Read Online Heart in Hand: Stitches in Time Series #3 by Barbara Cameron - Free Book Online Page A

smile as she rolled the yarn back on the ball. “There, now just go back to what you were doing but slower and with . . . a little more attention.”
    “I got distracted,” he said in a low voice.
    She blinked at him, and then understanding dawned as he continued to stare at her. Feeling flustered, she got to her feet. “I need to check on the other students.”
    Betsy, a stay-at-home mother with two children, had knitted twice as much as Anna expected. “You’ve made great progress!” Anna told her.
    “I’ve been taking some time to myself lately,” Betsy told her, grinning up at her as she knit. “Both my boys are in school all day now, and I finally have a little time to do something I enjoy.”
    “I remember those days,” Thelma said. A whirlwind in her seventies, she was newly retired from working at the phone company. “I was always so busy taking care of the kids and the husband—he was like a fourth kid himself—and the house. I never had the chance to have a hobby. Now, the hubby says I’m busier with all my hobbies than when I worked. I come here to knit, to quilt. There’s that Indian cooking class I take at the senior center.”
    “You’re making me tired thinking about all you do,” Anna said with a laugh.
    “And you, young fella, you came here with your daughter. Are you a single parent?”
    Oh no , thought Anna. Here come the questions, the prying . She hadn’t thought Thelma was that kind of woman. She cast a glance at Gideon, and he shook his head and shrugged, as if indicating that everything was okay.
    “Sarah Rose and I like to do things together,” he said, taking a moment to study his work. “I didn’t want the two of us to always be doing things like toss a baseball.”
    “It’s nice when fathers do things with their kids,” Thelma told him, nodding. “And not just toss a baseball.”
    “ Daedi says he thinks we kids should all learn how to do all kinds of things.”
    “He’s a smart daedi .” Thelma smiled.
    Anna saw how Thelma’s eyes grew sad.
    “How does this look, Anna?” Ella wanted to know.
    A shy, quiet wisp of a woman, Ella was taking the class more to learn how to relax, she’d told Anna, than to create things from it. She ate lunch at her desk and took the time later in the afternoon once a week to take the class.
    Anna was determined that she’d have some fun, not just learn to relax.
    Although this was a great solution she’d come up with since classes weren’t offered in the evening at Stitches in Time, it had probably made her feel even more stressed. So far, Ella was beginning to relax because she said she couldn’t multitask here in the shop when she was knitting. Anna had to admit that she needed this multitasking explained. How much calmer to do one thing at a time—and do it well.
    Sure, there were a few times when people needed to do two things at once. If you had to care for your new baby at the sametime as start supper, that was when you quickly put together a casserole or a roast with vegetables or a big pot of soup and it cooked at the same time.
    This sense of having to always do two things at once was one of the things that seemed to stress the Englisch the most and made them envy the Amish. When they walked into the shop, they reacted with yearning, wanting to learn how to quilt or knit or sew or pick up their UFOs—unfinished fabric objects—like a quilt they’d started and let sit gathering dust.
    The class members were welcome to get up and visit the restroom or fix something to drink or snack on a cookie any time that they liked. However, Anna had found that the students liked stopping for a break together a few minutes and chatting before turning back to their projects.
    She was pouring herself a cup of tea when Thelma sidled up to her and asked, “So, this Gideon is a widower, eh?”
    Surprised, Anna blinked and then nodded.
    “So maybe the two of you are interested in each other?”
    Such things were usually very