The Wishing Thread (29 page)

When she’d been on the road, she’d wondered, sometimes, about her sisters. When she was in Nashville negotiating with the owner of a cheap motel for a room with a broken shower, was Bitty buying chocolate bars and popcorn for her kids at a movie theater concession stand? When Meggie was clutching her pepper spray and wondering if the man she’d just interviewed was now following her down a dark street in Detroit,
was Aubrey curled up with
Jane Eyre
and a cup of tea? When she was trying to figure out how to tell Lance, in Dallas, that it didn’t matter whether or not she loved him because she
had
to leave—were her sisters even giving a thought to where their mother might be?

She walked past the chain-link fence where Mr. Smith’s drooly old Doberman used to snarl and bark with only half as much fury as its owner. She huffed up the hill to the east of the Stitchery and passed the house that used to have a concrete fountain of a woman pouring water from an amphora, but which now showed only a slight depression in the yard where the statue had been. The old neighborhood made her long for her aunt Mariah, who always had room for her littlest niece in the crook of her arm even when her older sisters wanted nothing to do with her.

Meggie kicked a mailbox post, and then she knew two things. First, she would not be going to the Tappan Watch meeting tonight with Aubrey. And second, what she’d felt after reading Bitty’s letter was not annoyance. It was jealousy. The same jealousy she’d felt as a kid when her older sisters had shooed her away so they could talk about “big girl things”; the jealousy that festered because Bitty and Aubrey had actually known their mother and Meggie could hardly remember her at all; the jealousy of having sacrificed so many years searching for a woman she didn’t know, while her sisters went on with their lives.

She had come full circle and found herself standing before the Stitchery again, but she did not step foot off the sidewalk. Rising up before her, dilapidated and yet still powerful, was the root of her problems. Her feelings toward the old building were as muddled as its architecture. Like Bitty, Meggie had ulterior motives: A sale would give her the funding she needed to live more comfortably as she searched for her mother, to
leave hostels in favor of motels, to swap fast food for real food. But unlike Bitty, she had no intention of recanting her intention of selling the horrid old place. It was two against one now—but Meggie’s one vote was bigger than both of her sisters’ combined.
She
was the one on the moral high ground.
She
was the one who had been doing the right thing.

She stood at the old black iron gate.

If Meggie were ever to write a letter like Bitty’s, left so cowardly on the table in the morning for her sisters to find, it would have only had one sentence on it:

Dear Sisters: Why haven’t
you
been out there looking for her, too
?

She pushed the gate open and headed inside.

Normally, Aubrey loved the library. From the street, it cultivated the image of a worldly schoolmaster, benevolent but stern. But inside, oh
inside
, the library’s warm and curious nature could not be repressed by the grumpy neoclassicism of its façade. Technically, the rooms were quiet. But they were never
still
. Even during the sleepiest afternoon hours, the library had an air of restlessness like a child who kicks its legs, and hums under its breath, and generally does everything it can not to burst out a rain of questions, observations, or songs. Even the library’s bespectacled and hoary patroness, who hung on the south wall in a gold frame and who could look a bit dyspeptic on a cloudy day, gazed down in pleasant approval when the Reading Room was full of sunshine and when Tarrytown’s bookworms and students came to lounge in big, comfy chairs.

Today, however, Aubrey found her work to be painful. She was reshelving oversized art books in the nonfiction section—which never failed to give her a kink in her lower back—and
she could not get her mind to focus. Several times a minute, she forgot what she was doing. Her brain grasped the tail end of a thought only for a moment before it slipped through her fingers or frayed.

She stared at the spine of a book, stared, but did not read. Even as she was wondered if it was possible that she was falling in love—to be asking herself the question seemed like a freak miracle in and of itself—her sister’s love life was falling apart. Aubrey saw a simple solution to everyone’s problems: Bitty and her children should move permanently, or at least semi-permanently, into the Stitchery. And yet, of all the things Bitty’s letter had mentioned, an extended stay at the Stitchery was not among them.

Aubrey was standing near the crotchety old dumbwaiter, scowling at the book she held, when Jeanette appeared from behind a tall shelf as if from behind a wall in a garden maze. She wore a grapefruit-pink sweater with the edge of a white T-shirt peeking from the collar. Her hair had been twisted back in rope-thick rows.

