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“It’s creepy.” Meghan shivered inside the pink hoodie Libby had bought her at the Gap for her last birthday. “The whole place looks like something out of a Stephen King movie. Look at it!” Her top lip curled, Meghan glanced around the perimeter of the park. For Libby, the old neighborhood had a certain appeal. It was anchored by an imposing church, dotted with park benches, bus stops and coffee houses. Except for Barb’s Knits—a little seedier than its neighbors and, surprisingly, a little embarrassing because of it—the surrounding shops had the solid feel that bright, new suburban stores never could. Pride of ownership was reflected in everything from the brightly colored and graphically appealing signs to the window boxes planted with summer annuals. Thinking about the generations of people who had put their blood, sweat and tears into the neighborhood and the new generation that worked just as hard to maintain it, Libby felt a sense of belonging. She was part of that new generation now. She had to live up to the promise of the neighborhood and those who had rescued it from melting into urban decay.
It was a scary thought. And exhilarating, too. None of which meant she didn’t sympathize with Meghan.
Like most kids her age, Meghan had been raised to think of the mall as the only place to shop; the bright and the new were all that mattered. Looking back on it now, Libby realized she should have introduced her daughter to the world beyond the confines of their upper-middle-class suburb long before her life—and her marriage—had been pulled out from under her. Whose fault was it that Meghan had seen little of downtown Pittsburgh other than the Science Center, PNC Park, where the Pirates played, and the view from her father’s office? This was new territory for Meghan. Not just a new city but a new way of life. A new home. A new beginning.
Just as it was for Libby herself.
With a deep breath for courage, Libby reminded herself that the transition was bound to be frightening. Just as so much of Meghan’s life had been these past months since Rick had announced he was filing for divorce.
When Meghan started pleading again, Libby didn’t argue. But she wasn’t about to give in, either.
“Mommy!” Meghan’s voice was anguished. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”
“We said we were going to make a go of it, remember?” Libby said, and before her daughter could bring up every argument she’d raised in the six weeks since Libby had decided to come to Cleveland, she held up one hand for silence. “We talked about this, Meghan. We decided it would be a new start. An adventure.”
“You decided.” Meghan crossed her arms over her chest. It was clearly a case of the proverbial line in the sand, and Libby wasn’t in the mood.
“It’s the best thing,” she reminded her daughter. “For both of us.”
“For you, maybe. Not for me. I should be home right now. I should be sitting by the pool at Jennifer’s. Or Rollerblading with Emma. Or going to dance class with—”
“There are pools and Rollerblading and dance classes in Cleveland,” Libby told her as she’d told her a hundred times before. “You’re a great kid. You’re popular. You’re a good friend. You don’t have trouble mixing in and you’d be starting high school back in Cranberry, anyway. Instead of meeting new people there, you’ll meet new people here when you start at Central Catholic. You know you will, Meggie. Pretty soon you’ll make lots of new friends in Cleveland.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my old friends.”
Libby let out a slow breath. “You’re absolutely right. They’re great kids and you can e-mail them every day and see them on vacations and on the weekends and holidays when you visit your dad. But here, here is where we’re going to start over.”
“Daddy’s starting over and he didn’t have to leave Pittsburgh to do it.”
It was a low blow, and just as Meghan had calculated, it slammed into Libby like a fist. She stopped herself from sniping back. Oh, it was tempting, but it wasn’t fair to blame Meghan for the pain that gnawed her insides.
“What Daddy’s doing is…” Libby almost let her emotions get the best of her. Immature, selfish and just plain boneheaded were not words she should use to describe Rick. At least not in front of her daughter. Meghan had heard enough of that talk. It was time to turn over a new leaf.
“Daddy’s starting over is different,” she told Meghan instead and she congratulated herself. If Libby pretended she wasn’t talking about the last three months and how her life fell apart and her daughter’s world crumbled, she could almost make herself sound logical and objective about the whole thing. “He’s got a new wife and he and Belinda are going to have a new baby. We’ve got each other and—”
“And this trashy place.” Meghan turned her back on Barb’s Knits. “Did you ever even consider that it might be a dump before you moved us all the way here?”
