The Sweetgum Knit Lit Society Read Online Free Page A

needles in despair. She would not cry. Not in front of Eugenie. Not in front of Merry. And certainly not in front of her sister.
    She could feel Ruthie looking at her. With dogged determination, Esther jammed the point of the needle through what she hoped was a stitch. It should have been so simple. She’d been at it for months now but had yet to complete one of the assigned projects herself. None of the other women had problems like this. Even that wretched teenager was aggressively stitching away after a mere fifteen minutes of instruction from Eugenie.
    “Mr. Rochester is, of course, the symbol of fallen and broken humanity,” Eugenie said, guiding the book discussion as deftly—and dominantly—as she knitted. Eugenie hadn’t waited for Camille to return before starting their meeting.
    Esther hadn’t finished the book—she abhorred the Brontës, all that unnecessary emotion—so she couldn’t knit, nor could she contribute to the conversation. How to hide in plain sight? She had never been good at avoiding the spotlight. That was her sister’s job. Ruthie, in her oversize sweatshirt and Lycra pants. Esther could only hope she hadn’t worn that getup to work today.
    According to her husband, Frank, the potential new minister had dropped by the church to have a look around.
Please, Lord, let the night janitor have vacuumed the sanctuary
. Frank was the chair of the church board. He’d been working diligently to secure a new minister, but it wasn’t easy to find an intelligent, accomplished pastor who wanted to live in a small town like Sweetgum. This new man, though, sounded promising. He was a bit too old—over sixty—but he’d grown up in nearby Columbia and had an interest in returning to his roots. At least that was what Frank had reported when she’d called him at his law office earlier. He had given her the update on the search for a minister, and she had told him when she’d booked his appointment with the cardiologist in Nashville.
    “Esther, don’t you agree?”
    Her head popped up. Eugenie’s dark brown eyes drilled right through her.
    “I’m sorry, Eugenie. I was concentrating on my knitting.” She slid the needles into her lap so no one could see the tangledmess. The harder she tried, the more the yarn slid off the needles. She tried to push the loops back on, but she wasn’t sure which ones were the actual stitches.
    “I asked whether you thought the story represented the eternal human dilemma of obedience to God versus the need for expression of our free will.”
    Esther clenched her teeth so her jaw wouldn’t drop open. “I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said, head high and back straight. She never allowed her spine to touch the chair. Legs crossed at the ankles only, never at the knees. She wasn’t the first lady of Sweetgum merely by default.
    “Why does Mr. Rochester’s first wife symbolize evil? After all, he was the one who locked her in the attic,” Ruthie said, taking off on a tangent as she always did.
    The teenager—what was her name? Hannah?—rolled her eyes but kept knitting away. Esther peered more closely at the girl’s work. Her stitches were so tight they were probably waterproof. Esther glanced down at the loose, uneven mass in her lap. Her stitches should have been regular and firm. Where had she gone wrong? She glanced at Ruthie, whose needles flew as if they were motorized. How could someone so sloppy in appearance produce such marvelously even work?
    With a sigh, Esther slid her knitting into her lap and picked up her book, pretending to look for a particular passage. She’d perpetrated this charade for months now. Amazing, really, how little people saw of what went on under theirvery noses. After the meeting, she’d hand off her project to the person she paid to complete them. And the members of the Knit Lit Society—even her own sister—still would not suspect. Fortunately for Esther, Camille came back into the room. Eugenie pursed