“But I still need to do the market research…”
“Of course you do. I’m no sucker!” They laughed together, then Teresa pursed her lips. “The location is going to be what makes or breaks it, Jen. There are so many yarn shops and so many online sources. You’re going to have to find the perfect place, with ambiance and no competition.”
“Maybe a smaller town, with tourist trade.”
“That would be good. You could sell online, as well.” She picked up the avocado and admired it. “Teach workshops in knitting fruit or sell your patterns, too. You could start a trend.”
“I don’t think so,” Jen retorted but she was thinking about Teresa’s advice and getting excited about the prospect of opening her shop. Could the dream that she couldn’t even voice several weeks before be so close as that? It seemed like it.
Teresa fingered the lacy hat for Cin. “She’ll love this,” she said. “It’s just funky enough. What are you making for Pluto?”
Jen winced. “I don’t know. The only thing I could think of was a sweater, but I’m running out of time.”
“Tick tock,” Teresa said. “Does he still use that shoulder bag?”
“The one that looks like it fell through the space-time continuum from 1972?” Jen asked.
“It’s too dirty to have made that quick of a trip,” Teresa said. “Honestly, the thing looks like he’s dragged it around the planet eight or ten times.”
“He pretty much has. He takes it everywhere.”
“Then that boy needs a style upgrade.”
“He’ll never part with it…”
Teresa waved off this objection with one hand. “How do you know that he’s not secretly desperate for a replacement but doesn’t know where to find one? Besides, we can solve this easily.”
“How?”
“We’ll make him a bag and felt it. It will be very chic and useful too.”
Jen frowned down at the incomplete lace shawl. “But I don’t think there’s time. And I don’t know how to felt…”
“I’ll proxy knit for you,” Teresa said breezily. She was already picking through her stash. “I can get it done tonight if I get to it and stop drinking. You’ll see.” She held up two balls of heavy wool. “Black or blue?”
“The indigo one. It looks more natural.”
“Good plan. I’ll do a Fair Isle thing with this lighter blue.” Teresa pulled out some thick needles and cast on. She worked with daunting speed, giving her all to the project once she had committed to it.
As usual, Jen was impressed by her friend’s drive.
“So,” Teresa asked after she had established her pattern stitch. “Tell me about the mystery dude. Is he like Steve?”
Jen choked on a mouthful of crantini. “About as different as a guy could be, which is funny if you think about it.”
“How so?”
Jen ended up having to tell Teresa the whole story of Zach from the beginning, which made Teresa laugh out loud more than once. “You should be the one taking pictures,” she charged, when Jen told her about Zach impersonating Elvis. “This guy sounds like a hoot.”
“He is.” Jen smiled to herself. “He makes me laugh.”
“And maybe that’s good enough,” Teresa said quietly. Jen glanced up at her friend’s sober tone. Teresa shrugged. “You’ve got to know, Jen, that this is the kind of guy that is around for a good time but not a long time.”
“Well, I wondered.” Jen looked down at her work, finding herself disappointed by her friend’s reality check. Then she wondered why she hadn’t been skeptical sooner. She and Zach had made no plans to get together before Christmas Day, though, and nothing had been said about any connection after she repaid her debt to Zach and played fake fiancé at his family dinner. He hadn’t even asked if she’d been working this weekend. Never mind New Year’s Eve.
Doubt took root in her sucker heart and grew a little leaf.
Teresa leaned over to bump shoulders with her, apparently sensing her change of mood. “But you know, Jen, maybe what he’s given you already is good enough. You’ve had fun, you’re happier than you’ve been and you’ve become confident enough to go back to school and pick up your life again. All that and great sex too. There are people who’ve been married for decades and gotten less out of their relationship than that.”
It was true. Logically, Jen knew as much. She decided to stick to her knitting and be glad of the gifts Zach brought her way. It would be greedy to expect anything more.
Even if she was feeling a bit greedy, she’d get over it.
Sooner or later.