Of course Libby had. She would have been crazy not to.
But she never imagined it would be this bad.
The thought settled inside her, and even though she knew it wasn’t fair, she automatically compared Barb’s Knits to the rest of the neighborhood.
The rest of the neighborhood won. Hands down.
Once upon a time—and that must have been a very long time before—the building had been not commercial but residential. It had a stone path that led from the sidewalk where they stood, and on either side of the path, flower beds where dandelions poked out of the soil, reaching for the summer sunshine.
Four steps led to a porch where the paint was chipped and a front door that was so caked with dirt it was hard to tell what color it might once have been. The front window was too dirty to see inside, as were the windows in the apartment above the first-floor retail space.
Home, sweet home.
Libby shook her head, clearing it of the fog of doubt that had settled over her with every mile she put between herself and her old life. She knew better than to be surprised by anything she might find inside or outside the shop. To pretend otherwise would be to admit she was both foolish and naive.
But that didn’t mean she thought she hadn’t made the right decision by coming to Cleveland.
Libby put on her game face. She wasn’t fooling herself and heck, she probably wasn’t fooling Meghan either. But maybe if she pretended hard enough, one of these days she’d convince herself it was actually possible to feel alive again.
“It can’t hurt to go inside and look around, can it?” Libby asked and—thank goodness—at that moment a man in the park across the street waved to them, and Meghan didn’t have a chance to answer. From the look in her eyes to the lower lip thrust out just enough for the world to know she was a martyr and a long-suffering one at that, Libby had no doubt what her daughter would have said.
With a quick look both ways, the man hurried across the street. In one hand he held a red leather leash with an overweight poodle on the end of it. With his other hand he gave Libby the thumbs-up.
“I’m guessing you’re the new owner, right? You must be. There hasn’t been another person who’s taken a look at Barb’s old place in as long as I can remember. Unless…” He narrowed his eyes and gave Libby the once-over. “Now that I’ve opened my mouth, you’re not going to tell me you’re from the drugstore chain, are you?”
“You sound as if that’s not a good thing,” Libby said.
The man’s expression grew sour. “I guess it’s progress, but…”
“But you’re not thrilled with the idea of the big-box drugstore taking up most of this block.”
“Me and everyone else around here. Well, almost everyone else. Peg over at the beauty shop—” he looked that way “—she says she’s not going to budge, but I don’t trust her. Barb’s Knits sits smack-dab in the center of the block, and the whole entire block is what those Tip-Top folks are after. Everything hinges on the sale of this property, and I’m betting that if Barb’s Knits goes, Peg will pull up stakes and go, too. Then there will be nobody stopping those Tip-Top folks. Peg!” He snorted. “She always was one to think of herself first and everyone else dead last. So fess up! You one of them? Or one of us?”
Libby grinned. “One of you. I think. If you’re talking about me being the new owner of the property, I am.” She introduced herself and shook the man’s hand. “And, just so you know, I’m planning on opening the store again. I told the drugstore folks I wasn’t interested.”
“Hear that, Clyde?” The man bent to rub the dog’s head. “That ought to get Peg’s knickers in a twist. Told you this nice lady looked like one of the good guys.” He stood and smiled at Libby before he hurried along with the dog. “Thanks for not selling to those drugstore creeps.”
Watching him go, Libby gave Meghan a playful elbow in the ribs. “See that? We’re already superheroes and we just got here. They’ll probably change the name of the park in our honor.”
“Whatever.” Meghan rolled her eyes. Clearly there were things a fourteen-year-old understood that an adult never would.
Reminding herself to cut Meghan some slack, Libby put an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Over the past months Meghan had grown at least an inch.
Libby herself wasn’t as petite as she was compact and though she struggled to maintain her figure as she was nearing forty, she sometimes looked longingly at Meghan, who was tall and willowy even as she was just entering her teenage years. Libby wondered what it would be like not to have to hem every pair of pants she ever bought.
