CHLOE
SUGAR MAPLE, VERMONT
Do you ever wonder why things happen the way they do? All of those seemingly random decisions we make throughout our lives that turn out to be not so random after all. Maybe if I had closed the shop twenty minutes earlier that night or gone for a quick walk around Snow Lake, she might still be alive today.
But I didn’t and that choice changed our lives forever.
At the moment when it all began, I was down on my knees, muttering ancient curses under my breath as I tugged, pulled, and tried to convince five feet of knitted lace that it would be much happier stretched out to six plus.
If there were any magic spells out there to help a girl block a shawl, I hadn’t found them, and believe me, I’d looked. Blocking, like life, was equal parts intuition, brute strength, and dumb luck.
(Just in case you were wondering, I usually don’t mention the dumb luck part when I give a workshop.)
That Monday night I was two hours into Blocking 101, teaching my favorite techniques to three yarn-crawling sisters from Pennsylvania, a teacher from New Jersey, and a retired rocket scientist from Florida. We had been expecting a bus-load of fiber fanatics from northern Maine, but a wicked early winter blizzard had stopped them somewhere west of Bangor. Two of my best friends from town, admitted knit shop groupies and world-class gossips, rounded out the class.
By the way, I’m Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & Strings, voted the number one knit shop in New England two years running. I don’t know exactly who did the voting, but I owe each of those wonderful knitters some quiviut and a margarita. Blog posts about the magical store in northern Vermont where your yarn never tangles, your sleeves always come out the same length, and you always,
always
get gauge were popping up on a daily basis, raising both my profile and my bottom line.
Sometimes I worried that this sudden, unexpected burst of fame and fortune had extended the tourist season beyond the town’s comfort zone. Hiding in plain sight was harder than it sounded, but for now our secret was still safe.
A blocking board was spread open on the floor. A dark blue Spatterware bowl of T-pins rested next to it. My trusty spray bottle of warm water had been refilled twice. I probably looked like a train wreck as I crawled my way around the perimeter, pinning each scallop and point into position, but those were the breaks.
Since blocking lace was pretty much my only cardio these days, when the wolf whistle sailed overhead, I didn’t bother to look up.
“Wow!” Janice Meany, owner of Cut & Curl across the street, murmured. “Those can’t be real.”
If I’d had any doubt about the wolf whistles, Janice’s statement erased it. Last I heard, not too many women were ordering 34As from their neighborhood cosmetic surgeon.
“Implants,” Lynette Pendragon declared in a voice that could be heard in the upper balcony of her family’s Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse. “Or a really good wizard.”
It was times like this when I wished I had inherited a tiny bit of magick from my mother. Just enough to render my indiscreet friend speechless for a second or two. Everyone in Sugar Maple knows we don’t talk about wizards in front of civilians unless the conversation includes Munchkins and Oz.
Fortunately our guests had other things on their minds.
“I’m glad my Howie isn’t here,” one of the Pennsylvania sisters breathed. “She looks like Sharon Stone. Howie has a thing for Sharon Stone.”
“Sharon Stone fifteen years ago on a good day,” the New Jersey schoolteacher added. “A
very
good day.”
What can I say? I’m only human. (And a nosy one at that.) I dumped the lace and glanced toward the front window.
Winter comes early to our part of Vermont. By the time the last of the leaf-peepers have headed down to the lesser glories of New York and Connecticut, we’re digging out our snowshoes and making sure our woodpiles are well stocked. In mid-December it’s dark and seriously cold by four thirty, and only the most intrepid window-shopping tourist would even consider strolling down Main Street without at least five layers of clothing.
The woman peering in at us was blond, tall, and around my age, but that was where the resemblance ended. I’m the kind of woman who could disappear into a crowd even if her hair was on fire. Our window shopper couldn’t disappear if she tried. Her movie-star-perfect face was pressed up against the frosty glass and we had a full-frontal glimpse of bare arms, bare shoulders, and cleavage that would send Pamela Anderson running back to her surgeon.
“Am I nuts or is she naked?” I asked no one in particular.
