Threading the Needle Read online

  Reverend Tucker was nice too. He’s about my age, with steel gray hair, glasses that are always slipping to the end of his nose, and a friendly, natural way of expressing himself in and out of the pulpit. But I’ve always been nervous around ministers, even ones as nice as Reverend Tucker. Seeing a clergyman always makes me think about things I shouldn’t have done but did and things I should do but haven’t.

  What did they want? Were they part of the church welcoming committee? Or the finance committee? Maybe, once you’d attended a certain number of times, they expected you to start paying a tithe to the church? I hated to disappoint them, but right now, ten percent of my annual income was a negative number.

  “It’s good to see you again, Tessa. Reverend Tucker and I are out doing a little church business and we thought we’d start with you. Do you mind if we come in?”

  “Sure. Just let me unlock the door.” I fumbled around in my purse, feeling awkward for keeping them standing there while I hunted for my keys, which, naturally, meant that it took me forever to find them.

  Margot turned toward my display window. “You’ve got such a sweet shop, Tessa. I dropped in to see you a couple of weeks ago. You were out, but someone else helped me.” Margot screwed her eyes shut and tapped a finger against her lips, trying to jar her memory. “Emily? I think that was her name.”

  “Emily,” I confirmed, grateful for the cover of Margot’s chatter. Where were my keys? This was becoming embarrassing. “She’s been helping me out over the summer.” I didn’t bother to add that when Emily returned to college in a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t be replacing her. I couldn’t afford to.

  “Well, I just loved the lavender body lotion and peppermint lip balm she sold me. Reverend, have you been in Tessa’s shop before? She has the most wonderful products made from herbs she grows herself. Isn’t that right, Tessa?”

  “Oh?” the good reverend replied. “Sharon’s birthday is coming up. Maybe I can get her present here.”

  “Found them!” I nearly shouted with relief as I yanked my key ring out from a side pocket of my handbag and held it aloft.

  I opened the door and walked through the shop, turning on lights. One of the things I love about this space is the large, many-paned windows that face the street. They give the shop a homey, old-fashioned look and a lot of natural light. My feeling is, the more light the better. That’s why, before we opened for business, we took down all the old dark paneling and replaced it with a rough-textured white plaster, restained the dark floors with alternating eighteen-inch squares of white and mossy green in a checkerboard pattern that let the natural grain of the wood show through, then painted all the wood and glass display cabinets white. Finally, we’d removed the fluorescent lighting and replaced it with lots and lots of spotlights in ceiling cans, which flooded the room with clean, white light. Walking into this room is like walking over clouds on a clear day, surrounded by sunlight above and around, with glimpses of the green earth below.

  Reverend Tucker stopped in the middle of the room, next to the candle display, and looked around. “I remember this shop back when Edwin Hargrove had his antique business here. Everything was so gloomy. The place smelled like mold and wet dog.”

  The reverend wasn’t the first person to mention this. Apparently, Mr. Hargrove had a shop dog, a golden retriever who liked to roll in mud puddles.

  “What a difference,” he continued. “It’s so bright and it smells so fresh. Not at all perfumey,” he said in a slightly surprised tone.

  “I use real plants and herbs for my products, no artificial perfumes. Lavender is our most popular scent, but I make products using rosemary, peppermint, lemongrass, bergamot, clary sage, roses, gardenia, and all kinds of spices and citrus peels too.”

  “Smell this!” Margot said eagerly, taking the cap off a tester of lavender lotion and holding it under the minister’s nose. “Sharon would love it.”

  He sniffed at the bottle. “Very nice. Does this come in some sort of gift basket? I’m not very good at wrapping things.”

  Three minutes later, I’d made my first sale of the day. Mrs. Tucker would be getting a Lavender Luxury Basket for her birthday, a bottle of lavender body lotion with matching glycerine soap, lavender sugar scrub, and a candle, prettily arranged in a white wicker basket and tied with a purple tulle bow.

