fic: BSG: the curse of the cabled sweater (Bill/Laura, PG-13)
Title: the curse of the cabled sweater
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Pairing: Bill/Laura, Carolanne/OC
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: AU, baby! Spoilers through Daybreak II, just to be safe. This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to RDM, David Eick, Sci-Fi, NBC Universal and their various subsidiaries.
A/N This is set in the Adama Brothers 'verse, which is all indexed here and which is mostly a Kara/Lee story set in present-day America. This is the Bill/Laura version, specifically, the How They Got Together version. It is a gift for miabicicletta, who swears she loves backstory, and I really hope she wasn't kidding, 'cause I feel like it got away from me a little bit with this one.
Warnings: The background plot here has characters dealing with societal homophobia. (Yes, sometimes I write stories to address Issues I Have With Society. It happens.)
Eternal thanks to leiascully for looking this over.
Home of Doyle Franks, present day
"What are you working on, Eileen?" Bill inquires, peering over his knitting needles at the woman next to him.
"It's that Baby Surprise jacket you showed me," Eileen replies. She holds up her knitting for Bill to inspect. "It was so darling, I just had to try it!"
"Eileen, do you have something to share with the group?" Bill jokes, and Eileen, the seventy-four year old grandmother of five, chuckles and shakes her head.
"My daughter's best friend is having a baby," she explains.
"Louis," says Doyle, rummaging for a skein of yarn, "you're not knitting, are you stuck?"
The newest addition to the group smiles at her. "Oh, well, I had finished those socks you showed me, the two-at-a-time socks? And I thought I might knit a sweater," Louis says thoughtfully. "I found a few patterns on Ravelry, and there's this pattern from Brooklyn Tweed--"
"Oh, Jared," Bill says knowingly, and they all sigh. "He does good work."
Louis nods. "I thought I'd make it for Felix to-"
He is abruptly drowned out by the shouts of most of the knitting circle, all of them clamoring, "NO!" in unison.
"What?" Louis frowns at them, confused.
"The curse, Louis," Doyle says, and several of the other members of the circle nod somberly. "The sweater curse."
"Okay, I know I'm new," Louis says, shaking his head, "but I really didn't think there was a hazing ritual for knitting circles."
"We're not hazing you, son," Eileen explains. "You can't make sweaters for significant others unless you're married. The relationship will be over before you even finish."
Bill sets his knitting down and takes a long sip of wine. "There's no such thing as the curse," he says, reaching for the wine bottle. "I've made Laura eight sweaters, and we've never had any problems."
"There's always one non-believer," Eileen huffs. She adjusts her stitch counter irritably. "Anyway, you're married."
"I made her sweaters before we were married and it all worked out just fine," Bill says.
"Well, you're lucky," Doyle says. "Two boyfriends I had to lose to the curse before I admitted it might be real."
"You know, it might make a good premise for a mystery," Bill tells her. "The curse of the cabled sweater. That's not a bad title for a short story."
Eileen just shakes her head.
Much later, Bill goes home and sits down at his desk in the study, scrawling, "The Curse of the Cabled Sweater," across the top of a notebook page. He has a few false starts, and after a bit he gives up, thinking of the sweater curse and the first sweater he ever gave Laura, many, many years ago. It still feels like yesterday.
+ + + +
Chicago, 1971
The first time Bill made Laura a sweater, it was an accident.
It was a Friday in late November and the streets of Chicago were buried beneath layers of ice and snow from a recent storm. The University had been forced to cancel classes and the boys' elementary school had also closed, which was just as well-- Bill would never have been able to pilot his aging station wagon through three feet of snow on unplowed streets to get them there, and with another few inches predicted by early evening, it would have been a small nightmare trying to bring them home.
Carolanne had called early that morning. They'd had a short yet civil conversation about the weather before Bill handed the phone off to Sam and left the room, leaving his ex-wife to explain to their children that she was sorry, but with all the snow she and Jo wouldn't be able to take them to the zoo this weekend. Bill elected not to tell them that it was just as well that the snow had come, since it meant she'd have an excuse to skip out on them, even though she probably wouldn't have. The hard truth that Bill had not found easy to accept was that Carolanne, for all her faults, was not a bad parent, nor was she a bad spouse: she just wasn't either of those things to him. It hurt to admit that he was bad for her. It hurt, too, that Jo wasn't. She had shacked up with Josephine a mere two months after the divorce was final. Bill hadn't even known, he'd just assumed that when the boys talked about "Jo" it was their mother's new boyfriend. He'd felt pretty damn stupid when Jo turned out to be a leggy brunette lady who taught art classes at a local high school and seemed to live exclusively in long flowing skirts and hippie flower-child blouses.
