Finally she found a radio station that played classical music, sat down in her sister’s chair, and took up her knitting.

To her surprise, after ten minutes of it, she felt her mind, like a pond that has been disturbed and then left alone, settle and grow clear.

Mickels’s remark notwithstanding, Crewel World had had a good day, saleswise. But there had been more deliveries—most of them, fortunately, with an invoice that gave her thirty or more days to pay. But even ninety days to pay was shorter than the five or six months it was going to take to close the estate. She hoped she could do enough business to make those payments.

Shelly had come back in soon after Joe had left, and said it was time to plan the Christmas display. Shelly and Godwin—who were going to be essential to the continuance of the shop, Betsy was already aware—put their heads together and came up with a design for the front window that looked okay to Betsy.

Later both of them, having apparently discussed it between taking an order for a thousand dollars’ worth of silk and metallics for a woman doing an enormous canvas of an Erté-like portrait and explaining the use of an eggbeaterlike device for twisting yarn into braid to a woman who bought two as gifts, had come and sat her down and wanted to know what her plans were. It was obvious they wanted her to keep Crewel World open. She’d been nearly as touched as alarmed. She hadn’t agreed—it felt too much like a trap for someone of her ignorance to promise to stay and run a small business in a state notorious for fierce winters. Didn’t blizzards close the stores and schools around here for great hunks of the winter?

Hey, she didn’t even have a winter coat. And she didn’t know how to knit a pair of mittens. She looked down at the red scarf, which was now over a foot in length. She’d put another inch on it sitting here musing, and there was not an error in it, amazingly. So maybe she could do a mitten.

No, wait, mittens had that thumb sticking out. How did one do a thumb? She recalled Godwin knitting his sock. He’d been using four needles, three of them stuck in the project and the fourth used to make and lift off the stitches, around and around, so there was no seam. One set of four to do the hand and another set of littler ones to do the thumb? No, wait, she remembered her mother’s hand-knitted mittens. The thumb’s stitches weren’t smaller than the rest of the mitten. She smirked a little at being able to figure that out. She was learning.