The Yarn Spinner
2010
Late November
Cathy and the Cousinhood
The day I met Lucy Parmenter I gave her worse odds for surviving than I’d given myself a few years earlier when I arrived in the Crossroads Cove, determined to keep the world from ever seeing what a burning car had done to the most beautiful actress in the world. At least I’d had a family connection here in the remote Appalachians of North Carolina—cousin Delta—and a handsome, mysterious man who’d already saved me from myself once, long-distance, and was waiting to save me again the moment I began hiding in my grandmother’s abandoned house up on Wild Woman Ridge.
Tom Mitternich’s love, combined with Delta’s mother-hen supervision, made all the difference in pulling me back to the land of the living.
But could we fix Lucy? She, just three months past a brutal rape, had been sent here from the other side of the state by her therapists. She’d been an art teacher; everyone agreed she was a cheerful blond angel, kind and friendly, a sweetheart adored by the kids. She’d been perfect until two maintenance men from her apartment complex, both meth addicts, were waiting for her in her bedroom when she came home one night. She’d tried to help them, offered them rides to church—to outreach programs, been kind to them. They decided she wanted more than friendship. Her heartbroken father, a prominent Methodist minister, had died of a massive heart attack as she lay in a Charlotte hospital.
Lucy Parmenter, now alone in the world and shattered, was only twenty-six. A lost soul.
She didn’t know it yet, but when a lost soul arrived in the Cove, just as I had, and Tom, and so many others, it was impossible to stay lost unless you could avoid all of the following: Delta, her famously spellbinding biscuits, people who told Delta where to find you, people who brought you Delta’s biscuits, people who came looking for you in the spirit of Delta and Delta’s biscuits, and anyone remotely related to Delta, which meant you, too.
Because, sooner or later, Delta’s blue-green Appalachian eyes would zoom in on you and find a formerly invisible twig on the Crossroads ever-expanding family tree, which confirmed that you are her cousin. Once, twice, or twenty-times removed, whether through some already known branch of the Scots-Irish-Cherokee pioneer heritage that rooted her to the Cove or through various off-shoots, Delta would adamantly insist you are kin. And that was that.
From then on, you were under the protection of the Cousinhood of the Worldwide Biscuit.
As a member in good standing, I had a duty to bring biscuits and hope to Cousin Lucy.
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