"So, you're roommates," he had asked Carolanne, trying to be casual.
"In a manner of speaking," she had replied, arms crossed over her chest, daring him to be the kind of jackass he'd been for most of their marriage.
"Is that why. . .," he had tried to say, leaving the rest of his sentence unspoken, unable to form the words.
"Don't kid yourself," she had said. "That's not the reason. I like men, too, Bill, and sometimes I even like you, but we just weren't going to work out, and I couldn't put the kids through that anymore."
"Right," he said gruffly.
"I love Jo. If you have a problem with that, I can tell you exactly what to do with it."
He did try and tell himself that his problem was just that Carolanne had moved on so quickly, not the person with whom she had chosen to do that. He didn't have to try very hard. Jo was guilelessly, obliviously cheerful, and try as he might to be upset at the new love of his ex-wife's life, he couldn't find a bad thing to say about her. She always invited him in when he came to pick up the boys, offered him whatever strange confection she'd invented that week, asked him about his work at the university and chatted merrily along about the mystery novels she was reading. He opened his mouth, once, to say something cutting and hurtful, but it was like trying to lift his foot to kick a puppy, and it just never got off the ground. So he acquiesced to Jo's persistent effusiveness, to her place in his boys' lives. If it was strange to Carolanne that Bill had a better relationship with her girlfriend than he did with her, then she never said and she never let on, she just smiled and helped the boys with their homework while Jo insisted on making Bill a cup of tea and asking him what he thought of Agatha Christie's detectives as opposed to Ngaio Marsh's or Conan Doyle's or Poe's.
So it was all very uncharitable of him to even contemplate telling the boys that their mother had to cancel for any reason that was not weather-related, but he had considered it anyway, right up until the moment when the words were about to leave his mouth.
"I'm sorry," he told them, looking down at three very disappointed faces. "The zoo will have to wait."
"How will the animals stay warm?" Lee asked, frowning up at his father, obviously concerned. "We give Bucket a blanket when it's cold, do they do that at the zoo?"
Bill glanced over at the corner where their aging basset hound, Bucket, was snoozing away in his basket. He had been a Christmas present to Bill from Carolanne, but it was the boys who had named him, and more particularly, Zak, who had been kind of a one-word pony that Christmas, as young as he was. He had pointed directly at the dog, clapped his hands in delight, and said, "Bucket!" The dog had wandered immediately over and slurped his face, and the name stuck. Though he never mentioned it to Carolanne, Bill always suspected that Zak had actually been trying to say one of his Uncle Saul's favorite phrases, but had fortuitously jumbled the words in his pre-pubescent confusion.
"I'm sure they take good care of them, Lee," he assured his middle son, who still looked unconvinced.
"But it would have to be a really big blanket," Lee said, spreading his arms out as wide as they could reach. "To fit over an elephant."
"They've got it covered, Lee, I'm sure of it," Bill said, and Sam laughed.
"Very punny," he said, looking up from the line of notes he had been drawing in the musical composition book that Jo had given him a few weeks before.
"Ha, ha, ha," Lee said, and stuck out his tongue at Sam. Zak followed suit, but Sam, good-natured as always, a trait he got from where, Bill doesn't know, just laughed again and shrugged off the teasing.
"Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad," Zak said, seized by a sudden burst of energy, "can we go make snowmen? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease?"
The other two joined in the refrain in short order, and soon he found himself suiting up for a walk in the bitter cold, triple-checking the boys' coats and hats and gloves to make sure they were bundled up as much as they could be before embarking on this adventure. It was probably irresponsible, but he told them that it would only be for half an hour, no more, no less, and he said it in his sternest voice, the one he usually reserved for his college students after they'd turned in one too many obviously half-assed term papers.