* * *
Christmas Eve dinner at Natalie’s was an event to look forward to. Jen always enjoyed it. Each year, Natalie picked a theme and they decorated and cooked accordingly. It was a collaborative effort and the guest list tended to be flexible.
Natalie’s compromise with Gran was that Gran would attend the Christmas Eve dinner as a party instead of a religious holiday. In recent years, they had begun singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve again, in lieu of going to church, which suited pretty much everyone. The annual family gift exchange was sufficiently traditional to please both Gran and Natalie, although they had argued the pagan roots of Christian tradition to death years ago.
This year, they were cooking Chinese food. Jen had found some red paper lanterns in Chinatown and hung them throughout Natalie’s big kitchen and out to the porch. Her contribution to the evening was hot and sour soup, which was five-alarm stuff, as well as vegetables in a spicy Szechwan sauce.
M.B. had brought chopsticks, pot stickers and dumplings for appetizers with various dips, and fireworks for afterward. He was busy showing Gran how to use the chopsticks, with mixed success.
Gerry was chopping vegetables in the kitchen with his usual vigor—could the man do anything by half measures? Jen didn’t think so and simply tried to stay out of his way.
Gran had arrived with some take-out deep-fried chicken bo-bo balls with red sweet and sour sauce. Natalie had put them into the fridge, but would have to heat them up again before they ate.
Pluto had managed to bring his guitar. He parked himself in one corner of the kitchen and strummed while everyone else worked.
Cin was the last to arrive and she was in what Gran called a royal mood when she did arrive. “Ian’s not coming,” she said, flicking the door shut with more force than was necessary. She peeled off her coat and chucked it in the direction of the coat hooks, not troubling to pick it up when it landed on the floor.
“But why not?” Natalie asked, glancing up from her stirring and frying. “He always comes.”
“He’s working,” Cin said, as if this was a sin beyond redemption. She thunked a big bottle of wine on the counter so hard that it might have shattered if the glass hadn’t been so cheap. Jen guessed Cin intended to drink most of it herself. “Just like he’s been working every day and every night since Thanksgiving.” She heaved a sigh. “I’ve tried to be understanding—”
“You couldn’t be understanding to save your life,” Pluto teased and got a glare for his attempt to be funny.
Cin returned to her lament. “—but I’ve run out of patience with it and with him.” She peeled away the foil around the top of the bottle with impatience. “I think I’m going to move out. It’ll probably be months before he notices, but whatever.”
“Why would he be working so much?” M.B. asked, the voice of reason. As always, he focused on logic and tried to take the emotional charge out of Cin’s attitude. “Do you two need extra money?”
Cin threw herself into a chair, not having any of it. “We always get by. No flights to New York for lunch to buy diamond rings, but that’s never been an issue before.”
“I thought you were thinking of buying a house,” Natalie reminded her daughter.
Cin scoffed. “We could both work double time until we’re dead, and still be unable to afford real estate in this town.”
“Then move to another town,” Pluto sugg
ested. Cin threw a pillow at him. “Come on, answering the phone at Nature Sprouts isn’t exactly an irreplaceable career opportunity.”
“I like it here,” Cin said, sulking the way she did when she didn’t want to be talked out of sulking.
“Maybe Ian has new responsibilities at work,” Gran suggested, ever the supporter of such thinking. “You can’t fault a man for being ambitious, or taking advantage of opportunity. Why, he could be trying to get a promotion!”
“Except that Ian never has been ambitious before.” Cin wrenched open the screw top on the wine and glowered at them all. “I can’t ask him because I never see him. Not to mention the fact that I can’t even tell you the last time we had sex.”
Jen and her grandmother were the only ones apparently thinking that this was too much information.
“But you are mentioning it,” Pluto teased.
“Obviously,” Cin snarled.
“Nothing like a good orgasm to improve a woman’s mood,” Natalie said as she stirred.
