356

Vincent

“What are these?” Vincent asked Marjorie, the lady at What Goes Around Resale, a shop he popped into from time to time in his perpetual quest for still-life subject matter.

“Hand-knit dishcloths,” Marjorie said.

“Jesus,” Vincent said. “They’re little works of art. Every one’s a different pattern, did you notice?”

“Yes,” Marjorie said. “The lady who knitted them used to knit ‘em like crazy. We have a couple of her pattern books, too.”

Vincent took the booklets from Marjorie, examined the covers of Nifty Knit Dishcloths and Color Splash Dishcloths, and began flipping through the pages. “Jesus, these things take seventy-five, eighty-five yards of ‘one hundred percent cotton worsted weight yarn’ each. Amazing.” Then, “What do you mean ‘used to’? Did she die?”

“She did, poor soul,” Marjorie said. “All alone at her kitchen table. Of a brain aneurysm, according to her son.”

“Alone. That’s really sad,” Vincent said. “I wonder if one of these is ‘Tidy Time’—”

“Couldn’t say,” Marjorie said. “We got most of her things. Clothing mostly. She had a lot of fountain pens, too, of all things.”

“Fountain pens?”

“Yeah. But he changed his mind on those. Said he was going to try and sell ‘em on eBay instead. He was an odd one, that one. Gave me the creeps the way he kept staring at my forehead. Wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

“How much for the books and all the dishcloths?” Vincent said.

“Would you be interested in her yarn bag, too?” Marjorie said.

“Lemme see it,” Vincent said.

Back at the studio, Vincent arranged the yarn, the books, and the dishcloths on a gleaming mahogany table, adding a clear glass vase and three stargazer lilies as a background element. And while he did this and loaded the Hasselblad and positioned a foam-board reflector, he thought about the woman who’d died all alone, and wondered what had possessed her to churn out cotton dishcloths like crazy.

Had he only been privy to the fact of the matter—that knitting dishcloths, for Hope, had just been a way to hide from her husband—his still-life tableau might have been somewhat less saccharine.

# # #