Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Eight

The next morning, right after Carrie checked me over, I went home. Jack was silent for the short drive, and so was I. When we got to the house, he came around the car and opened my door. Slowly, I swung my legs out and got up, glad he’d brought me clothes to replace my ruined jeans. Trying to be modest in a hospital gown would’ve been just too much. I was a little shaky, but he let me make my own way into the house.

When I looked around the living room, I was stunned.

“Who?” I asked. Jack was focused on my face, his own dark and serious. “What…?”

A vase of pink carnations was on the table by the double recliner. Three white roses graced the top of the television. A small dried bouquet was arranged in a country basket on my small bookshelf.

“Go lie down, Lily,” he said.

I shuffled into our bedroom, saw two more little flower arrangements and two cards. I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and eased back. I swung my legs up.

“Where’d these come from?” I was realizing that my initial idea, that Jack had gotten them all, was just plain crazy.

“Carrie and Claude. Janet, the dried arrangement, and she brought some chicken. Helen Drinkwater left a card in the door. Marshall brought you a movie to watch; a Jackie Chan. Birdie Rossiter sent flowers and included a card from her dog Durwood.” Jack’s voice was very dry. “The Winthrops sent flowers, Carlton from next door dropped by and left a card, the McCorkindales brought flowers.” Jack picked up a notepad he’d dropped on the night table. “Let’s see. Someone named Carla brought you a sweet-potato pie. Someone else named Firella called, said to tell you she’d be bringing by a ham tonight.”

People here in Shakespeare had been kind to me before, helped me out when I needed it, but this was a little overwhelming. The Drinkwaters, for example. Since when had they cared about my well-being? The McCorkindales? I’d been beaten black and blue before and they hadn’t noticed. Something about my losing a baby had struck a chord.

“How did they find out so fast?”

“You were brought up in a small town and you haven’t figured that out?” Jack tried to sound teasing, but couldn’t quite manage it.

I shook my head, not feeling smart enough to figure out how to untie my shoes.

“McCorkindale, the minister, visits at the hospital every evening. Beanie Winthrop is a volunteer Pink Lady. Raphael Roundtree’s oldest daughter is an admissions clerk, so Raphael carried the news to Body Time. I had to call your clients and tell them you couldn’t come in this week, so they knew. I arranged with the sister of the woman who does Carrie’s office for the Winthrops and the Althauses to be covered this week, and she’s best friends with Carla’s little sister.”

“You did?” I was so startled by all this that I was caught off balance. “I won’t go to work this week? But Carrie said I would be okay tomorrow,” I said. I could feel the blood rush into my face. “I could-”

“No,” Jack said flatly.

There was a long silence.

“What?” My ringers began to roll into fists.

“No.” Jack’s face was quite expressionless. “You are not. And before you get that look on your face, listen to me. What Carrie actually said was, you would be feeling fine tomorrow if you took it easy. That means no work. That means you really do stay home and take it easy. Now,” and he held up a warning hand, “I know you’re going to get into the ‘I have to earn my living’ speech, and I know you’re going to get mad.”

He was quite right about that.

“But, I am telling you, you are finally going to take the time you need to recover from something, and I am going to make sure you do it.”

“Who are you to tell me anything?” I was starting off low, but I could feel the pressure building.

“Lily, I am… your… husband.” With the emphatic spacing of someone who wants to be clearly understood.

And all at once, like the tidal wave that precedes a hurricane, understanding washed over me. As though it would hold me in the room, my fingers clenched the bedspread as I stared without focus, the stunning facts washed off my anger. I had lost our baby. This man was my husband. I gasped air in desperately, fearing I would choke.

Jack stepped closer to the bed, obviously worried.

I felt tears run down my cheeks. I couldn’t seem to let go of the bedspread to get a Kleenex.

“Lily?”

Wave after wave of complete comprehension swept over me, and it felt as though no sooner did I rise to my feet in the surf than another surge swamped me. I was weeping for the second time in two days. I hated it. Jack handed me tissue after tissue, and when the worst had passed, he stayed there, not moving, clasping me against his warmth.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying hard not to care that I sounded quavery and weak. “Jack, I’m sorry.” I felt guilty that I hadn’t been able to carry his child, guilty I hadn’t managed better than Karen Kingsland, though there was no comparison between us. “This is so stupid,” I managed to say, and was grateful when he didn’t agree.

