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“Yes. It is new.” Her accent is clipped and slightly guttural. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s Russian.
“And it’s just lovely,” Zeke says. “Don’t you think so, Faye?”
“Yes,” I say, holding up five skeins of red yarn. They’re all different textures and I swear I’m getting a rash from the combination of so many mismatched fibers thatjust don’t belong together.
“And I love the name.” Zeke grins.
“It was my second choice.”
“What was your first choice?”
“The Knotty Pussycat.”
I drop a skein and Zeke snorts. The woman nods at him.
“People had a strange reaction. Like that. No matter. I considered calling it The Iceman Combeth, but it was confusing to people.”
“The Iceman Cometh? Like the Eugene O’Neill Play?” I ask.
“Yes, except no. Combeth, like combing fibers. And Iceman, like Val Kilmer.”
“You likeTop Gun?” Zeke asks with a wide grin.
“I loveTop Gun,” she says with her full attention focused on him.
He just nods. “I have a friend who loves Top Gun. He’s also Russian.”
“I am not Russian,” she says, her head tilted as if teasing us with a big reveal to come. We wait, quietly, until she flashes those big teeth—they really are large—and says, with a snap of her wrist, “I am from Bulgaria. My mother’s people are Albanian. Very different.”
“Fantastic,” Zeke grins.
“Anyway, people didn’t get the name. I went back to the drawing board and now I have the Knitty Kitty.”
“Amazing.” Zeke hands me the skein I dropped.
“You knit?” the woman says.
I shrug and sort of make to juggle the yarn skeins, then nearly drop them all.
“Yes and no,” I say. I don’t know why. The answer is a resoundingno.
“I, for one, have always wanted to learn,” Zeke says. “And I have questions. For starters, what happens when you finish off the yarn?”
“Finish off?” she asks with a frown.
“Zeke,” I hiss.
“Yeah, like when you git ‘er done? Is there a prize in the center?”
“Prize? Why would there be a prize?” the woman asks. “Isn’t the knitting enough of a prize?”
“I’m sorry about him,” I say, shoving the red yarn into his hands.
“Is okay,” the woman says. “I am only just opening and have not yet gotten my shit together.”
“Are you hiring?” Zeke asks from the other side of the store where I watch him place a red Angora skein in a cubby of purple, green, and turquoise.
A shudder rolls down my neck.
