Home Sweet Home (3 page)

B
y 5:25 that night, mere hours after Andi had made the bold—and incredibly foolish—offer to watch the store for her grandmother, her heels were killing her feet and she was dreaming of a hot bath and a bottle of wine. Scratch that, two bottles.

All afternoon she had been running around the store, helping customers, searching for colors, needles, patterns. How, she suddenly wondered, did her mother and grandmother do this six days a week?

With only five minutes until she could lock the front door and collapse on one of the couches in the middle of the room, two women came in through the front door, laughing and carrying big felted bags.

“I’m sorry,” Andi said, although she was anything but sorry about kicking them out. “I’m afraid the store closes in a few minutes.”

The two women shot each other a look, but Andi was too tired to worry about being rude anymore. The yarn would be here tomorrow. They’d just have to wait until then.

The store’s phone rang and Andi grabbed it. “Lake Yarns. How may I help you?”

“Andi, it’s Nate.”

Oh god, she’d been so frazzled for the past few hours that she’d actually forgotten she asked Nate to call her here. Now, with her guard completely down, the sound of his low voice in her ear had her reaching for the counter to steady herself.

“Hi.” She couldn’t say anything more for the moment, not until she caught her breath, not until she pulled herself back together.

And then he said hi back, and ten years fell away so fast it made her head spin.

She was a teenager again and they were on the phone and she was so happy to be talking to Nate even though she didn’t have the first clue what to say.

“So, about tonight.” He paused and she actually held her breath. “That sounds great.”

“It does?” She cringed at her clearly flustered response.

“How about we meet at the Tavern at seven thirty?”

If she left right now, she would have time to take a long shower and change and redo her makeup before heading out to the Tavern. Looking down at her previously pristine black dress and sheer nylons, she noticed that she was covered head to toe with little threads of color from the yarn she’d been handling and brushing up against all day long.

“Seven thirty is perfect.”

“See you soon, Andi.”

She put the phone down and was reaching for her bag when she realized she wasn’t alone. The two women she’d spoken to at the door were sitting on the couches in the middle of the room looking like they planned to settle in for the night.

Didn’t they know she needed to get out of here to get pretty so Nate wouldn’t think she’d turned into an old hag in the past ten years?

“I’m sorry, but I really do need to close the store.”

The older woman with bright red hair nodded. “Of course you do. Our knitting night is about to begin.”

Oh no.

How could she have forgotten about the Monday night knitting group?

Her plans to go home to shower and change before her meeting with Nate went up in smoke. Andi looked down at the tiny threads of cotton and wool stuck to her sweater.

Oh well, Nate wouldn’t care what she looked like. It wasn’t like they were going out on a date or anything. Tonight was simply two old friends catching up with some business tacked on to the back end.

Scrambling to cover her gaffe, she said, “It’s been such a busy day in the store that I almost forgot it was Monday night.” The women just stared at her as she babbled unconvincingly. “Can I get you two anything?”

The slightly younger woman with shiny gray hair laughed. “Not to worry, honey, we always come prepared.”

The women produced four bottles of wine along with a big plastic container full of big chocolate chip cookies. Andi’s stomach growled as she tried to get her exhausted, overwhelmed brain to remember where the glasses were.

Fortunately the knitting group regulars were way ahead of her as they opened the small doors of the coffee table and began to pull out mismatched tumblers for the wine.

More long-buried memories came at Andi, joining all the others that had been scrambling into her brain all day. It had been her job, after everyone had gone, to wash out the glasses in the kitchen sink and dry them and put them back under the coffee table. Her grandmother always told her how important her role was, that wine made people comfortable, that it let them talk about the secrets they shouldn’t be holding inside.

The Monday night knitting group had been going on as long as her grandmother had owned the store. Evelyn always said the group was as important to her as family—and that they were responsible for keeping her sane more than once over the years. As a little girl, Andi had loved sitting on the floor, listening to the women talk, laugh, and cry. But by ten she had grown out of it. Not just the knitting group, but anything to do with yarn or the store.

