The Knitting Circle: The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year. Ann Hood
didn’t bother to ask what “cast on” meant. Like a magician practicing sleight of hand, Alice made a series of loops and twists, then held out one needle, the blue yarn snaking up it ominously.
“I cast on twenty-two stitches for you, and you’re ready to go.”
“Uh-huh,” Mary said.
Alice motioned for Mary to come sit beside her.
“In here,” Alice said, demonstrating. “Then wrap the yarn like this. And pull this needle through.”
Mary smiled as first one stitch, then another, appeared on the empty needle.
“Okay,” Alice said. “Go ahead.”
“Me?” Mary said.
“I already know how to do it,” Alice said, “don’t I?”
Mary took a breath and began.
Here was what Mary still found extraordinary: on the day before Stella died, nothing unusual happened. There were no signs, no premonitions, nothing but the simple daily routine of their life together—she and Dylan and Stella. Her neighbor when she’d lived in San Francisco, on a high hill in North Beach, had been an old Italian woman named Angelina. Angelina always wore a black shawl over her head, and thick-soled black shoes, and a black dress. “People should know you’re in mourning,” she’d told Mary. “When you wear black, they understand.”
Mary hadn’t pointed out to her that everyone wore black these days. She hadn’t rolled her eyes or smirked when Angelina told her that three days before her husband died—and here she’d made the sign of the cross, spitting into her palm at the end— a dog had howled, facing their apartment. “I knew death was coming,” she’d said. Also, two other men from the neighborhood had died in the past few months. “Death,” she’d explained, “comes in threes.” Angelina had a litany of signs, dreams of clear water, of teeth falling out of her mouth; a dead bird on her doorstep; goose bumps in still, warm air.
But Mary had none of this. No dreams or dead birds or howling dogs. What she had was a typical day. A good day. At five, Stella still drank a bottle of milk in the morning and one at bedtime, a secret they kept from her kindergarten friends. Dylan brought her, happily and sleepily sucking her bottle, into bed with them and they cuddled there, Mary and Dylan reading the newspaper and Stella watching Sesame Street.
They knew it was time to get up when Stella came to life. No longer sleepy, she would start to tickle Dylan. Mary wished she could remember what they’d had for breakfast that last morning together, what they talked about over Eggos or cinnamon toast. But so ordinary was that morning that she cannot recall such details.
She knows that Stella wore striped tights and polka-dot clogs and a jumper that was too long, also striped. But she knows this because after Stella died, when they came home from the hospital, these clothes still lay in a crumpled heap, right where Stella had dropped them when she got ready for bed. She knows this because for days she carried them around, pressing them to her nose for the last hints of Stella’s little-girl scent.
Dylan had left that morning while they were still getting ready for school. He always left early, kissing them both on the top of their heads. Stella would yell, “Don’t go, Daddy!” and pout, making Mary a little jealous. It was true, she thought, that the parent who did the most caretaking, the driving around and cooking and bathing, didn’t get the adoration.
She felt guilty now, of course, that she had no doubt grown short with Stella for dawdling that morning. Stella was a dawdler, easily distracted by the sight of her forgotten rain boots or the sparkles on a picture she’d drawn and hung on the fridge. Even while Mary hurried her, Stella hummed and dawdled happily, grinning up at her mother as she rushed her into the car. “We’re going to be late,” Mary probably mumbled that morning, because they were usually late. And Stella probably said, “Uh-huh,” before she returned to her humming.
Mary stopped for coffee that morning, and visited with other mothers at the café, and shared funny stories about their amazing children; she went to work, wasting these last precious hours as a mother with reviews and research and other meaningless tasks; Dylan called her—he always did—to tell her when he’d be home that evening, to ask if Stella had anything special going on; then she raced to pick up her daughter at school, sat in the car, and watched her come out, dreamy and tired, her backpack dragging on the ground. And as she watched her, Mary’s heart soared; it always did when she saw Stella, her daughter, again.
Unlike the rest of that day, the clarity of their last evening together was so strong that it made Mary double over to remember it. All of it. The late afternoon sun in their kitchen. Stella working on her Weekly Reader. Lighting the grill for an early barbecue. Stella drizzling the olive oil on the chicken. Stella scrubbing the dusty outdoor table and chairs, placing the napkins so carefully beside each plate, running into Dylan’s arms when he walked into the backyard, grinning, pleased, and said: “A barbecue! In April!”“Yes,” Stella had said,“we’re eating outside!”
That night, Mary placed the portable CD player in the open window and played Stella’s favorite CD of dance music, the two of them dancing barefoot: the Macarena, the chicken dance, the limbo, and finally Dylan joined them and all three danced to “Shout,” jumping and waving their arms. The sliver of a moon hung above them in the big glorious sky, like a blessing, Mary remembered thinking.
The morning of Stella’s funeral, Mary’s mother called.
“You have so many people with you,” she’d said. “I know you’ll understand if I go back this morning. The later flight gets in after midnight, and you have so many people with you.”
Mary had frowned, not believing what her mother was telling her. “You’re not coming?” she asked. She still wasn’t able to say her daughter’s name in the same sentence as “funeral” or “died” or “dead.”
“You understand, don’t you?” her mother had said, and Mary thought she heard pleading in her voice. While her mother explained about the connection in Mexico City, how far apart the gates were, how confusing Customs was there, Mary quietly hung up.
Her mother had disappointed her for her entire life. She was not the mother who went to school plays or parents’ nights; she gave praise rarely but never gushed or bragged; she had missed Mary’s wedding because of a strike in San Miguel, where she lived, that forced her to miss her flight to the States. “I’ll send you a nice gift,” she’d said. And she had. The next week a set of Mexican pottery arrived, with half of the plates broken in the journey.
But still, in this most terrible time, Mary had expected her mother to be there in a way she had not been able to so far. When Mary studied the faces in the church, saw the neighbors and colleagues and teachers and relatives and friends, disappointment filled her chest so that she couldn’t breathe. She had to sit down and gulp air. Her mother really had not come.
The flower arrangement her mother sent was the biggest of them all. Purple calla lilies, so many that they threatened to swallow the entire room. If Mary had had the energy, she would have thrown it out, that ostentatious apology. Instead, she purposely left it behind.
In the hot sticky summer right after Stella died, Mary’s mother called her. She had called once a week, offering advice. Usually Mary didn’t speak to her at all.
“What you need,” her mother told her, “is to learn to knit.”
“Right,” Mary said.
Her mother’s colonial house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,