Kate Jacobs (12 page)

Darwin sighed. Even though Georgia had tried to kick her out that one time and
even though Lucie was always giving her these weird looks and even though she
absolutely disapproved of knitting in the first place…that club was really the
only place she had to go.
A guy poked his head into the lounge. No doubt he was checking to see if it was
Darwin-free. She scowled at the sight of him.
"Bye," Darwin said, pushing past him in the doorway. "I'm off to
meet people. My friends."

* * *

It was past six thirty and Lucie should have
been packing up her messenger bag by now. If her boss hadn't come by at the
last minute, saying he wanted to get back to her about her request. But so far
he'd just been talking in circles.
"…and just the way you pitch in, Lucie, and help everyone around here is
fantastic. Your work ethic is so impressive…" Get to the permanent offer,
thought Lucie, get to the money. She'd already worked it out—going full-time
would mean she could just barely cover the latest round of bills, but at least
she'd stop going further and further into debt. And if she could bank her
vacation time…
"Lucie?"
"Yes, Anthony, you were saying?"
"Just seemed like you drifted there…"
"Oh, just a little tired lately. Sorry."
"As I was saying, Lucie, you're our best producer here, and boy, are we
lucky to have you. We'd love to hire you. But if there's one thing we don't
have too much of at a public-access station, it's money, and with this year
being the way it has been…"
Back at her desk, Lucie crumpled up the slip of paper on which her boss had
written his calculations. The salary was half of what she was making as a
freelancer. And even if you factored in health care, she just didn't know if
she could make a go of it.
Shit. She sucked in a fast breath. Yeah, well, maybe next year she'd win the
lottery. Thank God it was time to head uptown to Walker and Daughter. Knitting
was the one thing that took her mind off everything, that distracted her from
the impulsive—no, not impulsive, naive—decision she had recently made. The one
that meant she would need to take this full-time job. Unless something better
came along. It was just a seed of an idea that planted itself when she became
an insomniac. Lucie hadn't had a really good night since her fortieth birthday
party, two years ago. She sat at the kitchen table in her parents' Long Island
rancher, picking at the leftover birthday cake her mother, Rosie, had baked.
Every year it was her favorite: iced lemon. She savored each moist bite, the
lemon frosting tangy on her tongue, waiting for her mother's annual year-in-review.
"Always you have the boyfriends, never the husband," her mother was
saying. The usual. "You don't want to miss out on your chance to have a
baby."
"It's fine, Mom."
"No, there's something special about a baby from your only daughter,"
Rosie admitted, patting
Lucie's
cheek. "Don't
you want to make me happy?"
"Yes, Mom."
"I knew it. So, okay, I have just the boy for you. But don't get all
carried away. Don't fall into lust. Wait for love."
"Mom, I'm a grown woman."
"I know, I know. Time to get married," insisted Rosie. "But
you'll lose your head if you have sex. That happens when it's new."
Omigod
. Did her mother actually think she was still a
virgin?

* * *

That's how it started. She'd returned to her
one-bedroom apartment on Amsterdam and 101st that night, making the requisite
"Can you believe my mother thinks I've never had sex?" phone calls to
her friends. "I'm forty years old, for God's sake, forty years old."
Forty. Four-O.
And still single.
She stopped sleeping.
Night after night, it was as late as three or four in the morning before she
could rest. She'd tried
Ambien
, Saint John's-
wort
, chamomile tea, and acupuncture. The only thing that
lulled her to sleep was the click-clack of the two needles as the stereo softly
played the strains of Chopin. Lucie had been a good knitter when she was a
young woman and she'd been rusty trying it out again, knitting up a few
bookmarks to remind her fingers of how to work the needles. Then she had made
an olive-and-light-gray alpaca V-neck for herself, blocks of color dividing the
front, then stepped it up to four needles and made a cable-knit cardigan for
her dad, a cream fisherman's knit. Her knitting saved her sanity; she knew it.
Lucie favored traditional projects that took time and focus—an afghan, a Fair
Isle sweater—that would give her something to think about during the day, not
make her dread the night ahead. At night, she would work the stitches until her
fingers hurt, her eyes were weepy, and the exhaustion let her know that,
finally, the sleep would come. Then she'd tuck the rosewood needles and the
attached ball of yarn into the empty half of the bed beside her, drifting off
with her hand resting on her knitted stitches—a sweater front, a sleeve—and
dreaming, as she did every night, of a time when her apartment wouldn't be
empty.
When she'd have a family of her own.