Andi still remembered her last ever Monday night at Lake Yarns. She had been sitting next to Mrs. Gibson and only half listening to her complain about her swollen ankles to the woman next to her. Andi swore Mrs. Gibson was always pregnant. One of her kids was in Andi’s fifth-grade class, and John had five younger siblings already.

Andi had been working on a scarf for her father in a zigzag pattern, but she kept screwing it up. Bad enough that she needed help unraveling it and then getting it back onto the needles so she could fix her mistakes. Her mother and grandmother were both busy helping other people, and she had no choice but to turn to Mrs. Gibson.

“
Of course, I’ll help you with this, honey,
” the woman had said. “
You know, it’s no surprise you’re having trouble with this scarf. John told me how smart you are. You’re going to go out there and do big, important things like your daddy. You really don’t belong here with us knitters, do you?
”

Andi was pulled back to the present as she heard a throat being cleared and looked up to see that the red-haired woman was holding out a glass of wine, saying, “I didn’t know Evelyn and Carol had hired anyone new.”

Andi gratefully took the glass and was about to respond with her name when the woman said, “Wait a minute. I need to put my glasses on.” Later, after a few moments of peering, she said, “Andi? Don’t you recognize me? It’s Dorothy. Dorothy Johnson.”

Andi suddenly realized why the woman looked so familiar. It was her hair that had thrown Andi off, red instead of dark brown, and the fact that she seemed to have shrunk several inches in the past decade.

Dorothy introduced her to Helen who had moved to Emerald Lake five years earlier.

“I would have eventually guessed who you were,” Helen said. “You really are the perfect combination of Evelyn and Carol.”

“I look more like my dad,” Andi said automatically.

“I can see Richard in you certainly, but if you ask me, you take after the women in your family more. I’m so sorry about his passing, honey. We all were.”

It was hard to hear her father’s name on a stranger’s lips, harder still to be reminded that he was gone.

Andi briskly smiled. “Thanks. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with,” she said before moving to the door to welcome in more Monday night knitting group members.

Fifteen minutes after six, the wine was flowing with nary a needle in motion when one final woman pushed in through the door.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Brownies will make it all better,” another woman said. “You do have brownies don’t you?”

“Why do you think I’m late?” the latecomer replied with a laugh, but to Andi’s ears it sounded forced.

She put the tray of brownies on the table, then looked up in surprise. “Oh. Andi. I didn’t expect you to be here.”

Andi hadn’t seen her old friend in years. Now, as she took a good look at Catherine, she almost didn’t recognize her.

Andi remembered her as being a cute blond, not a mousy brunette whose once fit frame now carried around an extra thirty pounds.

“Catherine, how are you?”

Andi wasn’t prepared for her onetime friend to look her straight in the eyes and say, “Apart from divorcing my rat bastard husband, I’m all right.”

The women all around them still chatted as if everything was perfectly normal. Andi scrambled to find an appropriate response. But really, there wasn’t one.

Catherine shrugged, a show of nonchalance that Andi didn’t buy.

“Welcome home,” Catherine said before going and sitting down on a couch in the opposite corner.

Andi hadn’t even known Catherine had been married. Then again, she hadn’t gone to any of their high school reunions or registered at any social networking sites.

Dorothy tapped her wineglass several times with a knitting needle. “Everyone,” she said authoritatively, “please say hello to Andi, Carol’s daughter.” The woman’s eyes twinkled. “Even if you already know each other from her years growing up here, be sure to tell her something unique and memorable about yourself.”

Andi looked up from her spot behind the register. She’d hoped to be able to sit there and hide out for a couple of hours while the knitting group did their thing. But when Dorothy scooted over on the couch and patted the seat beside her, Andi knew she was cornered and cornered good.

“Andi and I have already met,” Helen said, “but just to be sure you don’t forget me, you should know that I have never so much as stuck a toe into the lake and never plan to.”