Meghan’s hair was nearly black, her eyes were as blue as sapphires and her complexion was porcelain perfection. They were traits she’d inherited from her father’s side of the family and she had yet to learn—thank goodness!—to use them to her best advantage. When she did, Libby knew Meghan would break hearts and—at least until hers was broken in return and she knew how much it hurt—she’d enjoy every minute of it.
Libby, on the other hand, had unremarkable brown hair that tended to curl unless she kept it short and tamed with any number of hair-care products. She liked tailored, classic clothes, traditional styling and lots of color. As long as the colors in question were black, navy-blue, gray or white.
Meghan’s growth spurt was just another sign that life was changing. Time was passing, and it was a reminder that Libby couldn’t wait for a fairy tale someday to make a new life for herself and her daughter. Today was what they had. It was all that mattered.
“What do you say?” She stepped toward Barb’s Knits, taking Meghan along with her. “Should we have a look inside?”
“Do we have to?”
“Unless you want to live out here on the sidewalk.”
Beneath her hand, Libby felt her daughter’s shoulders rise and fall. “We could go home.”
“This is home now.”
“We could—”
“Race you to the door.” It was a game they hadn’t played in years, and Libby couldn’t say why she thought of it. She slid her arm from around Meghan’s shoulders and hurried up the front steps, fast enough to make it look as if she was willing to compete, but slow enough to allow Meghan to win. It wasn’t until she was at the door that she looked back to see Meghan standing exactly where she’d left her.
“You’re so embarrassing,” Meghan said, and she stomped up to the porch.
“Yeah,” Libby said under her breath. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
With one hand, she fished in her purse for the key that her mother’s attorney had sent. She pulled it out and held it up for Meghan to see.
“You ready?” she asked her daughter.
Am I?
The words taunted Libby. She fingered the key, imagining what she might find on the other side of the door. Was she ready for this glimpse into her mother’s life? Libby couldn’t lie to herself; she hoped that something on the other side of the door would reveal Barb’s character, explain her motives, prove a mother’s love she’d never known.
And if she didn’t find it?
“Mom!”
Meghan’s voice snapped Libby back to reality.
“You gonna go inside or you just gonna stand here and stare?”
Libby tossed the key into the air and caught it. “Gonna go inside,” she said and she unlocked the front door. She paused on the threshold, drew in a breath for courage. And immediately gagged.
“I think something’s dead in there,” she said at the same time Meghan squealed.
Libby wasn’t going to let that stop her. She hadn’t come hundreds of miles to be chased away by a smell.
There was a wooden chair on the front porch, and Libby propped it against the door to keep it open and allow some air inside.
As ready as she’d ever be, she stepped into Barb’s Knits.
“The place is a dump.” Meghan was right behind her and as always, she had a way of distilling a situation to its essence.
Barb’s Knits was, indeed, a dump.
The room they stepped into must have once been the living room of the first-floor apartment. In addition to a dust-covered counter and cash register on the left, there was a wall of shelves and books directly ahead of them, and across from it, tables where tape measures, scissors and other supplies were piled. Beyond a doorway was another room and from what Libby could see, another past that. She peered through the gloom. There was lots of yarn everywhere, lots of dust and—Libby shivered—even some mouse droppings.
And something else.
In spite of Meghan’s half-heard warnings about ghosts, axe murderers and creepy crawlers, Libby started into the next room without hesitation, her attention caught by a display table.
The table had two tiers. The bottom one was stacked with wool, but Libby hardly noticed. Her eyes were on the teddy bear on the top tier. A cocoa-colored bear with one missing eye.
“Mom, you okay?”
“Of course.” Libby answered automatically, even though she wasn’t sure she was. Though she had no clear memory of the bear, there was something vaguely familiar about it. He was dressed in a fisherman knit sweater—handmade by the looks of it—and the fur on his right arm was nearly gone as if years of hugs had worn it away. Instinctively Libby touched the bear with one finger, then stepped back. She swore he was watching her with that one good eye of his.
“Mom!” Meghan’s voice called from the front room. “You’re awfully quiet in there. Did you get kidnapped?”
“I’m just looking around,” she told Meghan. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, right. And I just fell off a turnip truck.”