* * *

Lucie's
aunt Doris had taught her how to
knit, during a long-ago summer vacation; Doris had just gotten divorced
again—from the rebound guy between uncles Les and Paul—and had driven
Lucie's
mother nuts with her constant crying.
"I need help with Lucie," Rosie Brennan had whispered to Doris, her
husband's sister, late one night, hoping to quell the dramatics and refocus her
sister-in-law. "She's fourteen and won't give me a moment. She won't tell
me what goes on at school; all she does is come home and play Bay City Rollers
in her room, painting her toenails bright red and writing in her diary. I'm
worried she's going to try pot. Smoke her brains right out. That's what all the
kids are doing nowadays. Please, try to get her to open up, Doris. I need
you." It was classic Rosie. Molding the truth…for a good cause, of course.
In fact, Lucie wouldn't have recognized pot if you'd handed it to her, and at
fourteen, she was still sharing all her secrets with her momma. The two were
close: Lucie was the late-in-life surprise for the
Brennans
,
a precious daughter after a houseful of boys.
What details Lucie didn't cough up willingly, Rosie read every morning after
her daughter left for school, carefully using a bobby pin to pick open the
locking journal she'd given to her little girl on the day of her first period.
"So you'll have your privacy," Rosie had said. "Keep it
somewhere safe."
Rosie's plan worked; Doris took to her new project—becoming
Lucie's
confidante—with vigor. She took her niece swimming, taught her how to apply lip
liner, asked her about boys, and, after a glass of Coca-Cola every day at 3
P.M., showed her how to knit and purl. It became their special afternoon
ritual.
"My finger gets sore when I try to slide the stitches off the needle, Aunt
Doris," Lucie had complained.
"Honey, being a woman is all about being sore. Get used to it."
Failed romances had left Doris with an edge. But then she softened. "The
stitches are too tight, sweetie. So you'll do better next row. But remember,
you might just have to toughen up your skin to get the job done. Okay?"

* * *

As high school picked up in earnest and Lucie
joined the volleyball team, knitting became just another pastime she tucked
away, along with
Shrinky
-Dinks and Monopoly. Armed
with twelve lip-smacking shades of Bonne Bell gloss, an enviable collection of
wide-legged slacks, and the attention of a relatively acne-free boy in his
senior year, teen Lucie had been good to go.
And now, all these years later, she was back at the craft, the memory of
Doris's voice soothing her heart. It was like reconnecting with an old friend.
"Be careful not to use the short end of the yarn," her aunt had
advised her when she was a girl. "Make a knot, or put a smidge of tape on
it, or even just put a paper clip on the end—that way, you won't end up
wrapping it around the needle." This only after Lucie had used her short
end to knit five stitches. But Doris had waited quietly to see if she'd noticed,
then simply pulled the yarn off the needle to pull out the mistakes. "Try
again."
Try again, try again. Isn't that what everyone says? When your heart is broken,
they tell you that love will bloom again, thought Lucie, but they never ask if
you're the one who is causing the problems.
"Why aren't you married yet? You were always such a popular girl, always
going to beach parties—you remember those parties? Out on the shore?"
Riing
,
riing
,
riing
went the phone, every Friday night for twenty years. Rosie. Calling to see if
Lucie had met anyone yet, even though she'd just talked to her mother a few
days earlier. What about a blind date? Rosie knew just the boy for her…it was
the same phone call every week; only the names and professions of Mr. Potential
changed. The conversations were worse after the holidays, of course, when her
mother had to confront the year gone past and her brothers all married, Lucie
still alone.
But who wanted to be married when it meant you'd be living with someone who
wanted to know everything about you? All your thoughts and habits? Weighing in
on every decision, large and small? It would be like having two
Rosies
. Love, Lucie had learned over the years, can smother
you.
Her friends—from college, from work—had mostly settled down, to marriage, to
live-in arrangements, to kids and dogs and houses in Long Island or Jersey.
Come out for the weekend, they'd say. And she did go. At first. But then it
became clear to Lucie that their lives were hurtling in a direction she couldn't
follow. There she was, smiling stupidly at christenings, housewarmings,
cookouts. And any single male guests shied away—bald and annoying though they
might be—convinced that she was desperate to bed them and wed them. And it's
not like Lucie hadn't dated over the years: she canoodled with her college
sweetheart well into her twenties ("Where's the ring?" Rosie would
ask every Thanksgiving) and then, once that relationship had tired itself out
and they'd mutually come up with the guts to move on, kept up with a series of
steady "significant others." Bill, Todd, Angus. And a Howard lasted
briefly in there, too. She would tell everyone—Rosie, her brothers, her
friends—that each guy was "the one." At first it really seemed that
way. But then, little by little, her boyfriends became annoying. Wanting more
of her time. More of her soul.
What Lucie didn't reveal to anyone was that it was she who bailed on each
relationship. Every time the
dum-dum-da-dum
seemed
inevitable.
Oh, she could stay faithful, all right. She was a serial monogamist, more than
happy to settle in and stop looking around. Just as long as no one exchanged
keys—let alone vows—it was a-okay with her.
Because she was independent, see? Except that she wasn't. Not really.
Lucie's
entire life had been defined by her relationships
to other people. Daughter, little sister, girlfriend. She had simply bounced
around.
"Why buy the cow when she's offering the milk for free?" It was one
of her best lines, trotted out when a fellow seemed promising boyfriend
material. Who wouldn't want a girl that only wanted to see you on Wednesdays
and Saturdays?
A lot of men, apparently.
So there was a reason why Lucie Brennan couldn't sleep at night. She was too
busy trying to figure out how she'd gone from pretty young thing with an
up-and-coming TV career to a struggling, still-single freelance producer. Still
living in the same one-bedroom apartment after twenty years in the city. Still
living paycheck to paycheck. Still waiting for someone, somewhere, to give her
the answer.

