Threading the Needle

by Marie Bostwick

  “What do you want, Abigail?”

  “To help you,” she said. “To make amends, I suppose. If I can. I know New Bern is the last place on earth you want to be. And I know that you wanted to sell Beecher Cottage but weren’t able to.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Don’t look at me that way. It’s a small town, Madelyn. I made a few calls, asked a few questions, that’s all.” She hesitated a moment. “I sit on the board of the bank. I know Aaron Fletcher.”

  Of course she does.

  “And I heard your name again tonight. I was going to wait a few days to contact you, but then I thought . . .” Abigail reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out an envelope.

  “Here.”

  “What is this?”

  “A check. For seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Which, I understand, is two hundred thousand more than the price you’d hoped to list the house for. Enough to allow you to go anywhere you want and start over.”

  I turned the envelope over, lifted the gummed flap, and pulled out the piece of paper that was inside. It was just as Abigail said, a check for three-quarters of a million dollars made out to me, Madelyn Beecher Baron. Nobody besides myself—not Sterling, not the feds—had any claim in it. I could cash it at any bank, get into my car, and escape New Bern forever. It was tempting.

  But when I looked up at those ice-blue eyes, I couldn’t think of anything but the humiliation I’d suffered at her hands, Woolley’s unwillingness to defend me, my inability to defend myself. Never again.

  I pinched the check between my thumbs and forefingers and tore it in half. “Get out of my house.”

  18

  Tessa

  “Babe! I’m home!” I shook out my jacket and hung it up on the rack near the back door. Lee didn’t answer, but I could hear him in the kitchen, rattling pots and pans.

  I walked toward the sound. “Did you look outside? Halloween’s a week away and it’s already snowing! Hard!”

  I love the first snow of the year. It’s exciting. Makes me feel ten years old again.

  Lee was bending over by the cupboards, pulling out a blue mixing bowl.

  “Josh called, wanting to talk to you.” He kicked the cupboard closed. “You missed him,” he said, the accusation clear in his voice.

  “Oh. I’ll call him back.” I dropped my shopping bag on the floor and reached for the phone.

  “He went to the library for a study group. Couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Well, then I’ll call him later, after dinner,” I said evenly. I was late, but not that late. Not late enough that I deserved to have Lee jump all over me.

  Experience has taught me that when Lee is in a bad mood, which isn’t often, it’s best to ignore it. His bad moods usually pass quickly. When they don’t, I’ve found that there’s no point in trying to draw him out. When he’s ready to talk, he talks. Coaxing him to open up before he’s ready only makes things worse.

  Lee grunted, opened the refrigerator, and pulled vegetables out of the crisper. Was he making a salad? The kitchen didn’t smell like lasagna. Or anything else.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  “I’m on it.”

  More banging of dishes and drawers, followed by a furious chopping of vegetables. He hacked at the onions as if he intended to draw blood.

  “Well,” I said brightly. “I’m going to pour myself some wine. It was a crazy day.”

  I took two glasses down from the cupboard, filled them with pinot noir, kept one for myself and set the other down on the counter next to Lee. From where I was sitting, he definitely looked like he could use a drink. I perched myself on the opposite counter and started talking. Someone had to.

  “I stopped by Cobbled Court after work, picked out the fabric for my quilt. You’ve got to go in there sometime, babe. You wouldn’t believe how much inventory Evelyn has in her shop.”

  “Huh.” He slashed a green pepper in half, gutted the seeds, and started dicing the green flesh with an eye toward vengeance.

  “Choosing the fabric was way more complicated than I thought. Thank heaven the other women were there to help me. I needed something like twenty different fabrics. They’re really pretty, though. Do you want to see?”

  Without waiting for his answer, I hopped off the counter, took the fabrics from my shopping bag, and spread them out on the kitchen table. I smiled and fanned them out into an arc, like colorful spokes on a wheel. They really did look good together.

  Lee looked at the pile, then at me, and frowned. “How much was all that?”

