Chapter 8-5
896 Words
Perrin and Tamara had ridden in silence for several minutes. Tamara fiddled with the radio but no one had music, all ads at the moment. They were both just killing time to see what Bill Cullen’s response would be.
At long last the phone buzzed back and gave a cheerful ping as Perrin was pulling into the steep, narrow parking lot.
“What does he say?”
Tamara looked at it. Then appeared a little puzzled. “He just sent a one-letter response, ‘K.’ Which is short for ‘Okay’ when he’s in a real hurry. Maybe he didn’t read the P.S. part of it.”
Or, Perrin could hope, he’d decided that the single response covered both messages in the text. They continued in silence, each thinking their own thoughts until reaching the store.
“What is this place?” Tamara climbed out and glared at the building.
Perrin looked up at the aged two-story, concrete-block building, with peeling taupe-blah paint. To one side was a vacant lot, some old apartments towered over it from behind.
“A knitting store, Tamara.”
“But it says, The Weaving Works?”
“Don’t you trust anything I tell you?”
Tamara considered, “I guess I trust you.”
“Good, the moon is made of green cheese and Justin Bieber has a poster of you on his wall.”
“Eww!” But Tamara was smiling as they arrived at the door. “Hey, that’s cool.”
Knitting in a bright sock yarn wrapped about the door handle.
“There’s more of it,” Perrin pointed to the bike rack in front of the store. The galvanized steel had been knit over in a succession of the colors of the rainbow. “The Weaving Works” had been boldly knit right into the fabric.
“It’s called yarn bombing.”
“That is just so cool!”
“You’ve been hanging out with Jaspar too much. You’re using his adjectives.”
“He’s my kid brother, I don’t get a whole lot of choice on who I hang out with. I would have filed a request for a girl, but I was only three when they had the punk. He’s mostly okay except for being a boy. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“Deal.” Perrin pulled open the glass-and-steel door. “Welcome to knitting heaven, Tamara.”
They toured the whole store together. Racks of every color and type of yarn towered about them. Like a small, labyrinthine bookstore, its shelves stocked to overflowing with heavy yarns for fisherman’s sweaters, fine yarns for baby clothes, and feathery “eyelash” yarns for when you just wanted to feel utterly ridiculous.
“Check this out,” Tamara called Perrin over to the Jamieson yarns. “The skeins are so small and cute. I just love the colors.”
“They’re my favorites,” Perrin pulled out four different colors. “Come on.”
She led Tamara to a small mirror.
“Watch your face as I hold up each color.” She started with a blue and Tamara shrugged, then an orange that clashed with her hair and her complexion.
“Eww!”
Then a black.
“That one’s good.”
The Perrin held up the dark green heather yarn. It played off Tamara’s rich-red hair. With her fair skin, it snapped all attention to the girl’s dark eyes. The extra softness kept it from being to severe beside her young woman’s features.
“Wow… ” Tammy offered on a long drawn sigh.
“This doesn’t mean all your clothes should be Loden green, but when you want to really knock out some boy, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.”
They took the skeins back to the shelves.
“Hey Perrin. Why aren’t there any guys here except for that one over there looking bored?”
“Not a lot of male knitters. Funny thing is, there are a lot of cultures where it was traditionally the male who did the knitting. Now, this is just a cozy place for women to hang out. See the big table in the corner with a couple knitters around it? There’s almost always someone there to sit and knit with. Or you can bring in hard problems if you get stuck and someone will always help you out. I often think that this is how the world would feel if it was run by women.”
“Cozy.”
“Exactly. Now, we need the color sets for the four designs we were missing.”
“You want me to help you pick colors for clothes that will go onstage?” her voice was wispy and awed.
Perrin figured it was part of that distant-and-impossibly-remote “Dad’s world” and Tamara felt as if she were just a kid intruding. Like Tamara, Perrin had been plenty precocious, and that had caused its own set of problems. Well, it wouldn’t for this girl. Not if Perrin had anything to say about it.
“You’re the one that found the solution to something that’s been making me crazy for over a week. You solved it, I’ll make sure every knows that. As a matter of fact… ” Perrin stepped over to the display of knitting tools and pulled down a massively ridiculous crochet hook that had to be there as a joke, it was two feet long and almost as big around as Perrin’s wrist. She rolled it to the label, “Size 50.” It wasn’t a toy, some project actually required this monster. That was just too crazy. If she could think of what to do with it, she might buy it.
“Kneel, Empress-to-be Tamara Cullen.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Kneel, or I tell your dad that I’m not the only one kissing boys.”
“Oh man!” Tamara knelt.
Perrin tapped her lightly on each shoulder with the crochet hook, then thonked her on the head hard enough to elicit an, “Ow!”
“I hereby dub you my official design assistant. Rise oh Tamara of the thank-you-for-saving-my-butt design team.”
As she clambered back to her feet, several of the nearby women who had stopped to observe the goings-on offered a round of applause.
Tamara blushed a brilliant red while Perrin waved the hook as if acknowledging her adoring subjects. When the applause had turned to kind laughter and everyone had returned to their shopping, she turned once again to Tamara.
“Now, assistant, let’s go choose some colors.”
- Writer
