“There was no deciding about who wanted you and who didn’t. We both did. We both do. That’s why you’re here in Cleveland with me now. And it’s why you’re going to spend as much time as possible with Daddy. We’d both like to have you with us all the time. But unless we can figure out how to clone you, that’s just not going to work. We adore you, silly creature.” When she coaxed a smile out of Meghan, Libby breathed easier. “No matter what else ever happens between me and Daddy, nothing will ever change that. You know that, don’t you?”
Meghan wasn’t about to give in easily. Not when she was the center of attention and being told how wonderful she was. “Did Barb ever tell you stuff like that?”
“No.” Libby shook her head. “She never did. At least not that I remember. Maybe she just didn’t want to make promises she couldn’t keep.”
“Promises like how you’ll always love me and you’d never leave me the way she left you?”
Had the worry haunted Meghan all these years?
The very thought pierced Libby’s heart and she prayed it wasn’t true. She had never questioned the wisdom of sharing her story with Meghan, but she’d never meant to make her question if she was valued and loved.
No, Rick had done that when he walked out on both of them.
Rather than let her anger at Rick spoil the moment, Libby kissed Meghan’s cheek. “I will never leave you like my mother left me,” she told Meghan. “I would never even think of it. I’d never even think about thinking about it. I’d never even think about thinking about—”
“All right!” Meghan laughed, and Libby was glad. A child of divorce had enough to worry about without adding to the list.
“And when I talked about someone being here and taking things…just so you know, I’m not being greedy. I just wondered.” Libby took another look around at the bare apartment and wondered what it had been like when Barb was alive. Did she host dinner parties in the dining room? And if she did, who did she invite? Did she have friends? Or a cheerless, lonely existence? If she’d been alone, was it Libby’s fault?
That was too much to consider and Libby shook the thought away. “I just wondered what kind of things might have been here,” she told Meghan.
“You mean stuff that would tell you what Barb was like.”
Libby sighed in relief. Sometimes her daughter could be remarkably mature. “Exactly.”
“Maybe we’ll find something.”
Another look around and Libby shook her head. “I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.”
“You never know.” Meghan untangled herself from Libby and strolled into the living room. “You know,” she raised her voice so Libby could hear her in the kitchen. It didn’t take much; the apartment wasn’t much bigger than the great room back in their suburban Cranberry Township home. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be up here. I mean, it’s not nearly as nice as home, but…” Meghan moved aside the lace curtains on the living room window that looked over the street. “At least it’s not as grungy as downstairs.”
“It will be even nicer once we get it cleaned up and get some of our own stuff in here.”
“Yeah. Except we have to share a bedroom.” She thought her mother couldn’t see her, but Libby didn’t miss the face Meghan made. “How lame is that, having to share a room with your mother?”
“Once we get the business up and going, we might use the apartment for storage and move into a bigger place. Or we can think about adding onto the shop and giving you your own suite downstairs. How would that be?”
Meghan’s blue eyes lit up. “Promise?”
“No.” Meghan’s hopeful expression fell and Libby laughed. “I can’t promise, but I can plan. Right now our plan starts with getting things ready up here so we don’t have to spend my entire divorce settlement on hotel bills.” She looked around again at the apartment, filled with furniture but empty when it came to clues about her mother’s life.
“At least it won’t be as hard to clean up here as it will be down in the shop. I thought there would be more to pack up, things to cart away. I thought—”
Rick’s words pounded through her head.
What are you hoping for? A letter? ‘Dear Libby, here are all the reasons I abandoned you, now you can live happily ever after’?
“Damned straight,” Libby mumbled to herself, then smiled at the look of utter bewilderment on Meghan’s face when she realized her mother was talking to herself. “Don’t worry, kid, I haven’t lost my mind. I was just wishing that Barb had left us something.”
“Some hint about who she really was and why she left you?”
“Now that you mention it…” Libby wrapped her arm around Meghan, and together they headed downstairs for the cleaning supplies. “I’d settle for an explanation as to why she left a yarn shop to a woman who can’t knit!”
The next day, the first thing Libby discovered was that the air-conditioning didn’t work. Too bad. The skies had finally cleared, the temperature was flirting with the mideighties and outside the sidewalks steamed with humidity.
She was hot. She was sweaty. She desperately needed a break from the mountain of cleaning that had kept her busy all morning.
So why, she asked herself, hadn’t she chosen something a little more relaxing?
She flicked a bead of sweat off her forehead and scraped her palms against the legs of her black shorts. By the time she took a deep breath and reached for the blue metal knitting needles she’d found below the front counter that morning, her hands were as damp as ever.
Needles in her right hand, yarn in her left, she stared at the how-to pictures in the book she and Meghan had unearthed in the room beside the dining room, which must have once been Barb’s classroom.
In fact, because that particular room wasn’t nearly as cluttered as the rest of the store, and so, easier to organize, Libby had left Meghan in there to finish the cleaning.
“Sure you don’t want to come over here and try this with me?” she called to her now. Meghan needed a break. And Libby? Well, she knew from the start that a little moral support in the knitting department wouldn’t hurt. “It’s a whole lot of fun.”
“No, thanks.” Meghan’s voice floated back to Libby along with a plume of dust from the general direction of the classroom. “And don’t tell me it’s fun, Mom. No way do you sound like you’re having fun.”
“You got me there,” Libby grumbled, but she wasn’t about to give up. As if it actually might help her make sense of the instructions, she bent closer to the page. “Cast on?” She read the words in large, bold print and peered at the drawings and the instructions. None of it made sense. If she tried to ignore the written instructions and follow the drawings, she got confused. If she did exactly what the instructions said and didn’t pay any attention to the drawings, she was more mixed up than ever.
After thirty minutes of trying, the only thing she’d succeeded in doing was putting a slipknot on one of the needles.
Something told her there was more to it than that.
Refusing to be intimidated by either the incomprehensible instructions, the confusing drawings or the needles that felt so foreign in her hands, Libby followed the pictures in the book, wound the yarn around her fingers and—