It was what Libby always said when Meghan tried to pull a fast one on her. Libby smiled grimly.
Meghan stepped through the wide arched doorway that separated what had once been the living room from the dining room, caught sight of the bear and hurried over to scoop it into her arms. “Hey, he’s actually kind of cute. And, look, he’s wearing a little sweater! It doesn’t look nasty and dirty like some of this other stuff around here, does it?”
“Put him down, Meghan.”
Her daughter looked at Libby as if she’d lost her mind and in a way she supposed she had. That was the only thing that would explain how a toy—one she’d sworn she’d never seen before—could make her feel as if suddenly the walls were closing in on her. Her stomach churned.
“Don’t worry. It doesn’t look like he has fleas or anything.” Meghan held the bear in front of her nose and studied him closely. “With a little cleaning and—”
“I told you, Meghan, put the bear down.”
Libby’s voice was sharp and prickly, and hearing it, she felt guilty for snapping and even guiltier for not caring.
“Come on. We’re leaving.” Libby swept past her daughter and toward the front door.
“But, Mom!” Meghan dropped the bear and shuffled behind. “We just got here. And it’s not like I want to stay or anything but, gee, it’s only a bear and it’s nothing to get all nuts about.”
No sooner was Meghan out on the porch than Libby closed the front door and locked it. It wasn’t until she pocketed the key and turned to walk down the stairs that she realized there were tears in Meghan’s eyes.
Libby’s heart broke. She reached for her daughter’s hand. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Maybe you were right and I was wrong. Maybe it was a mistake to come here after all.” She took a deep breath. “I thought…”
“I know.” Meghan gave her hand a squeeze. “I mean, I think I get it. Sort of. You thought you wouldn’t care.”
As insights went Libby wondered why she’d never thought of something so obvious herself. “I just didn’t expect—”
“The bear, yeah. So what’s the story?”
Libby had never lied to Meghan about her past. Oh, she didn’t know the whole truth—that would be too much of a burden for any child her age. But when Meghan asked questions about Libby’s childhood and about why Libby had been raised by the Palmers, her father’s parents, Libby had never hesitated to give Meghan as much of the story as would satisfy her. As much as she could handle.
Libby wasn’t about to start playing with the truth now.
“I’m not sure about the bear,” Libby told her. “Not exactly, anyway. But there’s something about him that makes me feel as if I’ve seen him before.” A touch that felt like cold fingers skittered over her shoulders and Libby shivered. “I don’t know,” she said. “I know it sounds weird, but I think he used to be mine.”
CHAPTER 3
They spent the night at an Embassy Suites, far from the dust they’d kicked up at the shop and the forgotten teddy bear that had created an avalanche of emotions that had both surprised and confounded Libby. She wasn’t naive; she knew from the start that going to Cleveland might stir memories of her relationship with her mother. It was, after all, one of the reasons Libby had chosen to come in the first place. But after spending years repressing Barb’s memory and all her energy fighting her emotional response to it, she simply hadn’t expected to be knocked for a loop.
But then, she hadn’t expected to run into the tattered teddy bear either.
Libby dealt with it. If there was one thing she’d learned in the months since Rick confessed to his relationship with Belinda, it was that she couldn’t let her personal pain get in the way of what she needed to accomplish. If she was going to make a new start—and a new life—for Meghan and herself, she had to swallow her misgivings and get on with her plans. Number one on the list was to make Barb’s Knits a viable business and the apartment upstairs a home.
With that in mind, she and Meghan stopped at a grocery store on the way in from the hotel the next morning and loaded up on paper towels and cleaning supplies. They bought a cooler, too, a bag of ice and a twelve-pack of soda. Not so good for Meghan’s teeth but plenty good for parental PR, and after all Meghan had been through lately, it was the least Libby could do.
Back at the shop, she unlocked the front door and pushed it open.
“It smells better than it did yesterday.”
It didn’t; Meghan was only trying to make her feel better. After Libby propped the porch chair against the door to air out the store, she hugged her daughter just to let her know how much she appreciated the moral support.
