Liz felt a cramp in her right arm — the one that had never healed properly — and realized she was still gripping the receiver fiercely at the news she’d just received. That her daughter was on her way to the house.
The daughter she hadn’t spoken with in more than three years.
Liz finally replaced the telephone and felt blood surge into her arm, itching, stinging. She sat down on the embroidered couch that had been in the family for years and massaged her throbbing forearm. She felt light-headed, confused, as if she wasn’t sure the phone call had been real or a wispy scene from a dream.
Only the woman wasn’t lost in the peace of sleep. No, Beth Anne was on her way. A half hour and she’d be at Liz’s door.
Outside, the rain continued to fall steadily, tumbling into the pines that filled Liz’s yard. She’d lived in this house for nearly a year, a small place miles from the nearest suburb. Most people would’ve thought it too small, too remote. But to Liz it was an oasis. The slim widow, mid-fifties, had a busy life and little time for housekeeping. She could clean the place quickly and get back to work. And while hardly a recluse, she preferred the buffer zone of forest that separated her from her neighbors. The minuscule size also discouraged suggestions by any male friends that, hey, got an idea, how ’bout I move in? The woman would merely look around the one-bedroom home and explain that two people would go crazy in such cramped quarters; after her husband’s death she’d resolved she’d never remarry or live with another man.
Her thoughts now drifted to Jim. Their daughter had left home and cut off all contact with the family before he died. It had always stung her that the girl hadn’t even called after his death, let alone attended his funeral. Anger at this instance of the girl’s callousness shivered within Liz but she pushed it aside, reminding herself that whatever the young woman’s purpose tonight there wouldn’t be enough time to exhume even a fraction of the painful memories that lay between mother and daughter like wreckage from a plane crash.
A glance at the clock. Nearly ten minutes had sped by since the call, Liz realized with a start.
Anxious, she walked into her sewing room. This, the largest room in the house, was decorated with needlepoints of her own and her mother’s and a dozen racks of spools — some dating back to the fifties and sixties. Every shade of God’s palette was represented in those threads. Boxes full of Vogue and Butterick patterns too. The centerpiece of the room was an old electric Singer. It had none of the fancy stitch cams of the new machines, no lights or complex gauges or knobs. The machine was a forty-year-old, black-enameled workhorse, identical to the one that her mother had used.
Liz had sewed since she was twelve and in difficult times the craft sustained her. She loved every part of the process: Buying the fabric — hearing the
There was something so completely soothing about sewing: taking these substances — cotton from the land, wool from animals — and blending them into something altogether new. The worst aspect of the injury several years ago was the damage to her right arm, which kept her off the Singer for three unbearable months.
Sewing was therapeutic for Liz, yes, but more than that, it was a part of her profession and had helped her become a well-to-do woman; nearby were racks of designer gowns, awaiting her skillful touch.
Her eyes rose to the clock. Fifteen minutes. Another breathless slug of panic.
Picturing so clearly that day twenty-five years ago — Beth Anne in her flannel ’jammies, sitting at the rickety kitchen table and watching her mother’s quick fingers with fascination as Liz sang to her.
This memory gave birth to dozens of others and the agitation rose in Liz’s heart like the water level of the rain-swollen stream behind her house. Well, she told herself now firmly, don’t just sit here… Do something. Keep busy. She found a navy-blue jacket in her closet, walked to her sewing table then dug through a basket until she found a matching remnant of wool. She’d use this to make a pocket for the garment. Liz went to work, smoothing the cloth, marking it with tailor’s chalk, finding the scissors, cutting carefully. She focused on her task but the distraction wasn’t enough to take her mind off the impending visit — and memories from years ago.
The shoplifting incident, for instance. When the girl was twelve.
Liz recalled the phone ringing, answering it. The head of security at a nearby department store was reporting — to Liz’s and Jim’s shock — that Beth Anne had been caught with nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry hidden in a paper bag.
The parents had pleaded with the manager not to press charges. They’d said there must’ve been some mistake.
“Well,” the security chief said skeptically, “we found her with five watches. A necklace too. Wrapped up in this grocery bag. I mean, that don’t sound like any mistake to me.”
Finally after much reassurance that this was a fluke and promises she’d never come into the store again, the manager agreed to keep the police out of the matter.
Outside the store, once the family was alone, Liz turned to Beth Anne furiously, “Why on earth did you do that?”
“Why not?” was the girl’s singsong response, a snide smile on her face.
“It was stupid.”
“Like, I care.”
“Beth Anne… why’re you acting this way?”
“What way?” the girl’d asked in mock confusion.
Her mother had tried to engage her in a dialog — the way the talk shows and psychologists said you should do with your kids — but Beth Anne remained bored and distracted. Liz had delivered a vague, and obviously futile, warning and had given up.
Thinking now: You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There’s no mystery. But you put a thousand times
Liz’s keen gray eyes examined the wool jacket, making sure the pocket lay flat and was pinned correctly into position. She paused, looking up, out the window toward the black spikes of the pine but what she was seeing were more hard memories of Beth Anne. What a mouth on that girl! Beth Anne would look her mother or father in the eye and say, “There is no goddamn way you’re going to make me go with you.” Or, “Do you have
Maybe they should’ve been stricter in their upbringing. In Liz’s family you got whipped for cursing or talking back to adults or for not doing what your parents asked you to do. She and Jim had never spanked Beth Anne; maybe they
One time, somebody had called in sick at the family business — a warehouse Jim had inherited — and he needed Beth Anne to help out. She’d snapped at him, “I’d rather be dead than go back inside that shithole with you.”
Her father had backed down sheepishly but Liz stormed up to her daughter. “Don’t talk to your father that way.”
“Oh?” the girl asked in a sarcastic voice. “How
“Where are you going?”
“To see some friends.”
“You are not. Get back here this minute!”
Her reply was a slamming door. Jim started after her but in an instant she was gone, crunching through two-month-old gray Michigan snow.
And those “friends”?
Trish and Eric and Sean… kids from families with totally different values from Liz’s and Jim’s. They tried to forbid her from seeing them. But that, of course, had no effect.
“Don’t tell me who I can hang out with,” Beth Anne had said furiously. The girl was eighteen then and as tall as her mother. As she walked forward with a glower, Liz retreated uneasily. The girl continued, “And what do you