Andi was so stunned by Helen’s admission that she completely forgot her manners. “Why not?”

“I had an unfortunate incident with a swimming pool when I was a child,” Helen said with a shake of her head.

“But swimming in the lake is incredible.”

From the time Andi could walk, she’d loved to run off the end of her parents’ dock and cannonball into the water, whether eighty degrees at the height of summer or somewhere in the sixties in the late spring and early fall.

Andi was surprised by a fierce—and sudden—urge to run out of the store, strip off her clothes, and go running off a dock, any dock, just so she could experience that glorious moment when she hit the water.

Being surrounded with floor-to-ceiling yarn all day had clearly started to make her go a little nuts.

“I’m sure it is,” Helen said regretfully before turning the table over to the middle-aged woman sitting next to her. “Your turn, Angie.”

“I have four little monsters at home, and were it not for the fact that I knew I was going to be able to escape to this group after a weekend when none of them would stop screaming, I might very well have had an unfortunate incident of my own in the lake. On purpose.”

Everyone laughed, but Andi struggled with knowing what the right response was. It had been years since she’d known the comfort of being around other women. At work, she was primarily surrounded by men, and given her rule about no emotional entanglements in the office, Andi spent the bulk of her time with people who were pretty much just professional acquaintances.

Catherine was next. “Andi and I go way back. She doesn’t need to hear me bore her with stories about how things have gone since high school.”

Andi might not have been particularly well versed in girl talk in recent years, but she had a pretty good sense that Catherine wasn’t thrilled with her being back in town and running tonight’s knitting group.

Fortunately right then, another woman, who Andi judged to be around her same age, smiled and said, “I’m Rebecca. I help run the inn on the lake, and it is such a pleasure to meet you, Andi. I just adore your mother and grandmother.”

The pretty woman with the long, straight golden-brown hair and startlingly green eyes looked down at the diamond ring on her finger, drawing Andi’s gaze down to it.

“And what about you, my dear?” Dorothy asked. “What brings you back to town?”

Andi froze. She didn’t want to lie to these women, but she needed to sit down and talk about her project with Nate first. He would know the best way to present her building plans to the townspeople. Perhaps if she’d come back to town more since high school, it wouldn’t seem so strange that she was here now, but the constant demands of her job had always come first.

“Fall on the lake is always so peaceful, so quiet. This seemed like a good place to focus on a big project at work.”

“Quiet?” Dorothy and Helen both laughed. “Emerald Lake is a hotbed of excitement and intrigue.”

“Okay, who’s got gossip?” Rebecca asked, obviously trying to change the subject and take the focus off of Andi, who felt more and more out of her element with every passing second.

“Not so fast,” Catherine said. “Andi hasn’t told us something unique about herself yet.”

Andi felt another rush of blood move up to her cheeks. She dearly wished Catherine hadn’t drawn attention to her, not when she was trying so hard to fit in seamlessly with these almost strangers.

“I can’t think of anything,” she said, but she was met with a wall of raised eyebrows. Realizing they weren’t going to move on until she gave them something, she said, “I can’t knit.”

Oh no, she hadn’t just blurted that out, had she?

Dorothy scrunched her face up as if she was trying to access some long-lost information. “Wait a minute, I remember a little girl who looked like you sitting right here and knitting many, many years ago.”

Andi held up her empty hands in an effort to defend herself. “I haven’t knit since I was nine or ten. I seriously doubt I remember how.” She certainly hadn’t earlier in the day with her grandmother.

“Nonsense,” Dorothy said as she reached into her canvas bag for some large needles and soft blue yarn, so much like the skein Andi had been admiring earlier that morning. “It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how to knit, no matter how long it’s been. Take these.”

Keeping her hands firmly on her lap, Andi said, “Thanks, but you don’t need to give me your—”

“Take them.”

Andi immediately responded to the firm note in the older woman’s voice. “Okay.”

She sat awkwardly with the things on her lap when Rebecca took pity on her.