“Oh, hi!” Aubrey said a little too loudly. She lowered her voice. “What are you doing here? I thought you worked the morning shift?”

“I did. I came to see you. I wanted to get the dirt on your date last night.”

Aubrey smiled. “You know that feeling of, like, when you’re standing over the river at the top of the rocks on Anthony’s Nose, and the wind blows a little bit, and it feels like if you jumped the wind would catch you and you might just be okay?”

“Please tell me you are never going to test that theory.”

“It was a really good date.”

Jeanette asked a hundred questions about him, about their date:
Where did he take you? What did you eat? Did he kiss
you? Did he get to first base?
And Aubrey replied in practiced whispers, not louder than what was necessary to be heard. She’d told Jeanette briefly of the incident with Craig. When at last it seemed Jeanette’s line of questioning began to fade, her voice changed. She lowered her eyes and looked up through dark lashes, the very picture of humility. Aubrey was immediately on guard.

“So … speaking of romance, I wanted to ask a favor,” Jeanette said. “I need you to knit me a love spell.”

“For who?”

“For Mason Boss.”

Aubrey laughed.

“Hey—I’m not playing. I
want
Mason Boss.”

“Two months ago you wanted the guy who worked at the farmer’s market.”

Jeanette grinned. “And I had him, too. Thanks to you.”

Aubrey felt discomfort worm along her spine. For as much as Aubrey’s love life was dusty and on the shelf, Jeanette’s was rampant. When it came to love, Jeanette didn’t merely fall; she sought out cliffs and hurled herself from them. She dove without checking the water’s depth. And each time, to her credit, she dusted herself off, had a good cry, and climbed back up to do it again.

Aubrey touched her friend’s shoulder. “You don’t need a spell to make this guy notice you. Look at you. You’re six feet tall with cheekbones like a supermodel and muscles like Wonder Woman. What would be weird is if he
doesn’t
notice you.”

“But what if I’m not his type? You’ve gotta do this for me. Come on, Aub. Please? It’s not fair, you know. It’s not fair that all of a sudden you’re like
Vic this and Vic that
and all I’m asking is for one tiny spell so I could be, like, a tenth as happy as you are right now. Are you seriously gonna tell me no?”

Aubrey picked up a heavy book. She thought of Vic, and it was enough to make her feel happy all over again.

“Please?” Jeanette half whispered. “Look! I even have my sacrifice with me.” She reached into her camouflage handbag and pulled out a teacup. “I bought this for myself in the fourth grade with money from walking the neighbor’s dog.”

Aubrey didn’t move to take the cup.

“Aubrey, I really
like
him,” Jeanette said.

Almost without her mind’s consent, with years of instinct and DNA and tradition propelling her on, Aubrey felt the strange out-of-bodyness that sometimes happened when she stepped into her role as the Stitchery’s guardian. She looked down her nose at the cup in Jeanette’s hand. “That’s not going to be enough.”

A second passed. “You’re right. You know that? You’re absolutely right.” Jeanette secured the teacup in a palm, then stripped her purse strap from her shoulder, and thrust the whole bag at Aubrey’s midsection.

“What are you—?”

“Take it. Take the whole thing.”

Aubrey glanced down at the bag that jangled in her hands. “But what if there’s something important in here? What about your license? Your credit cards?”

“I don’t know what all’s in there. But it’s making me damn uncomfortable to give it to you. So I figure it ought to do the trick for a spell.”

“Jeanette—”

“Please, Aub.” Her eyes were wide. She was pleading and growing tired of it. “Please?”

“This is crazy,” Aubrey said, but they both knew she’d already given in.

“You’re the cherry on the sundae—you do know that,
right?” Jeanette said. She was already moving away down the aisle, smiling and walking backward foot over foot. “Oh, and would you mind giving me a lift to the meeting?”

“Why?”

“I lost my car keys,” Jeanette said. And she pointed to the bag in Aubrey’s hands.