  “This is perfect,” Reverend Tucker said as he shoved his change into his pocket. “Last birthday I bought Sharon a coffee grinder. Didn’t go over well.”

  Margot looked at me with eyebrows raised and lips pressed together, trying to suppress a smile. I had to look away to keep from laughing. Under his starched clerical collar, Reverend Tucker was a man like any other, one who hadn’t heard the “never get your wife anything that plugs in” rule.

  “Feel free to come back anytime you need a gift, Reverend. I’m happy to help.”

  “Thank you, Tessa. I will.” He picked up his shopping bag and walked away from the counter, getting halfway to the door before Margot stopped him.

  “Reverend? Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then spun around to face me. “Oh yes! The fund-raiser! The church is hosting a fund-raiser in September, a benefit for the Stanton Center and New Beginnings. Their donations have been down this year, and if they can’t raise some money, they’ll have to begin cutting back programs.”

  The Stanton Center is our local shelter for women and children who’ve been victims of domestic violence and New Beginnings is an offshoot of that, a community center offering counseling, career training, and enrichment classes for victims of domestic violence or, as space allows, any woman who needs help making a fresh start. They do wonderful work. In other circumstances I’d be happy to help, but . . .

  “I’m sorry, Reverend, but it hasn’t been a very good year for me. I just can’t make any donations right now. I wish I could.”

  “Oh, no. We’re not asking for money,” Margot assured me. “The church is sponsoring a country fair on our grounds and on the town Green in September. We’ll have a used book sale, a quilt show and raffle, cakewalk, carnival games and pony rides for children, a soup-and-salad luncheon, and a silent auction. It’s going to be a lot of fun, and since we’ll be having it on the peak fall foliage weekend, we’re hoping to attract a lot of tourists. . . .”

  “And tourist dollars,” the reverend added. “We’re hoping to raise six thousand dollars over the weekend. Would you be willing to donate an item for the auction?”

  “Absolutely!” I said. “What a wonderful idea.” I started looking around the shop, searching for items that might attract high bids.

  “How about another Lavender Luxury Basket?” I asked, pulling one off the shelf without waiting for an answer. “And you said there will be children? I’ve got a cute basket with bubble bath and shampoo, a terry cloth towel, and a rubber duck.”

  “Oh, that is darling!” Margot exclaimed, her eyes laughing. “Are you sure you can afford to donate two items?”

  “Sure. It’s all for a good cause. Candles are always popular, especially in the fall. What if I put together a whole basket of those?”

  By the time Margot and Reverend Tucker were ready to leave, I’d promised three baskets for the silent auction, as many gallons of peppermint iced tea as they’d need for the luncheon, and a bushel of vegetables for making soup. I was sure Lee wouldn’t mind.

  “See you on Sunday,” Margot said as I walked them to the door. “You know, we really should get together for lunch sometime.”

  “We should.”

  “Thank you again,” Reverend Tucker said as he shook my hand. “And tell your husband I said thank you to him as well. I hope we’ll see him in church sometime.”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing it would never happen. “That would be nice.”

  6

  Madelyn

  Iam not a big drinker. Not anymore.

  Many years ago I learned my lesson the hard way and haven’t overindulged
since. I do enjoy a glass of wine, two at the most, with dinner, but I haven’t had a hangover since I lived in New Bern.

  Ironic, isn’t it? The first hangover I’ve had in thirty-eight years occurred on my first morning back in New Bern, the scene of my last hangover. There’s got to be some sort of deep celestial significance to all that, but as the sun beamed through the bedroom window and directly into my eyes, I was too groggy to figure out what it might be.

  I rolled on my side and tried to go back to sleep, but the movement made my head pound. My eyeballs were a size too large and my tongue felt like it was made from dryer lint. I groaned aloud before rolling onto my back again, my arm flopping against the mattress and raising a flotilla of dust motes into the column of sunlight.

  Moving slowly to minimize the jostling of my throbbing head, I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and scooped water in my mouth with my hands. I took four aspirin tablets from the bottle in my cosmetics bag and washed them down with a few more scoops of water. The aspirin would soon dull the ache in my head, but it wasn’t going to do a thing for my queasy stomach.