  “Thirty-eight dollars,” I said, silently blessing Evelyn Dixon and her invented novice quilter discount.

  “Oh. That’s not too bad.”

  I put the fabric away. Lee turned back to the cutting board, using the blade of the knife to sweep the decimated vegetables into a bowl, then paused to take a sip from his wineglass, which I took as a good sign. He pulled out a cast-iron skillet and put it on the stove—no banging this time.

  The mail was sitting in a pile near the telephone. I flipped through it and started to tell him about Madelyn’s surprising return to New Bern and her even more surprising plans for Beecher Cottage but stopped short when I noticed an envelope with a past due notice from New Bern Energy.

  “Babe, did you forget to pay the oil bill?”

  The skillet, now filled with a mélange of onions, peppers, and mushrooms, banged hard against the burner, making me jump. The vegetables jumped too. Several pieces of pepper spilled onto the floor.

  “Forget? No! No, Tessa, I didn’t forget to pay the oil bill. I just didn’t pay it, all right? I paid the taxes, the mortgage, Josh’s tuition, the electricity, and telephone, Internet, and the house, car, and health insurance. After all that, there was two hundred and sixteen dollars left in the checking account. Two hundred and sixteen! That’s it!”

  Lee is not a shouter. His pent-up frustration exploded and sparked like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July and fizzled just as quickly. His shoulders drooped. The metal spatula he was holding in his hand flopped against his leg, leaving a grease mark on his pants.

  “I didn’t forget to pay it. I just didn’t pay it, not yet. All right?”

  “All right,” I said. I moved toward him, took the spatula out of his hand, and set it on the counter. “It’s all right. We’ll pay it as soon as we can. No big deal.”

  “Yeah. I’ll transfer some more money out of savings tomorrow,” he said. “I hoped we wouldn’t have to do that again, but . . .” He sighed. “I didn’t get the job. They called just before you came in. They had one hundred and twenty-eight applicants for the position. One hundred and twenty-eight! For a temp job!”

  “Oh, babe. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well. The commute would have been a killer. I’d have spent half of what I made on gas.”

  He bent over and started picking mushrooms and peppers up from the floor. I stooped down to help.

  “You know,” he said, “this is just not the country I grew up in. Back in my dad’s day, if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d be all right, you’d get ahead. Nowadays, the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s not right. I was listening to the radio today and heard a story about the housing bubble. They had clips from a mortgage broker who was blaming greedy real estate investors, a real estate investor who blamed greedy bankers, a banker who blamed greedy home owners, and a home owner who blamed greedy mortgage brokers! I swear, nobody takes responsibility for anything these days! I just don’t understand it, Tessa. You work hard all your life, try to do the right thing.... Isn’t there any justice in the world?”

  It was a good question and one I sometimes asked myself. But I didn’t know the answer, so I told him what I did know.

  “It’s their loss. You’re the best man for the job, for any job. I love you.”

  He got up and dumped the spoiled vegetables into the sink, and stared out the kitchen window into a curtain of black s
hot with white as the snowflakes fell.

  “I really thought I had it,” he mused. “They only interviewed six people.”

  “Six? Out of one hundred and twenty-eight? You should feel good about that.”

  “Maybe. But first runner-up doesn’t come with a paycheck,” he said, bitterness returning to his voice before he waved it off. “I’m sorry, hon. Don’t listen to me. I’m just having a bad day.”

  “You get to have bad days.” I walked up behind him, put my arms around his waist, and turned my head so my cheek rested against his back.

  “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you sit down at the table, finish your wine, and tell me all about your bad day while I finish making dinner? By the way,” I said, squinting at the mess in the skillet. “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Vegetable and goat cheese omelets.”

  “Okay. That sounds good, but what happened to the lasagna?” I took my apron off the hook by the pantry and slipped it over my head before opening the refrigerator and pulling out a bowl of eggs from our own chickens.