If the congregation that had elected Mason Boss had been a big crowd, then the group that coalesced for his first official meeting was enormous. Fifteen minutes before the meeting had started, the last chair had been unfolded and occupied. People continued to crowd in, shoulder-to-shoulder, and Aubrey had to shuffle to keep from falling down. The close quarters—the unfamiliar smells of strangers’ shampoo and armpits, the sounds of their breathing and the pressing of unidentifiable body parts—should have made her uncomfortable. But instead, she felt buoyed up. People she’d never met were introducing themselves to one another, even
to her
. Aubrey’s heart was in her throat. She told them: Nice to meet you. And if they knew she was the girl from the Stitchery, if they were startled by her awful eyes behind her sunglasses, they didn’t mention it. Beside her, Jeanette worried her fingers and craned her long neck to see over the crowd.

“See him?” Aubrey asked.

“Not yet.”

The crowd moved. Vic had been standing with his back to the wood paneling, and Aubrey suddenly found herself jostled against him. She’d worn her hair up high on her head, and she felt Vic’s exhalation against her bare neck as she knocked against him. “Oh! Sorry!” she said. Vic’s hands steadied her—her upper arm, her waist. And when he didn’t let go,
she felt more off balance than when she’d been jostled by the crowd.

Aubrey stood that way, pretending to watch for Mason Boss but conscious only of Vic’s hands, until at last—after people began to grumble and their feet started to hurt—at last, Mason Boss swept in through the fire hall doors. Jeanette made eye contact with Aubrey just for a moment, her eyebrows high with hope and her lips drawn into a kind of wide rectangle, like the middle of the word
please
. In her hands, she held the wrist warmers that Aubrey had brought her. Aubrey ignored the pang in her gut and gave Jeanette an encouraging nod.

The crowd began to quiet without being told as Mason Boss strode to the front of the room. His oversized head was tipped down as he walked, his brow furrowed in presidential concentration. He shucked his coat and tossed it onto a table.

The moment that Mason Boss clapped his hands together and asked “So what have we got?” Aubrey felt a ripple of electricity move through the air. All at once, Tarrytown was energized. Mason Boss offered some interesting arguments—and his ideas were
arguments
in that they went against every organizational technique the Tappan Watch had believed in so far. Mason Boss wanted a media blackout; he wanted the website taken down; he thought the petition idea was a joke. He didn’t care about the protest march that had been scheduled; he wanted something more dramatic, more spontaneous and spectacular—he wanted a
flash mob
.

“So, we’re going to break out into a dance number in the park?” Dan Hatters asked.

“Picture this,” Mason Boss said. “Without warning, we descend on village hall. All of us. All at once. We stop up traffic. We block the doors. We make things inconvenient for people. We’re loud and we’re not taking no for an answer.”

“Shouldn’t we at least issue a press release first?” Dan Hatters asked.

“Good God, man,” Mason Boss said with stiff elocution. “What you do think would have happened at the Boston Tea Party if the patriots had put out a press release?”

Within ten minutes, everyone had agreed that a flash mob was the perfect idea. Forty-five minutes were spent on setting up a phone tree—
so we’re totally under the radar before the flash mob
, Mason Boss had said. When the meeting was over, Aubrey half expected Mason Boss to take a bow. Chairs scraped on metal as people stood up. The sound of struck-up conversations swelled. Aubrey felt a tight grip on her right arm, and she realized that Vic had let go of her. It was Jeanette who held her tight. Her eyes were deep obsidian and glossy with brightness. She spoke in a hurried hush.

“He’s brilliant, isn’t he? The way he gets everyone so worked up. So eager to
do
something.”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said. And she realized that she’d warmed to Mason Boss; he was what they needed, perhaps.

“I’m going to go talk to him.” Jeanette’s voice was unusually tight with nerves. “Wait for me a sec?”

“Don’t worry,” Aubrey said. “You have the wrist warmers I made for him. You’ll be fine.”

Jeanette took in a deep breath. She tossed her dark cords of hair and strode across the room. Even in the dense crowd, her walk was brimming with liquid sex, and Mason Boss was not the only man who turned his head to see.

Aubrey stepped away from Vic to face him.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“Girl stuff,” she said. “Do you mind waiting a few minutes? If Jeanette can’t get Mason Boss on the hook, she might need a ride home.”

“No problem,” he said.

A few minutes later, Jeanette was walking away from Mason Boss, coming toward her. And Aubrey thought,
Oh no
. Jeanette’s lips were angled into a frown and her shoulders slightly slumped. Aubrey hadn’t thought it was possible: Mason Boss must have turned Jeanette down. She swallowed her guilty conscience.