I didn’t know I’d gone to sleep until I woke up. Jack had had a bad night, too, and I could tell from his breathing that he was dozing behind me. I thought over what he’d said to me. I made myself admit that he’d made sense. I made myself admit that before, when I’d gone back to work early after an injury, I’d done myself harm.

Even though I’d known I loved Jack for months, I was shocked by the power he had in my life. I hadn’t thought this through; I guess you can’t, you love someone without counting the change. I began to wonder what influence I exerted over Jack. He didn’t smoke or drink; though he’d formerly done both to great excess. He’d hardly had time to think about another woman, and I knew ahead of time how I would handle that: it would be very bad.

I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted Jack to do, or not do, differently. So… Jack was perfect? No, that wasn’t really how I felt. I knew Jack was imperfect. He was impatient, which meant he didn’t always take time to plan things out. He relied too much on intuition. He had a hard time handling his pride.

I rolled over to face him. I looked at his eyelids, at the relaxed face with its thin nose and slightly puckered scar. Jack had been divorced twice, and he’d had the disastrous affair with Karen Kingsland, a cop’s wife. Karen had been in her grave for five years now. For the first time, I wondered what the other wives had looked like, where they were now. For the first time, I was admitting to myself that I was one of those wives. One result of keeping our marriage secret was that I hadn’t had to consider myself really Jack’s wife, hadn’t had to acknowledge the whole load of baggage and implication that was carried in the word wife.

Well, we could make of it what we would.

Sooner or later, I had to tell my parents.

I could picture them doing cartwheels in the streets, but I could also imagine them sobering up when they thought of the fact that Jack had been married twice before. And they’d have to consider Jack’s notorious affair with Karen, whose husband had ended up shooting Karen dead in front of half the Memphis Police Department-and on television.

Well, all those women-including Karen, who’d been using Jack to make her husband pay attention-were idiots. Anyone who let Jack go was, by definition, a fool.

I didn’t often think of cosmic systems, but in this instance I had to conclude that these other women had only parted with Jack so I could have him.

The doorbell rang, and when Jack didn’t twitch, I eased off the bed and padded barefoot down the hall through the little living room, to answer the front door.

Carol Althaus and Heather were wearing matching short sets, pink-and-purple plaid cotton camp shirts tucked into pink shorts. Carol was holding Heather’s hand, and in her other hand she had a Hallmark gift bag. Carol looked far uneasier than her daughter.

“Oh, I’m afraid we woke you up!” she said, eyeing my rumpled hair.

“I was awake. Come in.” I stood to one side, and Heather was across the threshold in a flash, tugging at Carol to follow. Once the two were seated, Heather said socially, “This is such a nice little house, Miss Lily.”

“Thank you.” I wasn’t often called upon to show company manners. “Can I get either of you a glass of ice water or some cranberry juice?”

“Thanks, no, we can only stay a minute. We don’t want to wear you out.”

“Are you feeling better?” I asked Carol.

“Oh, yes! You know how it is. Once the morning is past, I’m fine.” Then she realized I certainly did not know how it was, and she closed her eyes in mortification. She made a little waving motion with her hand, as if she were erasing what she’d said. Heather was looking at her mother like she’d grown horns.

“If I’m not up to par by next Monday, I believe Jack called you to say he’d arranged for someone else to help you out?” Social talk was definitely uphill work for me.

“You’re gonna come back, though, aren’t you, Miss Lily?” Heather’s narrow face was tense as she leaned toward me.

“I plan on it.”

Her shoulders collapsed with the weight of her relief. “We brought you a present,” she said, and slid off the loveseat to carry the bag over to me. She gave it to me ceremoniously, her face serious.

Jack came from the hall to sit on the arm of my chair. He introduced himself while Carol eyed him much as she would have a pet tiger. Heather seemed less anxious and more interested.

There was a card in the bag, one with a teddy bear on the front. The bear’s arms were spread wide and the legend inside read, “Big Hug.” Okay.

The gift had been picked out by Heather, I knew as soon as I extricated it form the nest of yellow tissue. It was a figurine of a harassed-looking blonde with a dustcloth in one hand and a broom in the other.