  Lee carried his wine to the table and sat down to watch me. “Ran out of time. When I went out to the barn to bring in the stock for the night, the pigs were missing. They were out in the garden, scrounging for leftover potatoes. I was able to lure three of them back to the pen with a bucket of slop, but that big one . . .” He shook his head. “She was having no part of it. She saw me coming and ran toward the woods, making a break for freedom. And then Spitz got all excited and tried to help and that just made everything worse. She was just out there running around in circles, barking like crazy. Then the sow got ticked and rushed her. Spitz took off for the barn, yelping, and hid behind the grain bin. It took me over an hour to catch the sow, and then I had to haul Spitz out of her hiding place. I finally ended up carrying her inside.”

  I smiled as I cracked eggs into a bowl and set the shells aside. “Where is she now?”

  “Passed out under our bed, sleeping off the trauma.”

  I pressed my hand to my mouth, stifling the urge to laugh. Poor Spitz. Poor, pathetic Spitz. “So how’d the pigs get out in the first place?”

  Lee let out an irritated snort. “The gate to the pigsty was wide open. Somebody had actually tied it open with a piece of rope. And I found empty soda cans lying on the ground near the pen.”

  “Soda cans?”

  Frowning, he nodded and took a gulp of wine. “Yeah. Two of them. Somebody’s idea of a joke. Or a rescue mission. Stupid kids.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t suppress the laughter, not even with both hands over my mouth. I dropped my hands and laughed so hard I had to wipe away the tears with the hem of my apron.

  Lee put down his glass and spread out his hands. “What? What’s so funny?”

  In spite of the carnage Lee had inflicted on the veggies, we had a nice dinner together. I told Lee about Madelyn’s return to New Bern, news that he found considerably less interesting than I did.

  “I suppose she has to live somewhere, but I’d just as soon it was somewhere else. A penal colony on a desert island, she and her husband and everybody like them. Just drop them off in the middle of the ocean and let them rot.”

  I steered the subject back to the pigs, specifically to Spitz and her inept attempts at pig herding. Lee gave me a blow-by-blow description of the hapless dog’s attempts at driving the porker back to her pen. By the time he finished the story, we were both laughing.

  To celebrate the early arrival of winter, I decided to make snow ice cream, running outside in the wind to scoop the drifted snow into a bowl, then mixing it with sugar, cream, and a touch of vanilla. After dinner, Lee volunteered to clean up the kitchen. I went to the bedroom and got into my pajamas, then sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and phoned Josh.

  “Hi, Mom. Hey, what’s with Dad? He sounded peeved when I called before.”

  “Oh, he’s fine. The pigs got out. So, how are you? How’s school?”

  “Good. Everything’s good. So far, I’m getting an A in organic chemistry.”

  “You’re kidding! That’s great, sweetie! You must get it from your dad. I had to take Geology 101 to fulfill my college science requirement. Rocks for Jocks, they called it. Just me, the defensive line of the football team, and an aging professor who mumbled as he narrated slide shows of geologic strata. He gave me a C.”

  Josh laughed. “At least you still remember what strata are.”

  “Sort of.”

  “So, Mom, not to change the subject, but I wanted to talk to you about Thanksgiving.”

  “I know. We need to get your plane ticket soon. We’re just a little bit tight on finances right now.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I might not need a ticket. Professor Kleypas and his wife are going to Aruba for Thanksgiving and they want me to house-sit for them. All I have to do is bring in the mail, walk and feed the dog, and make sure the place doesn’t burn down. They’ll pay me five hundred dollars for the week,” Josh said. “And the house is really nice. They’ve got a pool.”

  “Oh.” I paused for a long moment, trying to let this all sink in. “It sounds like a good opportunity, but . . . I hate to think of you being alone at Thanksgiving. . . .”

  Not to mention how much I hated the idea of Lee and me being alone for Thanksgiving.

  “What would you do about dinner?”