“I think she’s strapless,” Janice said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“It can’t be more than ten degrees out there,” one of the Pennsylvanians said, exchanging looks with her sisters. “She must be crazy.”
“Or drunk,” Lynette offered.
“I’ll bet she was mugged,” the rocket scientist volunteered. “I saw a weird-looking guy lurking down the block when I parked my car.”
I was tempted to tell her that the weird-looking guy was a half-asleep vampire named Buster on an ice cream run for his pregnant wife, but I figured that might not be good for business.
The possibly naked woman at the window tapped twice, mimed a shiver, then pointed toward the locked door, where the CLOSED sign was prominently displayed.
“Are you going to make her stand out there all night?” Janice asked. “Maybe she needs help.”
She definitely isn’t here for a new set of double points,
I thought as I flipped the lock. Not that I profile my customers or anything, but I’d bet my favorite rosewoods that she had never cast on a stitch in her life and intended to keep it that way.
My second thought as she swirled past me into the shop was,
Wow, she really is naked.
It took a full second for me to realize that was an illusion created by a truly gifted dress-maker with access to spectacular yard goods.
My third thought—well, I didn’t actually have a third thought. I was still working on the second one when she smiled at me and somewhere out there a dentist counted his T-bills.
“I’m Chloe,” I said as I looked into her sea green eyes. Eyes like that usually came with magical powers (and more than a little bit of family history), but she had the vibe of the pure human about her. “I own the shop.”
“Suzanne Marsden.” She extended a perfectly manicured hand and I thought I caught a shiver of Scotch on her breath. “I think you might have saved my life.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I asked.
I’ve dealt with lots of life-or-death emergencies at Sticks & Strings, but most of them included dropped stitches and too many margaritas at our Wednesday Night Knit-Ins.
She laughed as Janice and Lynette exchanged meaningful looks I tried very hard to ignore.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t seat me early at the Inn. I thought I could flirt with the bartender until my boyfriend arrived but no such luck.”
It was probably the first time anyone had ever refused her anything, and she looked puzzled and annoyed in an amused kind of way.
“The Weavers can be a tad rigid,” I said, studiously avoiding eye contact with my townie friends, who knew exactly why the Weavers acted the way they did. “I promise you the food’s worth the aggravation.”
“I left my coat in the car so I could make a big sweeping Hollywood entrance, and now I not only can’t get into the damn restaurant, I locked myself out of my car and would probably have frozen to death out there if you hadn’t taken pity on me and opened your door.”
“Honey, you’re in Vermont,” Janice said. “You can’t go around like that up here. You’ll freeze your nipples off.”
“She said she has a coat,” I reminded Janice a tad sharply. As a general rule I find it best not to discuss politics, religion, or my customer’s nipples in the shop. “It’s locked in her car.”
“With my cell and my skis and my ice skates,” Suzanne said with a theatrical eye roll. “All I need is to use your phone so I can call Triple A.”
“Oh, don’t bother with them,” Lynette said with a wave of her hand. “They’ll take all night to get up here. My daughter Vonnie can have it open in a heartbeat.”
Suzanne’s perfectly groomed right eyebrow rose slightly. “If it’s not too much trouble, that would be great.”
Clearly she thought Vonnie was majoring in grand theft auto at Sugar Maple High, but that was a whole lot better than telling her that the teenager could make garage doors roll open three towns away just by thinking about them.
There were some things tourists were better off not knowing.
I shot Lynette a look. “So you’re going to go call Vonnie now, right?”
We both knew she had already put out the call to her daughter, but we’re all about keeping up appearances here in Sugar Maple.
“I’m on it,” Lynette said and went off in search of her cell phone.
I turned back to our visitor, who was up to her elbows in a basket of angora roving waiting to be spun into yarn, while Penelope, the ancient store cat who shared the basket, ignored her.
“This is glorious. I’ve thought about learning to knit but—” She shrugged. “You know how it is.”
Well, not really. I’ve been knitting since I was old enough to hold a pair of needles.
“I’ll be spinning that next week,” I told her while we waited for Lynette to return, “then knitting it up into a shawl.”