They made it downstairs in record time as the boys pulled Bill along in their hurry, but they had only been outside a few minutes when Sam tugged on Bill's sleeve and pointed towards the streetcorner. "That lady's having car trouble," he said. "Should we help?"
"Let's walk that way and ask," Bill suggested.
"But the snowmen," Zak said.
"The snow's not going anywhere," Bill told him.
While the boys entertained themselves by building a snowman on the sidewalk, Bill inspected the car of the lady Sam had spotted, who had turned out to be a beautiful redhead with bright, intelligent eyes and a sharp wit. He had never believed in love at first sight, but he was smitten, and he knew it.
"I was trying to get to the airport," she said, frustrated, one hand on her hip. "I suppose there's no chance of that now."
"Doesn't look like it," he replied, closing the hood of the car. "Tow truck's probably your best option. I know a guy, I can go give him a call, if you want. It's no trouble. It's time for the kids to be back inside, anyway."
"Thank you," she replied, nodding, her magnificent hair bouncing against her shoulders.
"You can't stay out here without a coat."
"I'm not taking your coat," she insisted, but he continued unbuttoning it all the same.
"I'm not giving you my coat," he said, tugging off the thick cabled sweater he'd just finished knitting the previous day. "Here. Keep it, I've got plenty."
"You're an idiot," she said, but she took the sweater from him anyway.
"Well, now I'm a cold idiot, but at least I didn't leave home without my sweater," he said, rebuttoning his coat. "Who does that, in this weather?"
"An idiot," she said, beaming at him. It was a very tired old cliche, but he swore his heart skipped a beat when she smiled at him like that.
"Guess I'm in good company, then," he said, grinning like a fool in spite of the cold. "I'm Bill," he said, remembering his name at long last. He held his hand out.
"Laura," she replied, shaking his hand, her voice as warm as the sweater he'd just given her. "This is a very nice sweater, Bill," she added. "Where did you get it?"
"I made it," he answered, and she smiled, impressed.
They went on their first date a week later. It would have been sooner, but the snow kept everyone inside for a few more days, and after that they both had to work. Laura, it turned out, was a principal at the same high school where Jo worked.
"I love her," she laughed, gesturing with a fork full of salad. "She's one of the only people I can talk to about politics."
"You're not voting for that Senator from Maine if he runs, are you?" he asked.
"Muskie? Why not? What, you don't like clean water?" Laura raised her water glass in a mock toast, and he chuckled.
"Yes, I do, but I don't like politics," Bill told her.
She propped her chin in one well-manicured hand. "What do you like?"
"You," he said, without hesitation.
Three dates later and he was damn near ready to propose, but he figured he should probably cool his jets until the boys got to know her. She came over for dinner. Sam, the world's most easygoing eight-year-old, liked her immediately, as, of course, did Zak. Lee was more skeptical, but by the end of the evening he was asking to read her a story from one of his many books, and Bill counted it a success.
"Your boys are darling," she said, just before she kissed him good night.
"They really loved you," he replied.
Carolanne, unfortunately, did not. She stormed into his office a day later, furious.
"How could you?" she demanded.
"How could I what?" Bill asked.
"Your new girlfriend," Carolanne said. Her words sounded like they had been squeezed through a vise. "How could you? I don't care if you hate me, Bill, but don't do this to Jo. What the hell has she ever done to you?"
Bill stared at her. "I'm not doing anything to Jo."
"You're dating the principal of her school? That's just a coincidence."
"I met her during the snowstorm," he explained. "I liked her hair. I gave her a sweater. I didn't know what she did for a living."
She crossed her arms over her chest. "You liked her hair."
"What, did you think this was some devious plot to-- I don't even know what it might have been, to tell the truth, Carolanne."
"If the school finds out about us, she could lose her job, you privileged asshole," Carolanne shouted. "God, think of someone who isn't you for once."
"Why the hell would you think I would-- wait," he said, shaking his head. "They can do that?"
Carolanne sighed. "Yes. Fantastic. Have I just given you an idea?"
"I don't hate you that much," he said. "I don't even know that I hate you at all."
"Oh," she said simply.
"She's better for you than I ever was," he admitted, surprised at how easy that was to say.
"Do you love this woman?" Carolanne asked.