Though it was early, the sky was gray and the clouds were heavy. As soon as she stepped inside, Libby hoisted the plastic bags of cleaning supplies onto the front counter and reached for the switch to flick on the lights.
Not a single one of them worked.
“And am I surprised?” she mumbled.
Meghan was apparently feeling braver than she had the day before. She headed off to explore. “Are you?” she called over her shoulder from a room off the middle showroom where a round wooden table was surrounded by chairs—and everything was coated in dust. “Surprised, that is?”
“Not even a little.” Firmly ignoring the bear who was lying where he’d been dropped, Libby looked at the dust that covered the counters, the dirt that sat on the windowsills and the faded yarn that was everywhere. It was piled on tables and heaped in baskets. It was mounded on an old mahogany buffet and jammed onto the shelves of a bookcase that took up most of one wall in the former dining room. There was even yarn displayed in what used to be the kitchen. Every cupboard door had been removed and each shelf was filled with wool. Some of it still looked usable. Most of it looked old and sad. None of it looked clean. “Grandma Palmer always said Barb wasn’t much of a housekeeper.”
“Doesn’t that seem bizarre?” Meghan had been looking through an old steamer trunk open on the floor and filled with yarn. The top layer of yarn had once been pastel colors and was now a uniform and dull shade of gray, but without sunlight to fade it and no coating of dust, the yarn beneath it had fared better. When Meghan stood, there was pink fuzz on her nose. She brushed it away with one finger. “That would be like me calling you Libby. No way you’d ever let me get away with it. Don’t you feel weird calling your mom Barb?”
It was better to concentrate on the facts than it was to editorialize, so that’s exactly what Libby did. “She wasn’t much of a mom,” she said. “You know all that, honey.”
“Because she left you, and you were raised by your dad’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa P. I get it.” Meghan nodded solemnly. As if she understood. As if, as a child who had spent her life with two parents who—in spite of their own personal differences—adored her, she possibly could. “Your mom… Barb…you told me had problems. Drug problems.”
“It was the sixties and I guess things were different then. At least that’s what people say. Anyway, I think Barb had her reasons. Remember, my dad was killed in a war.”
Meghan nodded. “Vietnam. We talked about it in history class.”
“Barb couldn’t handle his death. She was depressed. Lonely. Probably scared, too.” And before Rick walked out on her, Libby had never quite understood any of that. She’d spent years desperate to come to some understanding about her mother. She’d never thought it might come thanks to her own divorce.
It used to be that Barb and everything associated with her—their life together before she abandoned Libby, and the intriguing possibility of how things might have worked out differently—were the hardest things to think about. Back then, Libby thanked her lucky stars for Rick and the life they’d established together.
Funny, these days she thought about Barb when she wanted to forget about Rick.
“Things worked out best for me,” she told Meghan, talking about her childhood, not about her divorce. As far as Libby was concerned, that story didn’t have an ending. At least not yet. “Instead of being raised by a woman who probably didn’t have the skills or the patience to be much of a mother, I got to live with Grandma and Grandpa P. And Grandma and Grandpa P…well, I think the only person they love more than me in the whole wide world is you.”
Meghan took that much for granted, but that didn’t keep her from smiling. Before the Palmers had retired to Arizona, she’d spent a great deal of time with them, and even though thousands of miles now separated them, there was no doubt she was still the light of their lives. “But doesn’t that make you wonder…?” Meghan’s dark brows dipped into a vee, the way they always did when she was considering something beyond her years or her understanding.
“What?”
Meghan shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
“It’s just that…I dunno…” She twirled one curl of her shoulder-length hair. “I just wondered, you know, why if Barb never even saw you, if she never talked to you since you were little, why she left you her business.”
Libby might never have lied to her daughter, but that didn’t mean she had always told the whole truth and nothing but. There were some details Meghan wasn’t old enough to hear yet. Some details Libby didn’t like to bring out into the light of day and examine, and rather than do it now, she stuck to the matter at hand. “I don’t know why she left me her business,” Libby admitted. “Maybe she felt guilty.”