How to Knit a Heart Back Home by Rachael Herron Read Free Book Online Page B

cheek. He didn’t mean it though; he never did.
    Willow Rock was a small facility, only eight residents. Right now, most of them were in the TV room. He wondered what people did with their elders before television existed to keep them quiet. He sure as hell didn’t want to spend his dotage staring at Judge Judy , but he supposed it made things easier for everyone.
    His mother didn’t like TV either. But that’s not what made her the most difficult patient the nurses had. She would have been anyway.
    Irene Bancroft had always been a pain in the ass. Even when she was younger, when Owen was still in school, she was famous for shooing kids away from her prized rosebushes. She spent most of her time out in the garden, but it didn’t make her sweet, like it did the other gardening ladies in town. It seemed to make her cranky. The only thing that made her crankier was the winter cold and rain. She became an indoor cleaning machine during those cold months, and it had been hard for the teenaged Owen, struggling to keep his muddy shoes off the carpet and his dirty clothes off the floor.
    The only time he’d ever seen her crankier than that was when he’d moved her here, but after the two small fires she’d accidentally set, he’d had no choice. To pay for moving her into Willow Rock, he’d had to get power of attorney and sell her house, breaking her heart.
    But now he was here. He could start trying to make it up to her.
    His mother was standing at the window staring at the curtain when he entered her room, her back to him. She looked fragile, but her back was still straight.
    More than he could say for her mind.
    “Mom, it’s me.” She jumped as he switched on the overhead light but she didn’t turn around.
    “How are you doing, Mom?”
    She flapped a hand at him as if he were interrupting something, as if he were bothering her when she was in the garden. He’d seen that particular flapping too many times in his life to count.
    “Hey, Mom, if you want to look out the window, you should pull back the curtain, huh? It’s dark out there, but I bet the outside is more interesting than looking at that brown fabric.” Owen reached for the curtain cord and pulled.
    The floodlights in the backyard lit her face. His mother, for one second, looked like she did back then, back when she could still tell time and remember his name on a regular basis.
    Then she pulled back into herself. She moved to the left, out of the light. “I had a good view of my garden. Now I can’t see it. Ruined.”
    She stalked to her bed, head held high, and sat. “Home.”
    “Did you already eat?” he asked. Dinner was served so early in this joint, sometimes at four-thirty or five. But he supposed it made sense; it probably helped the staff get them to bed at a reasonable hour.
    “Waiting for the bus. Home .”
    The statement never failed to hurt, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Normally, he chose to ignore it completely. Every once in a while he could get her turned around and on to something else.
    Her hands jumped in her lap. They had never been still. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and her lips moved, as if she were trying to say something.
    This was what he hated most.
    Owen tried the stop-gap method—the small TV that neither of them would have normally chosen to watch. He flipped through the channels until he found something that caught her eye, a show on home renovations.
    “You like that, Mom? You want to watch with me?”
    But within two or three minutes she was slumped again, her shoulders rounded, looking toward the windows.
    “Anything good happen today, Mom? That you can remember?”
    Silence.
    “I met a girl named Lucy and she knows knitting people who know you. I bet she knits, too. This whole town is crazy for it still, aren’t they? I guess it wasn’t just some fad here, huh?”
    Irene didn’t even so much as blink.
    “You used to knit, remember? Remember that lady who used to come over? What was her