* * *

"You need to shake things up a
little,"
Lucie's
friends told her, suggesting
treats at the spa or splurging on some Jimmy
Choos
.
"I can't wear heels," she said. "And my skin breaks out if I use
anything harsh."
But she did need something different. So when one of the other producers at the
station suggested online dating, Lucie laughed it off. Then logged on at home
to give it a whirl.
She felt a little embarrassed, a little shy about her online forays. So she
kept it to herself. But there was something so freeing about finally having a
private life that Rosie knew nothing about. That no one knew about. It made
Lucie feel like a real adult. Finally.
And without even trying, she fell in love. Not with some guy who sent her an
e-mail or posted a profile.
No, she'd found someone else.
Someone who'd always been around but to whom she'd never really given a second
thought.
Herself.

* * *

It was great. She went to museums and plays
alone, and ate in restaurants at tables for one. Without even a book as a
cover. She took a pottery class. She turned up the music and danced by herself
in the apartment. There was the experimental solo vacation—a quick weekend
getaway to Boston—and its follow-up: a weeklong Caribbean cruise, a steal of a
deal with a last-minute rate. (Then she turned around and used the difference
in price to rationalize the purchase of a shiny ruby ring for herself.) Lucie
hadn't shut out her heart to the idea of love. She'd embraced it.
And she'd done something else, too. She had written down a list of everything
she wanted to do—make a film, have a baby, fall in love. Which of these things
can I make happen? she asked herself. What is my top priority?
The baby, she realized. The baby before the opportunity had passed and her body
was too old. She couldn't afford a clinic—she wasn't on a health plan—but even
a good Catholic girl whose mother thinks she's still a virgin knows how to make
a baby. The old-fashioned way.
So she began using her online dating for sperm-donor selection—unbeknown to the
nice-enough fellows she invited home after three or four dates. She settled on
Will, a good-looking researcher at Sloan-Kettering, a shy kind of guy who had
been in school so long he'd kind of missed out on dating. He was a good eight
years younger than Lucie, which didn't hurt, either.
He probably would have made good boyfriend material. But Lucie wasn't looking
for that. She convinced him to do the modern thing, to get tested and get into
bed.
She told Will she used birth control. She didn't.
Hey, Lucie wasn't a saint. She was a woman on a mission.
And she began spending more and more time at the knitting shop at the end of
every workweek, eager to avoid the Friday-night phone calls from her mother.
(So, okay, maybe she felt a little guilty over her baby-making antics.)
But it worked. It all worked. She was sleeping better, her knitting was going
gangbusters, and, oh yeah, there was that other little situation, too. Will had
hit the target. Her boobs were puffy and sore and her butt was growing
exponentially; it wouldn't be too long before it was impossible to hide the
fact that, at forty-two, Lucie was really, truly going to have a child.