Читать онлайн «Crewel World»

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Nowadays, when she stopped for lunch, Margot sat with her back to her shop’s big front window. That gray monstrosity they’d built across the street had taken away her view of the lake. She ate the last Frito and wadded the empty bag into the plastic wrap that had held her sandwich and dropped both into the little wastebasket under the table. She drank the last of the green tea in her pretty porcelain cup—brewed from a bag, but good nevertheless—and took the cup to the back room for a quick rinse.

There were no customers waiting to buy needlework patterns or embroidery floss or knitting yarn when she got back, so she made a quick tour of her shop, rearranging the heap of knitting yarns in a corner, adjusting a display of the new autumn colors of embroidery floss in a basket on a table, and moving a folding knitting stand an inch closer to the traffic lane. Her shop appeared aimlessly cluttered, but every display was calculated to draw customers ever deeper into the room, with items virtually leaping into their hands.

Satisfied, she sat down again and got out her own knitting. She was working on a bolero jacket she intended to wear to a meeting on Saturday. It was a simple pattern, just knit and purl, but she was doing it in quarter-inch ribbon instead of yarn, so the jacket had an interesting depth and texture. It helped that the ribbon blended every few inches from palest pink to soft mauve to gray lavender.

Margot started knitting, her hands moving with swift economy. The jacket was nearly finished—if it wasn’t finished already. She was slender enough to look good in a bolero jacket, but short enough that she had to try on everything in clothing stores, even things labeled petite, and nearly always had to adjust knitting patterns. After all these years she should be accustomed to it, but every so often she’d miscalculate or just get carried away with the pleasure of the work, and end up with the voluminous kind of garment teenagers wore. Of all the silliness of the current age, the silliest was a young thug who had to hold up his pants with one hand while he held up a shopkeeper with the other.

Margot Berglund was fifty-three, blond, with kind blue eyes and a bustling but comfortable manner. She had always been happiest with something to keep her busy, and so, when simply doing needlework and teaching her friends to do needlework and organizing expeditions to needlework stores and gatherings wasn’t enough, she had opened Crewel World. That was back when crewelwork was the rage; just because it was needlepoint nowadays, she saw no need to change an established name.