  “Ted’s mom already invited me to come to their house.” Ted was one of Josh’s college friends, a day student who lived at home. “They’re having a whole gang of people over, kids whose families can’t afford to fly them home for the break.”

  That was nice of Ted’s mother to invite Josh to dinner, but we could afford to fly our son home for Thanksgiving, sort of. We had credit cards. Paying them off was another matter, but still . . .

  I put my hand up to my mouth and chewed a ragged edge off my cuticle, sorting through my emotions.

  We’ve never had Thanksgiving, or any major holiday, without Josh. It was bound to happen eventually, I’d always known that. Children grow up and move out, creating lives of their own. Roots and wings, that’s what a good parent should give their children, so they say. And I know it’s true, but at that moment, I couldn’t help but wish that I’d bought myself a set of wing clippers a long time ago.

  “Mom? It’s okay. If you don’t want me to do it, I’ll tell Professor Kleypas I can’t. I just thought it’d be a help right now.”

  “No, no,” I said. “You’re right. I’m being selfish. Five hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

  Josh’s tone brightened. “And it might lead to other things. Professor Kleypas hires a couple of students to help with his research every summer. He usually picks rising seniors as lab assistants, but if I make a good impression on him, who knows?”

  “Who knows?” I echoed.

  “And I’ll be home for Christmas,” he rushed to assure me. “It doesn’t make sense to spend money on a plane ticket when I’m coming back three weeks later. Right?”

  “Right,” I said hesitantly. “I’ll talk to Dad, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Hey, is Dad there? Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s doing the dishes. Hang on and I’ll go get him.”

  “Mom? You’re sure you’re fine with this Thanksgiving thing, right?”

  “Sure,” I said, making my voice deliberately light. “I wasn’t in the mood to make a big meal anyway. Sometime after you cook your twentieth turkey, the thrill wears off.”

  Josh laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”

  “Hold on while I get Dad. You’ll be happy to know he’s in a much better mood now. Josh? Have I told you recently how proud I am of you?”

  “Yes. You have. Two days ago, the last time we talked. And every time before that.”

  I laughed. “Well, it bears repeating. I’m proud of you, Joshie. And I love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  It had been a long day and by the time ten o’c
lock rolled around, we were both exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. Lee was snoring, and Spitz, who had emerged from beneath the bed and wedged herself between Lee and me, protected on all sides from any marauding swine that might break into our bedroom, was doing the same. But that wasn’t what was keeping me awake.

  I kept thinking about Josh and how strange it would be to have Thanksgiving without him. In our current circumstances, it was for the best, a godsend really. But it didn’t feel like one. Why did we ever let him go to school in Florida? Why couldn’t he have stayed in-state? What was wrong with UConn?

  I rolled over and punched my pillow, trying to find a more comfortable position.

  Still, it said something good that Josh’s professor was willing to entrust him with the care of his home, didn’t it? Lee said it said something good about me and the way I’d raised him, but Lee gets as much credit for that as I do. Anyway, I’m not sure we’re better parents than anybody else. Josh is just a good, responsible kid. Always has been. I miss him.

  Spitz twitched and jerked in her sleep, probably dreaming of lions and tigers and pigs, oh my. I rolled onto my back again and cast a resentful glance toward Lee’s peacefully dozing form. He never had any trouble falling asleep.

  Giving up, I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling and turned my thoughts toward the day’s other disturbing development: Madelyn’s homecoming.

  What was she doing in New Bern? Was she happy to be back? Was she lonely in that big house by herself? What had she said to Abigail? If I knocked on her door and said hello, would she invite me in? Or slam it in my face?

  Alone in that big house, that repository of so many of her childhood memories and mine, was she able to sleep?

  19

  Madelyn

  Even folded, the quilts were bulky. I chose the two whose chances for repair seemed most promising, put them into a shopping bag, and loaded them in the car before going back inside to make a pot of very strong coffee. I needed it. I’d hardly gotten any sleep the night before; I’d been too excited. And nervous.