“That’s you,” Heather explained. “Do you like it?” She edged very close while she waited for me to speak.

“That’s just the way you stand at the end of the day,” Jack said, over my shoulder. I could tell he was smiling from the sound of his voice. I reexamined the slumped posture of the figurine and suppressed a snort. “I like it very much,” I told Heather. I glanced at Carol to include her in my thanks. “I’m going to put it on these shelves over here, so my company can see it.”

Jack was off the chair arm and carrying the figurine very carefully over to my small bookcase. He positioned it dead center on top, looked to me for my approval.

“Thanks,” I said. “Heather, does that look okay?”

“I want a hug,” Heather said.

I tried to shove my surprise aside quickly. I scooted forward in the chair and opened my arms. It was like holding a bird. A sharp grief lanced through me, and I had to restrain myself from holding the child tightly to me. I sighed as silently as I could, patted Heather on the shoulder, and gently let her go.

Jack drove in to Little Rock on Monday morning, leaving me with a long list of restrictions: only a light amount of exercise, only a little driving, no cleaning.

After I ate a slow breakfast, I realized I felt much better-physically, anyway. It was still only seven fifteen, and I was already at loose ends. So I went to Body Time and got on the treadmill for a while, and did a little upper body work. Marshall Sedaka, the owner of the gym, came out of his office to talk to me, looking more muscled up than ever. I thanked him for giving me the Jackie Chan movie. After he’d commiserated with me awkwardly over the miscarriage, he told me about the woman he was dating now. I nodded and said, “Oh, really?” at the right intervals, wondering if he’d ever look at Janet Shook, who’d been doing her best to attract him for years.

Tamsin and Cliff were being shown the ropes by one of the young men who seemed to stream through Body Time on a regular basis. They liked working out, Marshall had told me one day when he was feeling discouraged, so they thought they’d like working at Body Time. The fact was, as I’d found myself from my recent experience at the gym in Little Rock, that working for low pay in a gym is just the same as working for low pay at any other job. This particular young man was one I vaguely recognized as being a friend of Amber Jean Winthrop. In fact, I was almost certain he was one of the crowd by the Winthrops’ pool, the day Howell Three had gotten so upset.

Tamsin was looking lumpy and lost in her Wal-Mart workout ensemble of cotton shorts and black sports bra, topped with a huge T-shirt that must have been borrowed from her husband. Cliff was not faring any better, projecting discomfort and uncertainty though he was wearing an old pair of sweatpants that he must have saved from college and an equally ancient T that was full of holes.

“What a role reversal,” Tamsin said, with a wan smile. “Here we are in your place of power, instead of mine.”

She hadn’t taken the words right out of my mouth, since I never would have said that out loud, but she’d taken the thoughts right out of my head. And it was interesting that she thought of the health center as her “place of power.” The assault that had taken place in her own office must have shaken her to her mental and emotional foundations. Considering that, she’d made a great recovery.

“You’re gonna start coming in every morning?”

“Well, we’re going to try. Cliff and I both have been eating too much; we’ve just been so nervous. That’s what I do when I’m nervous, I head for the doughnuts. Jeez, do you have any body fat at all?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling awkward.

“I’m glad you feel well enough to come in this morning,” Tamsin said, her dark eyes uncomfortably sympathetic.

“Thanks for your visit while I was in the hospital,” I said dutifully. “I enjoyed the flowers.”

“When I lost my baby…” she began, to my discomfort. But just at that moment, Cliff gestured to her to rejoin him, since the young man was explaining yet another piece of equipment.

I left before Tamsin could speak to me again, on purpose. At the moment, I didn’t want to assume anyone else’s problems, since my own were bearing down on me.

But later that day, I would’ve been glad to have listened to Tamsin talk her heart out. Correction. Maybe not glad, but I would have tolerated it with a much better grace. Hanging around doing nothing was not a state of affairs I was used to. I cleaned my kitchen cabinets, slowly and carefully, only slightly violating Jack’s dictum. I was in a silent house, since Jack had assumed my stakeout on Beth Crider. He called home once on his cell phone to find out how I was feeling and to tell me he was having no more luck catching her out than I’d had.

That night, when he was drying the dishes while I washed, Jack expressed disgust that we hadn’t closed the books on Beth Crider.

