'Where's the afghan we read about in the paper? It was just terrible about Elaine Sheridan,' Meg said as they sat down.
'Ellen,' I corrected.
'Whatever,' Meg said, looking up and down the table. 'Where are the squares that she made?'
Stacy nodded. 'We want to make squares for it, too. We want to be part of history.'
Adele got up and came beside the newbies. 'Then you know how to crochet?'
'Sure. We learned last night,' the redhead said as they both held up their hooks and string. Each had just a trail of chain stitches.
Adele touched the trail hanging off Meg's hook. 'That's not quite crochet. These are just the foundation.'
'Oh,' Meg said, sounding deflated.
'But they're nice and loose,' Sheila said from down the table. Dinah caught my gaze, and we both rolled our eyes. Even at our most clueless, we'd been better than that.
'Dear, I'm afraid the author's plan was more about keepingyour hands out of a bag of chips than making anything.'
'She said you could make a little coaster.' Meg looked at her trail of stitches and wrinkled her nose. 'We got there kind of late. Maybe I missed part of what she said.'
CeeCee's expression changed to impatience. 'We're working under deadline and could certainly use some help. But you'd both have to learn how to crochet properly.' Meg and Stacy both nodded in agreement, and CeeCee gestured toward Adele and said she'd teach them.
Adele didn't look that happy at being bossed around by CeeCee, but took the new members down to the end of the table anyway. She turned out to be a surprisingly patient teacher. Once she was satisfied that they understood single crochet, she left them to practice and rejoined the rest of us.
Finally I got a chance to tell Dinah the good news. She jumped up and hugged me.
CeeCee was laying out paper squares on the floor, in a life-size mock-up of the afghan. She placed the completed squares on top of the paper ones. She looked up at us and gave me a dirty look.
'Can't you save all that until after the group?' she said in an irritated tone. Sheila handed her four squares made out of blue heathery yarn. They seemed fuzzier than the others and had stitches that were much looser.
CeeCee shook her head in disgust. 'I would think that by now you would know you have to use the same kind of yarn as the rest of us, and you can't use that giant hook.'
Sheila's expression tightened before our eyes. Her shoulders hunched together, and instinctively she began to rub the back of her neck.
I couldn't believe how harsh CeeCee had been. ApparentlyAdele noticed, too. She picked up Sheila's work and patted her on the shoulder.
'The colors are a little bland for me, but you could make a great scarf out of these. All you have to do is make some more of them and join them together,' Adele said. Sheila relaxed a little and thanked her for the suggestion.
'Where are the squares you did?' Adele asked CeeCee.
CeeCee suddenly looked disconcerted. 'I've just been too busy the last few days with the face cream infomercial to think about anything else.'
Adele shook her head in disapproval and showed off a stack she'd completed. 'But you had time to make those paper squares?'
CeeCee's voice had now turned shrill. 'I was just trying to keep things organized. It's the kind of thing Ellen would have done.' The paper squares started to scatter, and CeeCee struggled to put them back the way they'd been. 'They're all marked either done or not done, and I was going to hand out the not-done ones.'
'I have some to count in the finished ones.' I held out the three granny squares I had completed, and CeeCee took them with no comment. I was disappointed when she barely looked at them. I was really proud of my work. True, I'd had to unravel and start over again a number of times, and the three had taken much longer to make than I wanted to admit, but I thought the orange and light blue with the black border looked really nice.
Dinah gave her two she'd made. CeeCee seemed just as uninterested and dropped them in a pile on the floor. Adele leaned over and picked up one of mine. 'Pink, you made this?' It was obvious by her tone that she thought my piece was good, but she sounded too surprised for it to come off as a compliment.
CeeCee finished laying our completed squares over the paper ones. But there were still way too many blanks. The newbies had stopped practicing and were hanging over the mock-up.
'Is that the murder blanket?' Stacy asked, gazing at it with a strange fascination.
CeeCee stood up and put her hands on her hips. 'Dear, we like to think of it as Ellen's legacy, or the tribute afghan. Nobody is calling it a murder blanket. 'Murder blanket' sounds so negative,' CeeCee said before asking to see their practice work.
'Have they figured out yet who did it?' Meg asked in a low voice. Then she directed her attention at me. 'Weren't you the one who found her?'
'I bet it was her husband. That's who it always is,' Stacy offered.
'We're not here to play detective,' CeeCee snapped. She reached for the practice swatches Stacy and Meg had made, actually pulling them out of their hands. 'Let's see what you've done.'
I watched in amazement as CeeCee measured the swatches and counted stitches and rows, and was able to tell our new members how many of each they needed to do to end up with squares that would match the size of the rest of ours. She started to explain about making black borders and then threw up her hands.
'Just do what you can and we'll add the borders,' she said impatiently. CeeCee glared at the rest of us. 'Don't just sit there. Get those hooks going.'
'She's sure in a mood,' Dinah said, leaning close to me.
'I heard that,' CeeCee said. 'You'd be in a mood, too, if your name was attached to something and it looked like it was going to be a disaster.'
I had a feeling she was talking about more than the afghan, and I asked how the infomercial was going. Her glare said it all, and I dropped it. For the rest of the time, we all crocheted in silence.
By the end, with the exception of the newbies, we had each completed another square. CeeCee didn't seem any happier as we handed them to her. She had collected all the blank paper squares, and she started handing them to Adele, Sheila, Dinah and me, telling us those were what we were responsible for. As an afterthought she took two from Dinah and me, and handed them to the newbies.
Adele's face looked stormy, and she complained about being lumped in with the rest of us when she was not only a top-of-the-line crocheter but at the very least cohead of the group. CeeCee ignored her comment and started to lectureall of us.
'We are running out of time. You need to take your crochetthings with you everywhere, so you can work wheneveryou have a spare moment--'
'That's just what Debbee Stewart told us to do,' Meg said, interrupting and holding up her hook and trail of chain stitches. She turned to the rest of us. 'You're carrying,too, aren't you?'
It turned out that, with the exception of CeeCee, we had all taken Debbee's advice, and we all showed off our 'Debbee's kits,' as we'd come to call them.
'It isn't just about staying out of the chip bag,' Sheila said. 'I used mine at the gym. You wouldn't believe how fanatical those women are about getting their spaces in the classes. I took too long to scan some woman's card, and somebody else took her spot and she raised holy hell until I went in and got the first woman to move. It really made me tense, but I took out my hook and string and by the secondrow of single crochets, I felt the tension melt away. I want to get my boyfriend to carry one. He's been under a lot of stress lately.'
Meg was taking what she had just learned and making a row of single crochets on the foundation chain and said she was going to make a coaster.
CeeCee looked more and more exasperated as the talking and string-crocheting continued, and then she just lost it.
'Didn't any of you hear me?' she shouted. 'We need squares. Squares, ladies. Lots and lots of them. Made out of yarn, not string.' She snatched Meg's two rows of work and unraveled them until they were just string again. 'Stop making string coasters.'
We were all staring at her. I had never seen CeeCee come so unglued. Sheila patted her arm and handed her
