24.
I celebrated the first Monday of no school by going to Stash. The cowbell clanged and the woman behind the counter looked up as I entered. I was the only one in the store.
“So I think I figured it out,” she said cheerfully, recognizing me right away. She pulled open a drawer, fished around and walked toward me with a piece of graph paper that had about twenty numbered instructions and a lot of capital-letter abbreviations. The photo of me in the bikini was paper-clipped to the top.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the letters SC.
“Single crochet,” she said. “Which is mostly what this is, for tightness. Have you ever worked with a pattern before?”
“Actually, no, I’ve only done a scarf. Is it hard?”
“It’s not hard,” she said, and from the way she looked at me, I knew it would be. “It’s just there are a few things you need to familiarize yourself with. If you have a minute, I could quickly go over it.”
“That would be great,” I said.
“You’re lucky—I got nothing doing at the moment,” she said. She went through the pattern abbreviations and got me started, casting on the first side with some practice yarn from a basket by the counter.
“It’s basically a series of single crochets, joined together by chains and slip stitches,” she said.
“Slip stitch?” I asked, staring at her blankly.
“I’ll show you, don’t worry.”
“I’m glad the original was crocheted and not knitted,” I said. “I’ve tried a few times to knit and I always screw up. I have these big ambitions with knitting and I can never follow through.”
She smiled in an understanding way. “You just need someone to help you get started.” She took my hook and checked it, then handed it back. “Crochet’s a different game, maybe more fun, I sometimes think. More air. I’m a hard-core knitter, but crochet is airy. And it’s more forgiving.”
“You mean if you mess up,” I said.
“If you mess up, and the flow, I don’t know.” She mimicked winding her fingers and an imaginary needle. “I’m obsessed with it all. Sometimes I think it borders on pathological.” She sat back in the chair. “It makes everything better.”
“How long have you had Stash?” I asked, spreading out the chains so I could see them better. “I’m Thea, by the way.”
“I’m Carmen.” She smiled. “Two years. It was my husband’s idea. We were trying to get pregnant and I couldn’t stop cleaning. I would go through, like, five bottles of 409 a week. So he was like, ‘You have to stop cleaning.’ He said I should open a shop.”
“Well, it’s a great place,” I said.
“Thank you.” She looked around contentedly and checked my hook again. “Okay, you did three of those, right? Now it’s time to connect them with a slip stitch.” She reached my hook across the three chains and pulled the yarn through. “It’s basically just a connector stitch. No biggie. There, you got it. So when is your baby due?”
“In the summer,” I said. “I’m moving in with my boyfriend.”
“Are you in school?”
“I just graduated from high school.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s brave.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know, having a baby barely out of high school.”
“Well, we didn’t exactly plan it. Our parents are still in freak-out mode.”
“Yikes,” she said. She looked at me like she wanted to ask a million questions, but instead she turned back to the pattern. “You’re doing really well. You’ll probably get stuck, make some mistakes, have some questions. Feel free to come back anytime. Come back anyway. I want to see how it turns out.”
I stood up and thanked her, a little embarrassed by how much she’d helped me. She walked me to the door and saw me off, standing on the sidewalk with her arms folded, as though she were saying goodbye from her house. I started down the street, stopping at a light to jam the pattern into my bag, not knowing where to put the photo of me in the bikini so that it wouldn’t get any more beaten up than it already was. I looked at my face in the photo; I had a sort of Mona Lisa half smile going, but even ten-plus years later, it was immediately raw and decipherable. Me and my grandmother on the beach, after breakfast—toast and milk and orange juice, in side-by-side glasses. She was keeping me out of our house after another four a.m. blow-up.
“Why in the world would I want to go to Alan’s with you?” I remembered hearing Dad shout as I lay in bed. I’d crept to the top of the stairs and peeked. He was standing in the middle of the round woven rug, towering over Mom in a rocking chair. Then Mom stood up, my grandmother’s dark green bathrobe draping at her feet. “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it,” she’d said. “I can’t imagine why they’d want us in the first place.” She’d pretended to shake hands in the air, then turned and looked at her feet. “Uh, hi, uh-uh-uh, Alan, nice tacking out there, uh, today?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, just that she was making fun of him. I focused on the big rusty fan in the corner of the upstairs hallway, feeling the silence in every pore, its terrible, inescapable vacuum. I wondered what it would be—one of the sailing trophies on the mantel? The TV? But this time, she struck first. He spat at her and gave her the infamously cryptic title of “Shit-Hair,” and that was when she swung the storm lamp in an upward swoop, as though she were swinging a tennis racquet, slamming it at his ear. I remembered not needing to pretend to be asleep by the time the cops came, and after they left, Mom taking me upstairs to sleep in the guest room with the door locked.
“That’s it, I promise,” I remembered her whispering. I stared at the roses on her nightgown, which grew more and more detailed as light crept into the room. My eyes skipped from one rose to the next, and the white spaces in between them became the spaces between me and Mom and Dad, and I thought about how she wasn’t scared of him, and it seemed stark, that fact. Something to be afraid of, maybe, in and of itself.
As I crossed the street, I caught a woman in a trench coat and heels glancing at my belly and then at my face. If she thought I was too young to be a baby mama, she didn’t let on. I nudged the bikini photo into the chest pocket of my jean jacket, where it would be safe, as it started to rain.