“Works for both genders,” Gerry said and the two smiled at each other. M.B. rolled his eyes and got a cup of tea for Gran, who looked ruffled.
“She never learned such talk in my house,” Gran muttered and M.B. made a soothing noise that seemed to reassure her.
“I always thought she was an angel,” Jen confided in her grandmother. “But a naughty one.”
Gran laughed in surprise, almost spilling her tea in the process.
Meanwhile, Pluto perched on the chair beside Cin, his manner playful. “I don’t suppose the timing of Ian’s sudden work schedule is in any way linked to your turning him down.”
Cin glared at him. “I’ve never turned Ian down for anything.” She got a tumbler from the cupboard and poured herself a healthy serving. “Maybe that’s the problem. The man has my number and he knows it.”
“Nobody has your number,” Jen contributed. “You change it all the time.”
“Or have it unlisted,” Pluto teased.
Cin ignored them both. She threw back a gulp of wine.
Jen cleared her throat. “Did he hear us on the phone?”
“When?” Cin demanded, her eyes narrowed.
“When you were talking about upgrading, and saying you’d have Zach’s love child.”
“You didn’t!” Gran protested. Natalie choked back a laugh and Cin, for the first time in Jen’s memory, blushed crimson. “That was a joke,” she insisted. “And I was at work anyway.”
She’d seemed pretty serious to Jen, but Jen thought it a bad idea to say as much.
“Oh, come on,” Pluto urged. “You told me about him proposing with the Batman ring from the cereal box. You said you laughed at him.”
“Cincinnati McKee!” Gran said in shock and put down her teacup. “You didn’t do such a thing!”
“Pluto mentioned it at Thanksgiving,” M.B. observed.
“I thought it a joke,” Gran said. “One in very bad taste.”
“Of course I laughed at him,” Cin said indignantly. “It was a joke. You’re supposed to laugh at jokes: that’s why people make them.”
M.B. looked skeptical. “You’re saying Ian made a joke?”
Pluto grinned. “Ian, the straight arrow you’ve been living with for ten years, the guy who couldn’t hold on to a punch line if it was Velcro’d to his hands?”
Jen bit back a smile. It was an apt analogy. Ian was stoic and noble and good to Cin. He could be charming, but he was not funny.
Zach was funny.
Cin fidgeted. “It was a joke. I know it. He was just teasing.”
M.B. sat down beside Cin in the silence that followed. “Was it?” he asked gently. She looked up at him, clearly uncertain. “Are you sure? Maybe you hurt his feelings.”
“Of course, I’m sure it was a joke,” Cin insisted. “He couldn’t have been serious. It was a green plastic Batman ring that he got out of the cereal box, for goodness sake!” She turned to Jen. “And where’s your rock from Tiffany? That would be an engagement ring. That would be a proposal that a woman could take seriously.”
“Material waste and over-consumption,” Gerry intoned as he carried plates to the table. “What difference does it make what kind of ring it is? It’s a symbol of the connection between two people, no more than that. A circle of grass should suit you just as well.”
“Or a green plastic Batman ring out of a cereal box,” M.B. noted. Cin took another swig of wine and looked sour.
“Or the key ring off a pop can,” Pluto said and rolled his eyes. “Women are big for that option.”
“You’ve tried it?” Jen teased and he laughed.
“Not with any success. C’mon let’s see your rock.”
Jen shrugged. “I don’t have one.”
“No time to charter a plane to fly to New York with your busy schedule?” Gerry asked, his tone acid. “I suppose planning a huge wedding does cut into your leisure time.”
“I’m not planning a big wedding,” Jen said.
“But the Coxwells are,” Natalie said.
Jen left that one alone.
“I think the biggest diamond on the eastern seaboard was his ambition, wasn’t it?” Gerry sneered.
Jen met the older man’s gaze and decided she’d had enough of his bullying. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, Gerry, that some people will sometimes say something untrue just to pull your chain?”
Pluto laughed. M.B. coughed into his hand, but when Jen looked, his eyes were twinkling.