She wandered to the stack of shawls on the shelf and fingered a kid silk Orenburg I had on display. “Don’t tell me you made this?”
“Chloe knitted everything in the shop,” Janice volunteered.
“Impossible!” Suzanne Marsden looked over at me. “Did you really? I love handmade garments and this is heirloom quality.”
She might have been lying through her porcelain veneers but it was all the encouragement I needed. I whipped out the Orenburg and was treated to the kind of adulation usually reserved for rock stars.
“Amazing,” Suzanne breathed as I laid the shawl across her slender shoulders. “You couldn’t possibly have made this without divine intervention.”
I started to spout my usual it’s-all-just-knit-and-purl shop owner spiel when to my surprise the truth popped out instead. “It almost put me into intensive care,” I admitted to the background laughter of my friends, “but I made it to the other side.”
And then I showed her the trick that either sent prospective knitters running back to their crochet hooks or won them over forever. I slipped my mother’s wedding band off my right forefinger and passed the shawl through the small circle of Welsh gold.
“How much?” Suzanne asked.
“It’s not for sale,” Lynette answered before I had the chance to open my mouth. “Chloe never sells her Orenburgs.”
“In my experience there are exceptions to every absolute.” Suzanne favored me with a smile that was a half-degree away from flirtatious. “Name your price.”
“Dangerous words to use in front of a shop owner,” I said lightly, “but Lynette is right. The shawls on that shelf are for display only.”
Suzanne met my eyes, and I saw something behind the smile that took me by surprise.
Pretty people aren’t supposed to be sad. Isn’t that the story you were told when you were a little girl? Pretty people are supposed to get a free ride through this life and possibly the next one too.
That was the thing about running a shop. Every now and then a customer managed to push the right buttons and my business sense, shaky at the best of times, went up in smoke.
I swiped her platinum AmEx through the machine and slid the receipt across the counter for her signature.
“Would you like me to wrap it for you?” I asked while Lynette and Janice kept the other customers amused.
“No, thanks,” she said, pirouetting in front of the cheval mirror in the corner. “I’ll wear it.”
Lynette popped back in. “Vonnie texted me,” she said to Suzanne. “Your car’s unlocked and the Inn is open for business.”
Suzanne flashed us a conspiratorial grin. “My boyfriend always keeps me waiting. It wouldn’t hurt him to do a little waiting himself.”
But she didn’t keep him waiting long. She signed her receipt, made a few polite noises, then hurried back out into the darkness.
“I’d give anything to see the boyfriend,” one of the Pennsylvania sisters said after the door clicked shut behind Suzanne Marsden. “I’ll bet we’re talking major hottie.”
“Johnny Depp hot or George Clooney hot?” the schoolteacher from New Jersey asked, and everyone laughed.
The rocket scientist gave out a cross between a snicker and a snort. “That woman has future trophy wife written all over her. Odds are he’s old, wrinkled, and rich.”
“Maybe she loves him,” I said then immediately wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.
Janice and Lynette exchanged glances and I didn’t need extrasensory powers to know exactly what they were thinking. I shot them my best “don’t you dare” warning look. One thing I didn’t need was another lecture on love from Sugar Maple’s two most dangerous matchmakers.
Blocking lace seemed a little anticlimactic to me after Suzanne’s minidrama. I was seriously tempted to excuse myself for a minute then race up the street so I could peek through the front window of the Inn and eyeball the guy she was meeting, but that wasn’t how Sticks & Strings had maintained its ranking as the number one knit shop in New England two years running.
So I stayed put, but that didn’t mean I was happy about it.
It was a little before ten by the time everyone exchanged names and phone numbers and e-mail addresses. I handed out goodie bags of knitting gadgets and yarn samples and smiled at the oohs and ahhs of appreciation. Welcome to the dark side, ladies. Before long they would need an extra room to house their stash.
I let out a loud sigh of relief as I sank into one of the overstuffed chairs near the Ashford wheels. “I actually broke into a sweat blocking that shawl.” I flapped the hem of my T-shirt for emphasis.