The Knitting Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

welcome,” he whispered into her hair.
    She held on to him hard. She hated being alone now, and she hated her neediness.
    “Smells good,” Dylan said.
    “Me?” Mary said, flirting. “Or dinner?”
    “Both,” he said.
    “Can you believe it?” she said, walking to the stove. “Eddie wants me to chase some food truck around town.”
    “And?” Dylan said too hopefully.
    “And write about it,” Mary snapped. “As if I could write about the importance of a taco,” she muttered.
    She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the boiling water and bit into it, testing. She tried not to think of Stella standing at her side, her pasta tester, the way she would bite into a strand and wrinkle her nose with seriousness before pronouncing it was almost ready. “Two more hours,” she liked to say.
    “It might be fun,” Dylan said, but she could tell his heart wasn’t into having this argument again. It had become a pattern with them, his frustrated urging for her to go back to work, her anger at him for being able to work at all. A few times it had grown into full-blown fighting, with Dylan yelling at her, “You have to try to help yourself!” and Mary accusing him of being callous. More often, though, it was this quiet disagreement, this sarcasm and misunderstanding, the hurt feelings that followed.
    Mary sighed and drained the pasta, stirring in the sauce she’d made—onions, crushed tomatoes, pancetta. As she grated cheese over it, Dylan opened a bottle of wine.
    “I can’t get used to it,” Mary said, turning her attention to the salad, drizzling olive oil over the greens and sprinkling sea salt.
    “The silence.”
    Dylan stood, head bent, while she struggled to explain how the kitchen, the house, the world felt to her without Stella in it. But finally she shrugged, and finished dressing the salad. Words, her livelihood, her refuge, even at times her salvation, were now the most useless things in the world. Dylan couldn’t understand that.
    Stella would be singing while Mary finished making dinner. Or she would be showing off her work brought home from kindergarten that day. She would ask for an apple, sliced and peeled, to nibble. She would ask for a cup of water. She would make noise. Guiltily Mary remembered her impatience with these distractions. How could she have grown impatient with Stella?
    Mary heard her loud footsteps as she brought the food to the table. The screech of the chair as Dylan pulled it away from the table. Mary’s own sigh.
    “Your latest creation?” Dylan said, motioning to the scarf.
    He was trying to move past the awkwardness. She knew that, but she still smarted from it.
    “How’d you make that pattern?” he asked, impressed.
    “It self-stripes as you knit.”
    “My wife, the knitter,” he said.
    Mary was acutely aware of the sounds of chewing, of forks on plates, of their breathing.
    “I wonder about those women,” she said after a time, softening. “At the knitting circle.”
    “What about them?” Dylan said.
    “You know, who they are. There’s this one woman, Beth. She’s so rigid. Hair in place. Clothes pressed. Lipstick. Apparently she does everything perfectly.”
    Mary didn’t mention the few facts she had gleaned about Beth. The four children in matching sweaters who smiled out of a posed studio photograph she’d passed around. Four children! Mary had thought, shuddering at that abundance, that good luck.
    “I’m certain she has one of those houses, those center-hall colonials with the big square rooms and window treatments.” She flushed, embarrassed. “God,” Mary said. “Listen to me. I hardly know the woman. I hate her because she has so…so much.”
    “I do it too,” Dylan said. “When I see a father walking with his little girl on his shoulders I want to yell at him. How could he have this privilege? This blessing?”
    His voice trembled and Mary touched his hand lightly. Who are we becoming? she wondered.
    After a moment, she said, “You know