulled them up more firmly beneath her armpits. He was throwing his life away. She knew it. He knew it. And they both knew why he was doing it. Only Frank didn’t know that she knew. He didn’t know that she was well aware he’d paid a visit to her sister. Frank thought she was oblivious, but Esther Jackson was nobody’s fool.

  She snorted, an unladylike noise she would never have emitted in public. Her gaze fell to the copy of Little Women on the bed next to her. She’d always identified with the calm, sensible Meg March. Conduct yourself with dignity. Choose an appropriate man. Raise your children properly, and be an asset to your community. Esther had done all of those things, with one exception. One enormous, life-changing exception.

  And as a result, here she was sleeping alone, her son and grandchildren hundreds of miles away, her husband even farther, and she was left with only a book for company.

  Merry rubbed her eyes, bleary from lack of sleep, and studied the list on the monogrammed pad in front of her. Blankets, bottles, diapers, onesies, sleepers, crib sheets, burp cloths. It continued on down the page, an exhaustive recital of all the items a modern-day mother needed before she could bring a child into the world. Merry had given all these things away when Sarah turned three, sure in the knowledge that she would never need them again. The only thing she’d kept was the crib. She’d stored it in the attic, thinking that one day she’d bring it down for her grandchildren to sleep in when they visited.

  The clock on the mantel in the living room chimed midnight. Much as Merry hated the inevitable exhaustion tomorrow would bring, she was glad for these few moments to sit and absorb the peace of the house. Her family rested safely and comfortably upstairs. The kitchen was clean, the den picked up, the dining room table wiped clean of dinner debris. She’d made the kids’ lunches for the next day, ready to grab in the mad dash out the door to school. The breakfast casserole was assembled and waiting in the fridge, a Tuesday tradition she followed as faithfully as she attended church.

  Merry looked at the list again. She would have to hide it. She still wasn’t ready to tell Jeff yet and see the discouragement on his face, and she certainly wasn’t prepared to break the news to the kids. Courtney would be embarrassed. Jake would think it was weird. Sarah would feel displaced.

  Merry sighed, ripped the page from the pad of paper, and folded it neatly. She found her purse on the sideboard and slipped the list into the zipper pocket where she kept her tampons (not much need of those for a while) and Tylenol. Yes, she could predict how everyone in the house would feel about her pregnancy. Everyone, that is, except for herself. How would Marmee have felt if she’d turned up with child in the middle of Little Women? Probably she would have handled it with the s
ame selfless aplomb with which she did everything else.

  She wandered into the den, saw her knitting bag by her recliner, and settled in to work for a while. She wanted to finish the scarf for the next meeting so she could get back to work on the layette. She suspected that the next few months would pass as quickly—and as slowly—as any in her life ever had.

  Ruthie knew she never should have let Frank in the house that night. With a sigh, she set her book on the end table next to her chair and picked up her knitting needles again. She’d been alternating between the two all evening, too restless to settle into one thing for any length of time. And yet still the time had passed, a great deal of it actually. It must be after midnight.

  She didn’t believe in television, didn’t own one, but tonight she wouldn’t have minded the company of a late-night talk show or infomercial. Anything to distract her from a lifetime of regrets.

  Ruthie abandoned her favorite chair for the comforts of warm milk in her little kitchen. Ruthie never had trouble sleeping, but since Frank’s last visit she’d been as restless as one of those lions at the zoo, wearing out a path in the dirt as it paced back and forth. Caged but not hopeless. Frustrated but not vanquished. An apt description of the last thirty years of her life.

  She stirred the milk as it heated in the saucepan and tried not to remember Frank’s words of a few nights before.

  “I want to leave Esther.” He’d been sitting on the sofa, she in her favorite chair. No part of them but their souls ever touched.

  “You can’t do that.” She’d forced herself to deny him even as her heart thumped so loudly in her chest that she thought she, not Frank, might have a “cardiac event,” as folks their age were starting to call it.

  “I can leave her. I’m going to.” He looked like a petulant little boy, scowling. She could see the fear that had etched new lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth.