Favorite knitting bag in hand, Penelope Perlmutter headed out the door. Her husband, Bill stopped her on the way for a lingering, hurry-home kind of a kiss.
“Remember, I have two classes tonight,” she reminded him. “Beginners at 5:30 and Advanced Beginners at 7:30.”
“I know, I know,” Bill said. “You won’t be home until after 9:00 and supper’s in the oven. I’m supposed to take it out at 6:30.” He leaned in and stole another kiss. “Be careful, Pen.”
He admonished her to be careful every week, with that same crease between his eyebrows. The yarn shop was, after all, right across the street from the county jail.

“Don’t worry,” she assured him, as she did every week. “I have knitting needles and I know how to use them!”

They both laughed at her joke as she left, a gray-haired, fairly dumpy knitting teacher with a hand-knitted 100% merino shawl draped artfully around her neck. There was far more truth to their banter than Bill realized. Penelope hoped he would never realize exactly how much. He might try to put his foot down again, as he had when she broached the idea of teaching knitting at Llama and Lamb. They didn’t need the money, he’d pointed out, and what about his supper?

She’d first allayed his fears about supper, promising to cook before she left each Tuesday evening. Penelope had found it a bit harder to convince Bill that she needed to teach knitting at the shop because now that the kids were grown, cooking, cleaning, and keeping him in clean socks was not all she wanted to do with her life. And she did need the money. Bill regularly complained about how much she spent on yarn at the shop, when there were aisles chock full of much cheaper yarn at the craft store at the mall.

Penelope had prevailed in the end, but in light of his misgivings, it would never do for Bill to find out everything she did at the shop, nor everything she knew how to do with knitting needles.