“Maybe she’s really hurt,” I said, without conviction.

“Huh.” Jack didn’t seem troubled by doubt about that. “In the years I’ve been a private detective, I’ve investigated one case where the guy was really hurt as badly as he claimed. One. And every now and then, I still drive by his house to check, because I can’t quite believe it.”

“The level of cynicism here is pretty deep.”

“Absolutely. Did you have any time to check Beth’s credit rating today?”

“Sure did,” I said. Jack had a computer program that seemed able to call up anything about an individual’s financial history. To me, it seemed frightening that he didn’t have to produce any kind of ID, or explain his purpose, in buying this program. Joe Doe could buy one as easily as law enforcement personnel. “If I did everything right, nothing seems to have changed on her credit history.”

“Then she’s smarter than most of them, but we’ll nail her,” he said, confidence running strong in his voice. “Next week, you can take over surveillance, if you feel well enough. I should spend some time in the office, returning phone calls.”

I managed to keep my face still, but I had to acknowledge to myself that I was feeling gloomy. Jack would be spending some nights in Little Rock next week. He had rented a room in his friend Roy Costimiglia’s house, the room vacated by Roy’s son when he’d gotten married the year b t,;e. Jack could come and go as he pleased and not bother with renting an apartment, so the arrangement suited him perfectly. I’d known when Jack moved in with me that he would have to stay in Little Rock some of the time. I just hadn’t counted on missing him.

“Sure,” I said. “Listen, did you find out anything else about Saralynn’s murder?” Jack and Claude had shared a beer the night before while Carrie and I talked. Claude had kind of taken to Jack, since there were few people in town he could talk to freely. Jack, an outsider experienced in law enforcement and married to a woman who didn’t gossip, was heaven-sent to Claude.

“I don’t think they’re making any progress on the case,” Jack said, “though maybe I’m reading in between the lines. And the new detective-well, everyone except the new guy, McClanahan, has come to Claude to complain about her. Too Yankee, too black, too tough.”

“You’d think they’d want a fellow officer to be tough.”

“Not if she’s a woman, apparently. She ought to be able to back them up on the street, but then she ought to let them take the lead in everything else. And she ought not to want to be promoted as much as they do, because they deserve it more, having a wife and children to support.”

“Oh,” I said, enlightened.

“Right.”

“You think she’s crippled as a police officer, down here?”

Jack mulled this over, as he brushed back his hair and secured it at the nape of his neck.

“No, but she’ll have to try like seven times as hard as a guy, and probably twice as hard as a Southern white woman,” Jack said. “I’m glad I’m not in her shoes.”

That very day, who should drop by to see me but Detective Alicia Stokes. I opened the door, hoping I didn’t look as surprised as I felt. Instead of her career clothes, Stokes was looking good in walking shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, serious walking shoes instead of sandals at the end of her long legs.

“You feeling better?” Stokes asked, but not as if she actually cared.

“I’m fine,” I said with equal enthusiasm.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Okay.” I stood back and let her into the (by now) spotless little house. “Would you like a Coke?” Letting Jack do the grocery buying had had its consequences. He had gotten a bag of Cheetos, too.

“Sure.”

“What kind?”

She stared at me.

“You said Coke. That’s what I want.”

I didn’t bother explaining that I called all soft drinks “Coke,” like most Southerners. I just got her some. I didn’t often drink carbonated drinks, but I joined her in a glass. Once I’d gotten her settled in a chair, and had satisfied the dictates of hospitality, I asked Alicia Stokes what I could do for her.

“You can tell me what you think about Tamsin Lynd.”

“Why do you care what I think?”

“Because everyone in the damn town says you are the one to ask.”

I found that inexplicable. But it seemed to me that it would look like I was being falsely modest if I asked for her to tell me more about that, so I shrugged and told her I hardly knew Tamsin well.

“And she’s your counselor?”

“Yep.”

“Because you were raped.”

“Yes.”

“All right. What kind of job do you think she’s doing?”

“A pretty good one.”

“How do you figure that?”

I said carefully, “Those of us who weren’t talking at the beginning are talking now. I don’t know how she did it, and maybe she didn’t have a lot to do with it at all, but it’s a fact that we’re all dealing with what happened to us, in some way or another.” There, hadn’t I put that well?

