I’d owned Crafts and More for seven months now. A month ago I was even flush enough to hire a woman to work with me three afternoons a week. Barbara was a wonderful crafter who was using the extra money to help her youngest son who was in his first year in computer management at the Community College of Vermont, the same place Johanna taught English lit. I knew her from church where she led a weekday-morning crafts-and-Bible study. She bought lots from my shop. When I’d asked if she wanted to work here part-time, she’d said, “Sure! Why not? I’m here the equivalent of that time anyway.”
I’d also begun offering craft classes in the community. My favorite was a scrapbooking class for seniors over at the Champlain Seniors’ Center. In addition to tonight’s mirror arts class, I had a quilting class. Plus, I had plenty more classes in the planning stages.
Johanna was wearing two different colored socks I noticed, as we headed back down the stairs. I smiled to myself. Johanna was good for me. My funky friend brought a lightness to my life that had been absent for too long.
Three women were waiting under the awning at the locked front door. “Hello, ladies,” I said cheerfully, letting them in. “There’s a bit of time, so if you want, you can pop over next door and grab a coffee. They’re still open for a few more minutes. We won’t start without you.” I poked my head outside and looked through the large glass windows into the brightly lit coffee shop. But of course the man who got his coffee the same time I did each morning wouldn’t be there. What was I thinking? And why was I even looking for him?
I was about to turn back when I saw something. Or felt something. It was as if a dark hand had waved across the coffee shop windows. It disappeared so quickly that I couldn’t get a handle on it, couldn’t figure it out. A person? A cloud? Fog? What?
I held my sweater closed at my throat, but the sense of something, or someone, there made me quiver. I thought of my aunt’s constant premonitions, her asking me to make a promise before she died. “Don’t go back to Vermont. Whatever you do, don’t ever go back to Vermont, Marylee. Promise me this!”
And I had looked at her skeletal face, wasted by the cancer that would take her in a matter of weeks, and made no such promise. Instead, I’d wept as I’d smoothed a wet cloth on the forehead of my mother’s sister, the woman who’d raised me.
A chill so profound started at the tip of my toes and ended in a place near my forehead. I closed my eyes briefly.
“Are you okay?” A woman with gray curls approached me.
“Just a chill. It’s cold out there,” I said.
“Do you think so?” said someone else overhearing the tail end of our conversation.
“Warm for this time of year,” said another from across the room.
“Supposed to rain,” said someone else.
And while the ladies talked on about the weather, I drew back into my cheerful shop and made my way to the craft table in the rear. Earlier I had set out pieces of mirror, both glass and plastic. At each place I’d laid a nine-by-twelve mirror. I’d instructed the ladies to bring photos or pictures from magazines that they wanted to use in their mosaics. For those who hadn’t brought pictures, I had a stack of old tourist magazines featuring scenes from Vermont and other parts of New England they could cut pages from. I had told them this was going to be a fun class and that anybody could do it. Even Johanna, who claimed she couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler, was going to participate.
Two more ladies entered; another two went for coffee and a few more sat down at the table and fingered through pieces of mirror.
“I’ve done decoupage, but never with mirrors,” one said.
“It’s something I learned from my aunt,” I said with forced cheerfulness. I was still reeling from what I’d seen out there. Or hadn’t seen. “But watch your fingers. Some of those pieces are sharp. We don’t need any cut fingers tonight.”
Ten minutes later all eleven women had arrived. Most of them seemed to know each other already. I had us fill out colored name tags with marking pens, but this was obviously more for my benefit than theirs. I stood at the head of a long table and began to explain mirror mosaic art as taught to me by Aunt Rose.
“Is it like tole painting?” asked a woman whose name tag read Gladys.
“Not really,” I explained. “It’s a bit like decoupage. But not exactly. It a bit dif—” I stopped. I began choking, coughing. I put my hand to my throat. My eyes went wide. I couldn’t breathe. One of the ladies reached into her purse and handed me a paper-wrapped cough candy. “Thank you,” I managed to say. I tried unwrapping it, but my fingers refused to find the edges of the wrapper.
This wasn’t an ordinary tickle in my throat. A woman named Beryl was smoothing out the picture she’d brought with her. It was the same exact picture I had kept in the frame on my nightstand for all of my growing-up years. It was the picture that had listened to all my whispered prayers and thoughts. It was the picture I had said good-night to almost every night of my life, and the one I had said good morning to when I woke up. I was still coughing. I needed to sit. I needed to flee. I needed to throw up. I closed my eyes. I swallowed.
Johanna drew back, put her hand to her mouth.
I pointed to the picture, astounding even myself by my ability to ask Beryl in a very calm voice, “Where did you get that picture? Do you know those people? Are they related to you?” Could this little owl-like woman with the oversized glasses be a relative of mine? Some distant aunt? Did she know my aunt Rose?
She shook her head. “This is just a magazine picture, dear. I cut it out years ago. I’ve always thought the picture so lovely and romantic.”
“What magazine?” I managed to ask.
“I have no idea. It was one of those magazines that had romance stories. Not many of them do anymore, you know. There was a time when every women’s magazine had a romance story. I miss that.”
Several women nodded in agreement. Several more looked up at me, concern across their faces.
“But what magazine? When?”
“Oh, my dear, that would be years ago now.”
I kept looking at her and asked, “Did you…Have you lived here a long time?”
She shook her head and said, “We moved here when Bert retired. That would be ten years.”
“Then do you know these people?” I pointed at the picture.
Her eyebrows screwed together into one long brow across her face. I was conscious of time standing still, of the rest of the class regarding me, but I had to know.
“No, dear,” she said. “I told you. This is just a picture from a magazine.”
“But, um…” I couldn’t take my eyes from the picture, the two of them, my parents in a stranger’s hands.
I had lived with the story of my parents for as long as I could remember. They’d died in a car accident, the details of which were too painful for my aunt to ever fully talk to me about. Even when she was dying, she’d refused to tell me about the particulars of the accident. Was it a head-on collision? Was it a drunk driver? Had the car skidded out of control on icy or wet roads? When I would ask these questions, my aunt
