Hanging by a Thread by Monica Ferris Read Free Book Online Page A

them was working on a Christmas project. But the talk was of Halloweens past, when children in homemade costumes went door-to-door soliciting candy. “I remember one year when my brother, who always dressed as a tramp, came home with a pillowcase nearly full of candy,” said Comfort. “Mother made him take most of it to the children’s hospital in St. Paul, and he still had enough left to give himself three or four stomachaches.” She was knitting a child’s sweater dappled with snowmen, a gift for a great-grandchild.
    “My father used to say that when he was a boy, they pulled awful pranks, soaping windows and tipping over outhouses,” said Martha, who was working on Holiday House, a complex work in two pieces. One, lying finished on the table, was the front of a two-story house done in Hardanger and other fancy white-on-white stitches. The second had an elaborately-decorated Christmas tree down low and a lit candle up high; when the first piece was laid over it, the tree appeared in the living room window and the candle in an upstairs bedroom. She was working on the tree, using silks, metallics, and tiny beads. “Once, they dismantled a neighbor’s Model A and reassembled it in the hayloft of his barn.”
    Alice said, “My brothers never thought up anything more imaginative than stealing the mayor’s front gate.”
    Godwin, fashionable in a blue-and-maroon argyle sweater that set off his golden hair beautifully, said, “I always loved dressing up on Halloween.” He was knitting a red-and-green scarf without looking, his fingers moving swiftly and economically. A tiny smile formed. “Never as a tramp, however.”
    Emily, her dark eyes focused on the Cold Hands, Warm Heart sampler she was cross-stitching, said, “Oh, I wish there were fancy dress balls nowadays, the really elaborate kind, where people come as Harlequin and Marie Antoinette and go dancing in a gigantic ballroom all lit with candles.” She paused to complete a stitch. “But I’ve never even heard of someone holding one, much less been invited.”
    “You just don’t move in the right circles, my dear,” said Godwin. The ladies laughed. Godwin loved to hint at scandalous gay parties, but they were almost sure he’d never been to one in his life.
    As on last Monday, Betsy yearned to sit down with them, but today she was stuck at her desk designing a new seasonal display. As soon as the store closed this evening, the cross-stitched black cats and jack-o’-lanterns would be cleared away to make room for a framed counted cross-stitch cornucopia, and a stand-up pillow shaped like a turkey. But there would be only a very few other acknowledgments of Thanksgiving-not with the retailers’ most important holiday on the horizon: Christmas.
    Her window and the major components of her seasonal display were due to go up tonight. Already she was behind other retailers, whose Christmas lights had begun to twinkle right after school started.
    She glanced at the soft fabric sack under the table, three steps but many hours away. It held her Christmas stocking and a Ziploc bag of floss. If she was to get it to her finisher, she would have to work on it every night after the shop closed—and starting this weekend, the shop would be open all day Saturday and Sunday. That meant she couldn’t go to Orchestra Hall Saturday night. She took a sip of hot spiced cider and sighed. She enjoyed stitching, and she enjoyed owning a needlework shop, but there never seemed to be enough time left over for anything else.
    She looked down at her barely-started plan for the front window. Betsy kept a few needlepoint Christmas stockings out year round and, of course, Marilyn Leavitt Imblum’s Celtic Christmas hung with the counted cross-stitch models year round. But there were other big, complex Christmas patterns it took cross-stitchers months to finish. They needed prodding to remind them to buy these projects in March, when everyone else was thinking about tulips and