Free Jumper by Alexes Razevich Page A

sigh when she found it sitting plum in the middle of her cloth measuring tape. She picked it up to put back where it belonged, but it was odd. Useful thimbles were all basically the same with dimpled tops and bodies, the variations coming half to a third of the way down where some might be decorative. Maddie remembered hers as plain, was sure it was plain. She saw now that it was etched with carousel animals circling the bottom third: a horse, a tiger, a swan, and a fox, delicately and perfectly drawn, a post through the center of each.
     
    *
     
    The jumper hadn’t looked that dirty in the store but the water she’d soaked it in had turned an ugly brown color. Maddie decided rubber gloves were in order, even though it was likely only dust and dirt blowing around the store that was coming off now, the water looking darker and nastier than it was for being concentrated in the minute bathroom sink of her tiny one-bedroom apartment. When the final rinse was done and she felt certain all the Downey was rinsed away, she laid the jumper on the mesh-topped drying rack. No hangers for this wet beauty. No stretching on the arms or the lovely double seed stitch pattern.
    She looked closer, frowned, and shook her head. She’d done a good strong whipstitch to tie up the loose end at the hem but it’d come undone. Nothing she could do about it until the sweater dried.
    In her bedroom, Maddie put on a freshly ironed white shirt and black slacks. If she couldn’t wear her beautiful blue jumper until tomorrow, then today she’d go for stark contrast. She slipped on black leather flats, ran a brush through her hair, and headed to work.
    The news was on the radio when she walked into Clemenso’s Coffee Bar.
    “Nico doesn’t like it when you play the news in here. He wants that Pandora station.”
    Her co-worker, Brendon, looked up from his phone and pointedly swung his gaze around the empty store. Maddie rolled her eyes. She had the 2pm to 10pm shift today. The place was always dead in the late afternoon. Business would pick up when the kids got out from school, and get really busy around seven when the laptoppers started coming in.
    “I like news,” Brendon said, running one hand over his sparse beard. “It’s good to know what’s going on in the world.”
    “It’s depressing, usually,” she said. “Customers don’t come here to get depressed.” She drew herself up and listened. “What is this—the Onion station? Fake weird news?”
    “NPR,” Brendon muttered, cocked his head and listened. His eyes grew wide and he shrugged. A small town in Nebraska had disappeared. Not fallen into a sinkhole. Not been knocked down in an earthquake. It and all fifty-three people in it had simply vanished.
    Maddie reached over and tapped a different channel. Soft jazz filtered from the small black speakers placed discreetly around the store. She wasn’t a big fan of soft jazz either, but at least they wouldn’t get in trouble now if Nico decided to make one of his surprise visits.
     
    *
     
    She’d made good tips that night and was in a splendid mood when she got home.
    “Right,” she said to the now dry sweater in the bathroom, “let’s get you fixed up proper.”
    She stood back and glared at the garment. “What’s this?” More yarn had unraveled, maybe eight inches, and hung limply over the side of the drying rack.
    Maddie sighed, gathered up the sweater and carried it into her small living room, stopping on the way to grab her sewing box. She sat on the threadbare couch her parents had given her when they’d bought a new one for themselves, the same couch she’d sat on all her life, and switched on the standing lamp next to it. The lamp had a flexible neck. She pulled on the metal shade and brought the bulb down low, to give her good light to work by. She got out a largish tapestry needle, threaded the yarn through, and began weaving the errant yarn back into the hem—slowly, carefully.
    When she was done, the area