  It seems counterintuitive to put quantities of greasy food into a nauseous stomach, but the experiences of my misspent youth had taught me that was exactly what I needed to do. But there was no food in the house. That, along with hatred for my husband and an extended wade in the wallow of self-pity, was part of the reason I was in this condition.

  After furiously tearing off strip after strip of ugly brown wallpaper from the foyer yesterday and screaming a few more choice words at the absent company who I felt most deserved them—Sterling, the ghost of Edna Beecher, Eugene Janders, the entire federal government, God—I felt no better. Seeking relief, I pulled a bottle of Delamain Extra cognac out of my luggage and poured myself a drink, a big one.

  While I was packing my things under the watchful eyes of the federal agent who was there to make sure I didn’t take anything that wasn’t “mine,” I’d spotted the bottle of Delamain sitting on a counter-top. When the agent’s back was turned I slipped it into my voluminous handbag, but only as an act of defiance. I don’t even like cognac.

  However, desperate times . . .

  Halfway through my second glass, I realized I really should eat something, but the cupboards and refrigerator were bare. By that time, driving to the supermarket on the edge of town was out of the question—the last thing I needed was a ticket for DUI—and the shops within walking distance were already closed for the night. Riffling through my purse, I’d found two tiny bags of peanuts left over from my last airline trip. I sat down in the dark kitchen and ate them one by one, washing each down with a swig of cognac.

  Stupid. And now I was paying the price.

  I stood over the commode, considered throwing up, decided against it, then pulled on a pair of slacks and a sweater before going downstairs to look through the kitchen cupboards, confirming what I already knew. There wasn’t a scrap of food in the house. If I wanted breakfast, I was going to have to go out and buy some.

  The thought of wheeling a shopping cart through the aisle of the grocery store was more than I could face. So I fished my darkest pair of sunglasses from the bottom of my purse, hid my disheveled hair under a baseball cap, and walked downtown in search of a café. I knew I shouldn’t be spending money eating out, so I promised myself that starting tomorrow, I’d be frugal. Besides, I reasoned, the fresh air might do me good.

  It did.

  Summer had a few days left to run, but the morning chill made it clear that fall was fast approaching. Here and there, the trees showed spots of yellow and pale orange. A gust of wind in the branches made a rustling sound, as if the leaves were made from paper. The sun shone bright and clear in a sky of brilliant blue that, even through the shaded lenses of my glasses, was impossible to ignore.

  Pretty. I had forgotten.

  New Bern, with its tree-lined streets, neatly trimmed hedges, and rows of quaint white-clapboarded, black-shuttered antique houses—real antiques, not ersatz “reproductions” that never quite look or feel like the real deal—was very pretty indeed. A picture postcard for “the good old days.” Charming.

  It was easy to see why tourists in search of the quintessential New England village and city dwellers looking for a peaceful weekend retreat put New Bern on their not-to-be-missed list. In their shoes, I’d feel the same. And for a moment, even with my head aching and the light filtered through smoke-colored lenses, I did. For just a minute, the length of the village block where the white clapboard houses with trimmed hedges give way to a row of wide-windowed, no-chains-allowed storefronts, I allowed myself to be charmed by New Bern.

  But only for a minute.

  I heard her a split second before I saw her, a disembodied voice blown around the street corner. Even all these years later, there was no mistaking it—that upper-crust, eastern-seaboard, non-rhotic accent of hers, all absent “Rs” and extended vowels, delivered with the lower jaw slightly jutted and the eyebrows slightly raised, a voice that could only belong to Abigail Burgess Wynne.

  “I know I said I’d be there, darling, and I will be. I just want to stop by the quilt shop and say hello to Evelyn. I haven’t seen her since she got back from Ireland.”