“You think I’d fit in the group?”

“No.”

“Why not? Cause I’m Yankee? Cause I’m black?”

“Tamsin’s a Yankee. Firella is black.”

“Then why?”

“Because you haven’t been raped.”

“How do you know that?”

I shook my head. “You wouldn’t have to worry about fitting in with the counseling group if you had been raped.” And that mark just wasn’t on her, though I wasn’t about to say that. She’d ask me how I knew, and I just couldn’t tell her. The mark was not on her.

“So, in your opinion, how can I get close to this woman?”

“Why do you want to?”

“I need to watch her.”

I was getting a growing feeling of doom.

“It’s her,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s her. You took a leave of absence from the Cleveland force to watch her.”

“How did you know that?”

I shrugged.

“You better tell me now.”

“Jack made a few phone calls.” I didn’t want her to think I’d had a look at her personnel records or learned something out of school from Claude.

She sat back in her chair, tall and black and tense and angry.

“I know about you, too.”

“Most people do.”

She didn’t like that. I didn’t like her. I felt a certain grudging admiration for someone who would pursue a case with such relentless determination. At the same time, it seemed kind of nuts. Like the man who’d pursued Jean Valjean… what was his name? Inspector… Javert, that was it.

“What about this has you so hooked?” I asked, in honest puzzlement.

“I think she’s doing it herself,” Alicia Stokes said. She sat forward, her long hands capping her knees, her Coke forgotten on the table beside her. “I think she’s fooling everyone, and I can’t let her get away with it. The man-hours we wasted in Cleveland… enough to work four extra cases, cases where people really needed us. As opposed to trying to protect one neurotic woman who’s actually persecuting herself. She had everyone else fooled. Everyone.”

I gave Stokes a long hard look. “You’re wrong,” I said.

“On what basis?”

“She’s done good. She can’t be that crazy. We would know.”

“Oh yeah? You a licensed shrink? You know there have been cases like this before. They’re almost all women. All the men, they feel sorry for the poor persecuted woman. They feel frustrated because they can’t protect her from the evil demon who’s doing this to her. Then it turns out she’s doing it all herself!”

Alicia Stokes certainly believed what she was saying. I looked down at my hands, considering. I was trying to reconfigure my world, trying to see Tamsin as Stokes saw her. Tamsin, with her medical transcriptionist husband and her little old house. Tamsin, with her nice conservative clothes and her plump belly, her good mind, her compassionate nature. Nothing I got from Tamsin added up to the kind of emotional horror that could plan and execute such clever schemes against herself.

But I could be wrong. As the detective had pointed out, I was no therapist.

What if Stokes was right? The consequences-to me, to the whole group-would be devastating. We had all placed our trust in each other and begun to build on that; but the basis of this trust was the foundation laid by Tamsin Lynd.

I looked up to find the detective leaning forward, waiting patiently for me to finish my thoughts.

“Could be, couldn’t it?”

“I guess,” I said, my voice reluctant and unhappy. “I guess you realize that your own behavior is pretty damn fishy.”

Stokes was startled, and almost lost her temper. For a long, tense moment, I could see the war in her face. Then she pinched her lips together, breathed in and out, and collected herself. “I know that,” she said.

“It’s not my business,” I said slowly, surprising myself by telling her what I was thinking, “but what are you going to do when this is over? Sooner or later we will know the truth. The Cleveland Police Department may not take you back. Claude will be very angry when he finds he hired you under false pretenses. How did you get past his checking your references?”

“My superior owed me the biggest favor in the world,” Alicia Stokes said. She put the palms of her big hands together, bumped her chin with the tips of her fingers. I’d seen her make the gesture before, and it seemed to indicate that she was feeling expansive. “So I knew when Claude called him, he’d get a good recommendation from Terry. I passed the physical and psychological tests, no problem.” She smirked. “The others were glad I was going. They wouldn’t say anything-or I might stay.”

I tried not to let my surprise show on my face. Quite a change of heart, here: Stokes was sharing more than I wanted her to. But then I thought, Whom else could she talk to? And she must want to talk, want it desperately.

Detective Stokes needed a good therapy group.

Something twittered in the room. I looked around, startled.

“It’s my phone,” Stokes said. She pulled it from a small pouch clipped to her belt. “Yes?” she said into the unfolded phone, which looked very small in her hand.