Gerry inhaled and straightened. “I don’t see anything funny about my expressing a concern for the future of the planet…”
“Except that you’re so serious about it,” Natalie interjected. “Whatever happened to mutual tolerance? Remember ‘peace, love, and understanding’? We don’t have to all have the same answer to every question.”
Natalie and Gerry eyed each other from across the kitchen, and Jen sensed an unfamiliar vibration between them. It looked to her as if Gerry was waiting for Natalie to blink, while Natalie simply smiled back at him, her chin held high. The expression in her eyes was a bit harder than it tended to be when she looked at Gerry. They stared at each other for a long moment, then his lips turned and he strode back across the kitchen to the stove.
He slammed a pot lid and Natalie ignored him.
“I don’t have a ring because Zach and I aren’t getting married,” Jen said quietly, feeling it was best to make the truth clear to her family.
“Yet,” Natalie supplied with vigor. “It’s in your charts that you’ll be together and really, there’s nothing wrong with taking your time.”
“You mean we won’t be going to a wedding at the big Episcopalian church in Rosemount after all?” Gran demanded. “I’ve told all my friends and I’ve already bought a hat.”
“It’ll happen, Mom,” Natalie reassured her mother before Jen could say anything. “All Jen and Zach need is a little space.”
Jen felt everyone look at her, then look away.
Cin, of course, hadn’t really been interested in the conversation around her. “I’m sure Ian has a girlfriend,” she complained, taking the conversation back to her own woes once again.
“Well, if you turned him down, it’s hard to blame him, isn’t it?” Pluto asked.
“He wasn’t serious!” Cin wailed.
“Sounds like he was,” Jen couldn’t help but note.
“Maybe you should ask him,” M.B. suggested.
“While you can,” Pluto added quietly, but Cin ignored them all. She was too busy draining her glass of wine and getting herself another one.
“We’re almost ready,” Gerry said, sounding long-suffering.
“Don’t forget my bo-bo balls,” Gran said with anticipation and Natalie got to her feet. “They’re so good.”
“Of course, Mom.” Natalie returned to the kitchen, opened the fridge and removed the little brown paper bag. Jen could see her mother over the island that separated the eating area from the work area of the kitchen. Na
talie hummed a little as she put a pan on the stove with a bit of oil in the bottom, waited until it was hot, then popped the deep fried balls of chicken into the fat again.
What Jen could also see but Natalie could not see was Gerry’s face. He stood beside the sink, watching Natalie work, his expression one of horror.
“What are those?” he asked in a tone that indicated he already knew the answer.
“Bo bo balls,” Natalie said. “Mom’s favorite. They have chicken in them and are deep fried. I’m sure you’ve had them before.”
“But this is a vegetarian kitchen!”
“Live and let live, Gerry,” Natalie said impatiently.
“Is that what they said to the chickens before they were slaughtered?”
Natalie turned to face Gerry, the take-out dish of bright red sauce in her hand. “Would you please put this in the microwave for a minute?”
Gerry recoiled. “What is that stuff?”
Natalie shrugged. “The sauce.”
“Sweet and sour sauce,” Gran contributed cheerfully. “It has pineapple chunks in it.”
“Oh,” Gerry said in an arch tone. “From one of those New England organic pineapple farms?”
Natalie glared at him and held the dish closer to him. “Just heat it up.”
“How many kinds of food coloring are in this crap, Natalie?” Gerry demanded. “What kind of toxins are you putting into your body?”
“The same kind I’ve put into it for eighty years,” Gran said as she pulled up a chair to the table. “Seems to be working out just fine so far.”
Gerry looked at Natalie. “You can’t mean to let anyone ingest this kind of garbage in your house?”
Natalie took a step back, her expression hardening in a way that Jen had rarely witnessed. Natalie’s children were completely silent, knowing the portent of that look well despite its rarity, and Natalie spoke very softly. “There are things, Gerry, that are more important than abstract principles.”
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