Was this a hopeless situation with Richard that she had better quit before it got worse, or could it work? Three children! She liked Alice Dean and Bo. Sylvie not so much. But did it matter? The girl was almost out on her own, as her father had said. So Billie’s opinion of her—and hers of Billie—didn’t really matter. Since he already had three children, most likely Richard wouldn’t want more, if things got that far between them. Maybe they wouldn’t even need to discuss it. She had been pregnant once when she and Frank were married, but she miscarried. Frank was as sad as she when it happened, but the sadness clung to Billie long after it became the past for him.
To distract herself from the impulse to call him, she reached for a bag hanging over the back of the futon’s black metal frame and pulled out a smaller bag that held a ball of variegated yarn. A circular knitting needle hung from the yarn with a half-knitted sock attached. Settling back against the pillows, she wrapped the yarn around her left index finger and with her right hand, slid the stitches toward the needle’s point, ready to be knit.
She had been working on this sock for six years. Frank had bought the yarn when they were on vacation in Maine and had asked her to knit him a pair.
“I’ve never made socks,” Billie had told him.
“You can knit anything.”
“Sweaters,” she’d said. “Scarves. Hats. Mittens.”
“So, make mittens for feet.”
She didn’t tell him that socks were the last thing she wanted to make. The thin yarn, the complicated shaping, those tiny needles felt too fussy, too domesticated. She knit with worsted and bulky yarn. Things that she could start one day and finish the next, things she barely had to think about, let alone concentrate on.
They split up before she had mastered the first heel and divorced at the instep.
I should have thrown this damn project away, she thought, cupping it in her hand.
Instead, the day the divorce was final, she had ripped out the stitches, re-wound the ball, and started over. This time she made the leg differently, in a knit 2, purl 2 ribbing, not the stockinette stitch the pattern had called for. She had thought the ribbing would help the sock stay up on whoever’s leg she eventually gave it to. She had struggled again through turning the heel and headed into the long, dull foot. She knit sporadically, with stitchless months interspersed with intense bursts of attention to those fine needles. First in New York, then on the plane to Arizona, she imagined the man who’d wear the socks when they were done. Each time her mind wandered away from the fantasy mate, and she saw Frank.
“You ever going to finish my socks?” he still asked her once in a while.
Sometimes she thought she would finish them. She imagined surprising him with them one birthday. A slim box in a padded envelope, no note. He would open it, startled by his feelings as he looked at the familiar yarn he had chosen, made into the socks he had asked for.
But most of the time Billie hated him and his feet. She hated him for the way he had pushed her, using her past to hook her to crimes he wanted her to write about, crimes against children who were suffering as she had.
Frank’s “You can do it” gradually morphed into “You’ve got to do it. You can save these kids. You have to.”
The exposés she wrote for him made her career, and won her awards.
Then one night, beside a warehouse in a garbage strewn street, she stood frozen, notebook in hand, while a man held a pistol to the head of a toddler. “Leave!” he’d screamed at her. “I’ll shoot!”
She ran to their apartment, threw her notebook on the kitchen counter, packed her suitcase, and flew home to Arizona.
Frank had apologized over and over, but she never returned. Eventually she forgave him enough to let in bits of fondness, bits of yearning, which she sometimes regretted.
Her fingers, thickened and coarse from years of ranch work, snagged on the yarn and needles for another few rows.
She held up the sock to check on her progress then slipped her own foot through the ribbing, down the leg, past the heel and out through the needles. It was too big for her. It bagged around her ankle and flopped over her arch.
She pulled her foot out and set the sock and yarn on the pillow beside her. Then she lay back, pulled the sleeping Gulliver against her chest, and closed her eyes.
When she woke, she found the knitting tucked under her chin. When she stretched, her joints squeaked and popped. Gulliver lay frog-like, awake, his chin on his paws, tail wagging an invitation. Get up. Get going. Open that bag of kibble!
She was pouring cream into her coffee—wondering about Richard, the kids, their mother, their horses—when she heard Starship bang his feeder. She opened the door and yelled, “Coming!”
He banged it again.
On her walk down the hill to feed the herd, Billie wondered how Richard could justify allowing Sylvie to ride sored horses, to compete for a trainer like Dale—especially now that it was not only illegal, but the laws were starting to be enforced. Hadn’t it occurred to him that if Sylvie were caught, she could be prosecuted? Ethics and morals aside, the kid might go to jail.
She was wondering if the horse in that last stall at Dale’s was a mess of burned flesh and stacked pads when she reached the barnyard and Gulliver started to bark. It took her a second to register that something was wrong. Starship stood at his feeder, lifting it away from