"Yes," he replied automatically. "Look, Laura likes Jo, and she's not-- she's not like that. She wouldn't."
She stared at him for a minute, then she laughed. "You're gonna ask her to marry you, aren't you? You've got that look on your face. You used to look at me like that. The times, they are a-changing, huh?"
"They seem to be," Bill agreed. "You used to look at me like you look at Jo."
"I hope she says yes," Carolanne said. "I mean that. We're both happier this way."
"She took the sweater. I'm hoping my luck holds," he said, smiling.
"Sorry for yelling. It's not easy, sometimes."
Bill had told Laura the truth: he had never really cared for politics, and more than half the time he wouldn't even make it to the polls on election days, but after that, he made an effort.
When he finally did propose, nearly a year later, he tucked the ring into the pocket of a newly knitted cardigan.
"You don't think we're tempting fate? I heard there was a curse, about sweaters," she said, wrapping herself in the warmth of the red sweater he'd made for her. "And yes, by the way. It was always going to be yes."
+ + + +
a cabin in Oregon, present day
"The only real mystery here is why you stopped to help me, when you don't know anything about cars," Laura teases. She's reading over his shoulder again, not that he minds.
"I don't think that's much of a mystery at all," Bill replies, and she smiles at him. "The mystery is why you weren't wearing a coat."
"Serendipity," she smiles, and kisses his cheek before she leaves the room.
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Pairing: Bill/Laura, Carolanne/OC
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: AU, baby! Spoilers through Daybreak II, just to be safe. This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to RDM, David Eick, Sci-Fi, NBC Universal and their various subsidiaries.
A/N This is set in the Adama Brothers 'verse, which is all indexed here and which is mostly a Kara/Lee story set in present-day America. This is the Bill/Laura version, specifically, the How They Got Together version. It is a gift for miabicicletta, who swears she loves backstory, and I really hope she wasn't kidding, 'cause I feel like it got away from me a little bit with this one.
Warnings: The background plot here has characters dealing with societal homophobia. (Yes, sometimes I write stories to address Issues I Have With Society. It happens.)
Eternal thanks to leiascully for looking this over.
Home of Doyle Franks, present day
"What are you working on, Eileen?" Bill inquires, peering over his knitting needles at the woman next to him.
"It's that Baby Surprise jacket you showed me," Eileen replies. She holds up her knitting for Bill to inspect. "It was so darling, I just had to try it!"
"Eileen, do you have something to share with the group?" Bill jokes, and Eileen, the seventy-four year old grandmother of five, chuckles and shakes her head.
"My daughter's best friend is having a baby," she explains.
"Louis," says Doyle, rummaging for a skein of yarn, "you're not knitting, are you stuck?"
The newest addition to the group smiles at her. "Oh, well, I had finished those socks you showed me, the two-at-a-time socks? And I thought I might knit a sweater," Louis says thoughtfully. "I found a few patterns on Ravelry, and there's this pattern from Brooklyn Tweed--"
"Oh, Jared," Bill says knowingly, and they all sigh. "He does good work."
Louis nods. "I thought I'd make it for Felix to-"
He is abruptly drowned out by the shouts of most of the knitting circle, all of them clamoring, "NO!" in unison.
"What?" Louis frowns at them, confused.
"The curse, Louis," Doyle says, and several of the other members of the circle nod somberly. "The sweater curse."
"Okay, I know I'm new," Louis says, shaking his head, "but I really didn't think there was a hazing ritual for knitting circles."
"We're not hazing you, son," Eileen explains. "You can't make sweaters for significant others unless you're married. The relationship will be over before you even finish."
Bill sets his knitting down and takes a long sip of wine. "There's no such thing as the curse," he says, reaching for the wine bottle. "I've made Laura eight sweaters, and we've never had any problems."
"There's always one non-believer," Eileen huffs. She adjusts her stitch counter irritably. "Anyway, you're married."
"I made her sweaters before we were married and it all worked out just fine," Bill says.
"Well, you're lucky," Doyle says. "Two boyfriends I had to lose to the curse before I admitted it might be real."
"You know, it might make a good premise for a mystery," Bill tells her. "The curse of the cabled sweater. That's not a bad title for a short story."
Eileen just shakes her head.