  She rounded the corner, cell phone to her ear, walking briskly, wearing good wool slacks, pearls, and a summer-weight cashmere sweater over a starched snow white blouse, not a hair out of place. That had not changed. I hadn’t supposed it would.

  She was older but not yet old. There were more lines around her mouth and her hair was pure platinum now, pulled into a low knot at the back of her neck, but there was something about her expression, her eyes.... Strangely, she looked almost younger than she had at our last meeting.

  All these years later, I could remember every wounding word she’d uttered, every stabbing inflection of her voice, the utter loathing in each glance of her piercing, icy eyes.

  Now she sounded relaxed, happy, and there was a definite spring in her step. She hustled past me without a glance, took a sharp right turn into the old Cobbled Court, and disappeared, the sound of her voice and the echo of her heels on cold gray stones fading behind me.

  I walked past the door of the café until I was sure she was gone, and then stopped, reaching my palm out to rest against a gritty red-brick wall. My heart was racing and the aspirin-dulled pain in my head was back. The rest of me felt numb. I couldn’t keep standing there on the street, but I couldn’t force myself to go inside the café either. Instead, I made an about-face, fighting off nausea as I retraced my steps back down Oak Leaf Lane. The crisp sunny morning and the chittering birds mocked my retreat.

  Three doors from my destination I looked up and saw it—the painted porch of the old Kover house—and the memories . . . all those awful memories came flooding back.

  Why was I here? The scene of my most humiliating failures? Of all the cities, towns, and villages in the world, why did I find myself a refugee in the one place that never welcomed me, filled with people and the memories of people who never wanted me? Why? What kind of cosmic joke was God playing now?

  Eyes glued to the sidewalk, I walked the last half block to Edna’s garden gate with quickened steps, went inside the house and back to bed, pulling the covers over my head to block out the light and the memories—all the memories.

  Impossible.

  7

  Madelyn

  Islept off the cognac and dreamed about my dad. I didn’t remember my dream, I never do. But it was something about Dad and a ship. Dad on a ship. Something like that.

  The ocean is more than an hour’s drive from New Bern. Even so, Dad wanted to be a ship captain when he grew up. It didn’t work out. Instead, he became a shipbuilder, actually a submarine builder. He worked for the Electric Boat Company, out of Groton, Connecticut, where I grew up. When I was nine he was knocked unconscious by a piece of swinging steel and never woke up. Grandma Edna came to Groton after Dad’s accident. She had to. There was no one else.

 
I kept vigil in the hospital waiting area, a room with gunmetal gray tile on the floors and stiff plastic sofas, where people dozed or wept or drank cardboard cups of coffee bought from the vending machine while keeping one ear tuned for the sound of nurses in rubber-soled shoes, bringing news. They wouldn’t let me in Dad’s room, not until the last day, when I was told to come and say good-bye. It didn’t matter. Dad was already gone. He had been from the moment that slab of metal cracked his skull. The tubes and screens and beeping monitors had only delayed the inevitable.

  It was terrible to see him like that, and frightening. I tried to put my hand into Edna’s, but she pulled back and closed her fist on empty air, pulling herself in as tight and hard as a pillar of polished marble. We’d scarcely exchanged a score of words since she arrived in Groton but, somehow, I already knew she could never forgive me. Though I didn’t know why. Not yet.

  I never met my mother. Until Dad died, I didn’t know where she was or who she was. Edna lost no time filling me in on the details of my unplanned arrival in this world. The history she imparted was one-sided and colored by hate, but it’s all I have to go on. Hers was the only voice in the room.

  My father was bright and a good student, good enough to be accepted into the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, on Long Island. The competition for admission was fierce and with good reason: tuition was free. The family would never have been able to pay for Dad’s education otherwise.

  The courses were demanding and the discipline was rigorous, but there was still time for Dad and his shipmates to go into Manhattan on weekends. He met my mother in Greenwich Village, at the White Horse Tavern, where beatnik poets, writers, and hangers-on liked to drink. In the same year my parents met, the poet Dylan Thomas would collapse at the White Horse Tavern. He died a few days later.