The Knitting Circle: The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year. Ann Hood

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       3

       Scarlet

      In three days, Mary finished her second scarf. She draped it over a chair at the kitchen table for Dylan to see as soon as he got home. Her fingers followed the stripes of color down the length of the scarf. It would look good with tassels, she decided. If she went back to the knitting circle she would ask Alice how to make tassels, and how to attach them.

      The phone rang and Mary let the machine pick up.

      Her boss’s voice filled the room.

      “Hey, Mary, it’s me, Eddie,” he said. “Just, you know, checking in.”

      As Eddie talked, Mary set the table for dinner. Two plates, two napkins, two forks, two wineglasses. Even after all these months this simple act made her gut wrench. That third seat—Stella’s seat—empty.

      “So there’s this truck driving around town selling tacos,” Eddie was saying. “Or empanadas. Something. And I was thinking, you could maybe find this truck and eat some tacos, or whatever, and write about the experience.”

      “Shut up, Eddie,” Mary said to the answering machine.

      “I don’t know, Mary,” Eddie said, his voice soft. “Maybe it would help a little.”

      Her mouth filled with a sharp metallic taste and she swallowed hard a few times.

      “The thing is,” Eddie continued, “I know you’re standing right there listening to me and I just wish you would pick up the phone or go and eat some empanadas or something.” He waited, as if she might really pick up the phone. “Okay,” he said finally. “Call me?”

      At the sound of him hanging up, Mary said, “Bye, Eddie.”

      The faces of the women in the knitting circle floated across her mind. She liked that they were strangers, that her story, her tragedy, was unknown to them. And, she realized, their stories were unknown to her. For all she knew, they each held their own secret; they each knit to … what had Scarlet said? To save their lives. To them, she was a knitter, a woman who could make something from a ball of yarn. Her friends would never believe this of her. Once, out of frustration, her friend Jodie had come over and sewn on all of Mary’s missing or loose buttons. “Hopeless,” Jodie had called her. It had been weeks since Jodie had even called. Like many of her friends, Jodie had run out of ways to offer comfort.

      Mary heard Dylan’s key in the door and ran to meet him.

      “What a welcome,” he whispered into her hair.

      She held on to him hard. She hated being alone now, and she hated her neediness.

      “Smells good,” Dylan said.

      “Me?” Mary said, flirting. “Or dinner?”

      “Both,” he said.

      “Can you believe it?” she said, walking to the stove. “Eddie wants me to chase some food truck around town.”

      “And?” Dylan said too hopefully.

      “And write about it,” Mary snapped. “As if I could write about the importance of a taco,” she muttered.

      She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the boiling water and bit into it, testing. She tried not to think of Stella standing at her side, her pasta tester, the way she would bite into a strand and wrinkle her nose with seriousness before pronouncing it was almost ready. “Two more hours,” she liked to say.

      “It might be fun,” Dylan said, but she could tell his heart wasn’t into having this argument again. It had become a pattern with them, his frustrated urging for her to go back to work, her anger at him for being able to work at all. A few times it had grown into full-blown fighting, with Dylan yelling at her, “You have to try to help yourself!” and Mary accusing him of being callous. More often, though, it was this quiet disagreement, this sarcasm and misunderstanding, the hurt feelings that followed.

      Mary sighed and drained the pasta, stirring in the sauce she’d made—onions, crushed tomatoes, pancetta. As she grated cheese over it, Dylan opened a bottle of wine.

      “I can’t get used to it,” Mary said, turning her attention to the salad, drizzling olive oil over the greens and sprinkling sea salt. “The silence.”

      Dylan stood, head bent, while she struggled to explain how the kitchen, the house, the world felt to her without Stella in it. But finally she shrugged, and finished dressing the salad. Words, her livelihood, her refuge, even at times her salvation, were now the most useless things in the world. Dylan couldn’t understand that.

      Stella would be singing while Mary finished making dinner. Or she would be showing off her work brought home from kindergarten that day. She would ask for an apple, sliced and peeled, to nibble. She would ask for a cup of water. She would make noise. Guiltily Mary remembered her impatience with these distractions. How could she have grown impatient with Stella?

      Mary heard her loud footsteps as she brought the food to the table. The screech of the chair as Dylan pulled it away from the table. Mary’s own sigh.

      “Your latest creation?” Dylan said, motioning to the scarf.

      He was trying to move past the awkwardness. She knew that, but she still smarted from it.

      “How’d you make that pattern?” he asked, impressed.

      “It self-stripes as you knit.”

      “My wife, the knitter,” he said.

      Mary was acutely aware of the sounds of chewing, of forks on plates, of their breathing.

      “I wonder about those women,” she said after a time, softening. “At the knitting circle.”

      “What about them?” СКАЧАТЬ