Much later, Bill goes home and sits down at his desk in the study, scrawling, "The Curse of the Cabled Sweater," across the top of a notebook page. He has a few false starts, and after a bit he gives up, thinking of the sweater curse and the first sweater he ever gave Laura, many, many years ago. It still feels like yesterday.
+ + + +
Chicago, 1971
The first time Bill made Laura a sweater, it was an accident.
It was a Friday in late November and the streets of Chicago were buried beneath layers of ice and snow from a recent storm. The University had been forced to cancel classes and the boys' elementary school had also closed, which was just as well-- Bill would never have been able to pilot his aging station wagon through three feet of snow on unplowed streets to get them there, and with another few inches predicted by early evening, it would have been a small nightmare trying to bring them home.
Carolanne had called early that morning. They'd had a short yet civil conversation about the weather before Bill handed the phone off to Sam and left the room, leaving his ex-wife to explain to their children that she was sorry, but with all the snow she and Jo wouldn't be able to take them to the zoo this weekend. Bill elected not to tell them that it was just as well that the snow had come, since it meant she'd have an excuse to skip out on them, even though she probably wouldn't have. The hard truth that Bill had not found easy to accept was that Carolanne, for all her faults, was not a bad parent, nor was she a bad spouse: she just wasn't either of those things to him. It hurt to admit that he was bad for her. It hurt, too, that Jo wasn't. She had shacked up with Josephine a mere two months after the divorce was final. Bill hadn't even known, he'd just assumed that when the boys talked about "Jo" it was their mother's new boyfriend. He'd felt pretty damn stupid when Jo turned out to be a leggy brunette lady who taught art classes at a local high school and seemed to live exclusively in long flowing skirts and hippie flower-child blouses.
"So, you're roommates," he had asked Carolanne, trying to be casual.
"In a manner of speaking," she had replied, arms crossed over her chest, daring him to be the kind of jackass he'd been for most of their marriage.
"Is that why. . .," he had tried to say, leaving the rest of his sentence unspoken, unable to form the words.
"Don't kid yourself," she had said. "That's not the reason. I like men, too, Bill, and sometimes I even like you, but we just weren't going to work out, and I couldn't put the kids through that anymore."
"Right," he said gruffly.
"I love Jo. If you have a problem with that, I can tell you exactly what to do with it."
He did try and tell himself that his problem was just that Carolanne had moved on so quickly, not the person with whom she had chosen to do that. He didn't have to try very hard. Jo was guilelessly, obliviously cheerful, and try as he might to be upset at the new love of his ex-wife's life, he couldn't find a bad thing to say about her. She always invited him in when he came to pick up the boys, offered him whatever strange confection she'd invented that week, asked him about his work at the university and chatted merrily along about the mystery novels she was reading. He opened his mouth, once, to say something cutting and hurtful, but it was like trying to lift his foot to kick a puppy, and it just never got off the ground. So he acquiesced to Jo's persistent effusiveness, to her place in his boys' lives. If it was strange to Carolanne that Bill had a better relationship with her girlfriend than he did with her, then she never said and she never let on, she just smiled and helped the boys with their homework while Jo insisted on making Bill a cup of tea and asking him what he thought of Agatha Christie's detectives as opposed to Ngaio Marsh's or Conan Doyle's or Poe's.
So it was all very uncharitable of him to even contemplate telling the boys that their mother had to cancel for any reason that was not weather-related, but he had considered it anyway, right up until the moment when the words were about to leave his mouth.
"I'm sorry," he told them, looking down at three very disappointed faces. "The zoo will have to wait."
"How will the animals stay warm?" Lee asked, frowning up at his father, obviously concerned. "We give Bucket a blanket when it's cold, do they do that at the zoo?"
Bill glanced over at the corner where their aging basset hound, Bucket, was snoozing away in his basket. He had been a Christmas present to Bill from Carolanne, but it was the boys who had named him, and more particularly, Zak, who had been kind of a one-word pony that Christmas, as young as he was. He had pointed directly at the dog, clapped his hands in delight, and said, "Bucket!" The dog had wandered immediately over and slurped his face, and the name stuck. Though he never mentioned it to Carolanne, Bill always suspected that Zak had actually been trying to say one of his Uncle Saul's favorite phrases, but had fortuitously jumbled the words in his pre-pubescent confusion.