Her face became hard as she listened, and the fire burned hotter in her eyes. “I’ll be there,” she said abruptly. The phone went back into the depths of her purse. “Take me to Tamsin Lynd’s house,” she said.

So she’d walked to my place. As I grabbed my keys, I looked back at the detective. Oddly, Stokes looked almost happy-or at least, less angry.

“Is Tamsin all right?” I asked, venturing onto shaky ground.

“Oh, yes, little Miss Counselor is just fine. It’s her husband, Cliff, who’s hurting.” Stokes was positively grinning.

I could find out what had happened without leaving my car, as it turned out. Cliff was on the lawn bleeding, and the ambulance attendants were bent over him, when we arrived within three minutes of the call.

“Stay here,” Alicia ordered, so I sat in the car and watched. I think her goal had been to keep me out of the crime scene, or the situation, whatever it was. If she’d been thinking straight, instead of being so intent on the scene, she would’ve sent me home. What did she need me for, now that I’d provided transportation?

It wasn’t too hard to read the evidence. Cliff’s leg was gashed and bleeding, as they say, profusely. In fact, the medics had cut away his pants leg. I could see that one of the steps going up to the side door of the house, the door nearest the garage, was missing its top. Splintered wood painted the same color as the other step was lying on the ground.

Well, this could have been an accident. Hefty man meets weak board. Cliff’s leg could have gone through the step, scraping his shin in the process. However, that wouldn’t really fit the facts. The leg was gashed, not scraped; I could see that much, more clearly than I really wanted to. And surely, for that kind of ordinary accident, one wouldn’t call an ambulance.

Someone tapped on my window, making me almost jump out of my skin. It was the new policeman, Officer… there was his nametag, McClanahan. I lowered the window and waited.

“Ma’am? You need to move on,” he said apologetically. He laid his hand on the door. He was wearing a heavy gold ring, and he tapped it against the car door as he stared off at the paramedics’ activities.

I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. He wasn’t tall, or fat, or pumped, or handsome. In fact, he was a plain pale man with freckles and red hair, a narrow mouth, and light green eyes that were much the color of a Coke bottle. But there was intelligence there, and assurance, too, and then there was the odd coincidence of his always being at hand whenever I was with Detective Stokes.

“Then you will have to tell Detective Stokes that you told me to go home, since she told me to stay right here,” I said.

We took each other’s measure.

“Oh, really,” he said.

“Really.”

“Lily Bard, isn’t it?”

“You know who I am?” People never looked at me in the same way once they knew. There was always some added element there: pity, or horror, or a kind of prurient wonder- sometimes even disgust. Curiosity, too. McClanahan was one of the curious ones.

“Yes. Why did the detective ask you to wait here?”

“I have no idea.” I suspected she’d just plain forgotten she didn’t need me any more, but I held the knowledge to myself.

He turned away.

“Where are you from?”

It was his turn to jump. “I haven’t lived here long,” he said noncommittally. His bottle green eyes were steady and calm.

“You’re not…” But I had to stop. To say, “You’re not an ordinary cop,” would be unbearably patronizing, but it was true that Officer McClanahan was out of the general run of small town cop. He wasn’t from around here; he wasn’t from below the Mason-Dixon Line at all, or I’d lost my ear completely. Granted, the accents I heard every day were far more watered down than the ones I’d heard in my youth; a mobile population and television were taking care of that.

“Yes, ma’am?” He waited, looking faintly amused.

“I’ll leave,” I said, and started the car. I had lost my taste for sparring with this man. “If Detective Stokes needs me to come back, I’ll be at home.”

“Not working today?”

“No.”

“No cleaning jobs?”

“No.”

“Been ill?” He seemed curious, mildly amused.

“I lost a baby,” I said. I knew I was trying to erase “Lily Bard, the victim” from his mental pigeonhole, but replacing that version of me with “Lily Bard, grieving Madonna” was not much better. If I’d been fully back to myself, I would’ve kept my mouth shut.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. His words were stiff, but his tone was sincere enough to appease me.

“Good-bye,” I said, and I pulled away. I went to Shakespeare’s Cinema Video Rental Palace, picked out three old movies, and drove home to watch them all.

Maybe I would take up crocheting.