‘Are you sleeping?’
‘If only,’ Susan said quietly. If only she could close her eyes and make it all go away – find it was just a bad dream, a relic of the panic from her own past – I can’t do this, I’m alone, HELP! No, she was not sleeping. ‘But you should be,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re sleeping for two.’
‘I’m also peeing for two. Did you talk with Kate?’
Susan glanced at the door where Lily stood backlit, a stillslim silhouette against the frame. ‘Only for a minute. We’re meeting in the morning.’
‘Mary Kate says her mom’s really upset. It’s the money issue.’
‘It’s more than that,’ Susan said. If money ruled the Mellos, Kate and Will would have stopped after the twins. But Kate would be upset, like she was, about the consequences of what their daughters had foolishly done. ‘Any word from Jess?’
‘No. She’s not answering my messages. I think she’s mad at me. She told Mary Kate that Sunny went berserk. Jess blames me.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because we had agreed not to tell. Only I got pregnant before they did, so I was farther along, and I knew you knew—’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘You may not have known you knew, but you knew,’ the girl insisted, ‘and once I told you, the others had to tell their moms, even though they wanted to wait.’
Susan didn’t argue about what she had known when. She was already beating herself up about what she should have seen but hadn’t. Girls like theirs didn’t do things like this.
But they had now. And waiting to tell moms? ‘Funny thing about being pregnant,’ she mused, wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Before long, it shows.’
‘But by then, it would be too late to do anything about it,’ said Lily. ‘Jess is worried they’ll make her have an abortion. If they do, she’ll run off to her grandmother. I have no one but you, Mom. If you didn’t want me here, I could call your Aunt Evie, but she’s like, what, eighty now?’
Susan put her chin on her knees. ‘Sixty, and you’re not calling Aunt Evie.’
‘Well, if I had to, I would – or I’d call Dad’s sister. She likes me. I mean, it’d only be for a little while.’
‘You’re not going anywhere.’
‘I’m sorry if I’ve messed things up.’
Susan wanted to say that she hadn’t. Only she had. The fact of Susan sitting in bed, missing Lily’s warm body but unable to open the covers for her to snuggle, spoke of a huge mess.
‘Don’t be angry,’ the girl whispered.
‘Why not, Lily?’ Susan shot back. ‘My signature accomplishment last year was the establishment of a school clinic where students can be treated for things they don’t want to discuss with their parents. That clinic is staffed by a real nurse, with a real doctor on call, either of whom could have given you birth control if you’d wanted to have sex. Do you realize that I pushed for this specifically to minimize student pregnancies?’
Lily remained silent.
‘Mm,’ Susan concluded softly, ‘I’m speechless, too.’
‘You’re missing the point. This is not an unplanned pregnancy.’
‘No, you’re missing the point,’ Susan parried with a spike of outrage. ‘This town lives and breathes responsibility. This family lives and breathes responsibility. What you’ve done is not responsible. You can talk all you want about knowing what you’re doing and being a good mother, but you’re seventeen, Lily. Seventeen.’
‘You did it,’ Lily said meekly.
And that, Susan realized, would haunt her forever. She had worked so hard to get past it, but here it was again. And now she had no idea what to do. She certainly couldn’t call Rick. He had trusted her to raise Lily well, and she had failed.
Heartsick, she turned away from the door and curled into a ball. She didn’t know how long Lily stood there, only knew that she couldn’t reach out to her, and by the time she rolled back to look at the clock, the doorway was empty.
Susan rarely called in sick, but she would have done it the next day if she hadn’t planned to meet Kate at the barn. Inevitably, someone would see her going there. But Zaganack looked out for its own. If you were sick, people knew; likewise, if you were supposed to be sick and showed up elsewhere.
The prospect of leaving school at ten kept her going, and when she finally ran down the stone steps and climbed into her car, she felt better for the first time that day. She would have walked if she’d had time; the barn wasn’t far, and the November air was crisp, still fragrant with the crush of dried leaves. But she didn’t want to lose a minute.
No ordinary barn, this one had a past. Originally built on the outskirts of town to house horses, it had also hidden its share of escaped slaves heading to freedom north of the border. For years it had housed nothing but cobwebs and mice, but for Susan, Kate, Sunny and Pam, who saw PC Wool as their own personal ticket to freedom, it held an appeal. When the last of the Gunn family died and the property went up for sale, the women lobbied for the barn. Envisioning it as a tourist attraction, Tanner Perry, grandson of Herman Perry and husband of Pam, had bought it and moved it closer to the rest of Perry & Cass. The tourist part had never quite materialized, but the success of PC Wool more than compensated.
Parking beside Kate’s van, Susan ran inside, past stalls of raw fiber, shipping cartons and computers, all the way to the back. There, tubs for soaking fiber and shelves of dye lined the walls. A separate section held newly painted wool, now hung to dry, while ceiling fans whirred softly above. A skeining machine stood nearby.
Had she not been preoccupied, Susan might have admired a mound of finished skeins. A blend of alpaca and mohair, these were the last of the holiday colors she had conceived the summer before. Rich with dozens of shades of cranberry, balsam and snow, they were the culmination of a year in which sales had doubled. Not only had PC Wool earned its very own section in the Perry & Cass catalogue, but after becoming the darling of the knitting blogs, it had experienced an explosion in online sales.
A large oak table stood at the heart of the work space. Old and scarred, it was the same one on which they had put together their first season of colors ten years before. Back then, the table was in Susan’s garage, and PC Wool had only been a dream, conjured up during child-free evenings with a bottle of wine and good friends who loved to knit. Even now, a large basket in the center of the table held small knitting projects, while the bulk of its surface was covered with skeins waiting to be twisted.
Dropping her coat on a chair, Susan went to Kate. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Been better,’ Kate replied. Her eyes were heavy, her hair a riot of ends sticking up around the bamboo double-pointeds at her crown. She opened her arms.
This was why Susan had come. She needed comfort. Petite Kate, with her big heart and can-do approach, had always offered that. ‘If it had to be anyone,’ Susan whispered, ‘I’m glad it’s you. What are we going to do?’
Kate