"I'm sure they take good care of them, Lee," he assured his middle son, who still looked unconvinced.
"But it would have to be a really big blanket," Lee said, spreading his arms out as wide as they could reach. "To fit over an elephant."
"They've got it covered, Lee, I'm sure of it," Bill said, and Sam laughed.
"Very punny," he said, looking up from the line of notes he had been drawing in the musical composition book that Jo had given him a few weeks before.
"Ha, ha, ha," Lee said, and stuck out his tongue at Sam. Zak followed suit, but Sam, good-natured as always, a trait he got from where, Bill doesn't know, just laughed again and shrugged off the teasing.
"Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad," Zak said, seized by a sudden burst of energy, "can we go make snowmen? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease?"
The other two joined in the refrain in short order, and soon he found himself suiting up for a walk in the bitter cold, triple-checking the boys' coats and hats and gloves to make sure they were bundled up as much as they could be before embarking on this adventure. It was probably irresponsible, but he told them that it would only be for half an hour, no more, no less, and he said it in his sternest voice, the one he usually reserved for his college students after they'd turned in one too many obviously half-assed term papers.
They made it downstairs in record time as the boys pulled Bill along in their hurry, but they had only been outside a few minutes when Sam tugged on Bill's sleeve and pointed towards the streetcorner. "That lady's having car trouble," he said. "Should we help?"
"Let's walk that way and ask," Bill suggested.
"But the snowmen," Zak said.
"The snow's not going anywhere," Bill told him.
While the boys entertained themselves by building a snowman on the sidewalk, Bill inspected the car of the lady Sam had spotted, who had turned out to be a beautiful redhead with bright, intelligent eyes and a sharp wit. He had never believed in love at first sight, but he was smitten, and he knew it.
"I was trying to get to the airport," she said, frustrated, one hand on her hip. "I suppose there's no chance of that now."
"Doesn't look like it," he replied, closing the hood of the car. "Tow truck's probably your best option. I know a guy, I can go give him a call, if you want. It's no trouble. It's time for the kids to be back inside, anyway."
"Thank you," she replied, nodding, her magnificent hair bouncing against her shoulders.
"You can't stay out here without a coat."
"I'm not taking your coat," she insisted, but he continued unbuttoning it all the same.
"I'm not giving you my coat," he said, tugging off the thick cabled sweater he'd just finished knitting the previous day. "Here. Keep it, I've got plenty."
"You're an idiot," she said, but she took the sweater from him anyway.
"Well, now I'm a cold idiot, but at least I didn't leave home without my sweater," he said, rebuttoning his coat. "Who does that, in this weather?"
"An idiot," she said, beaming at him. It was a very tired old cliche, but he swore his heart skipped a beat when she smiled at him like that.
"Guess I'm in good company, then," he said, grinning like a fool in spite of the cold. "I'm Bill," he said, remembering his name at long last. He held his hand out.
"Laura," she replied, shaking his hand, her voice as warm as the sweater he'd just given her. "This is a very nice sweater, Bill," she added. "Where did you get it?"
"I made it," he answered, and she smiled, impressed.
They went on their first date a week later. It would have been sooner, but the snow kept everyone inside for a few more days, and after that they both had to work. Laura, it turned out, was a principal at the same high school where Jo worked.
"I love her," she laughed, gesturing with a fork full of salad. "She's one of the only people I can talk to about politics."
"You're not voting for that Senator from Maine if he runs, are you?" he asked.
"Muskie? Why not? What, you don't like clean water?" Laura raised her water glass in a mock toast, and he chuckled.
"Yes, I do, but I don't like politics," Bill told her.
She propped her chin in one well-manicured hand. "What do you like?"
"You," he said, without hesitation.
Three dates later and he was damn near ready to propose, but he figured he should probably cool his jets until the boys got to know her. She came over for dinner. Sam, the world's most easygoing eight-year-old, liked her immediately, as, of course, did Zak. Lee was more skeptical, but by the end of the evening he was asking to read her a story from one of his many books, and Bill counted it a success.
"Your boys are darling," she said, just before she kissed him good night.
"They really loved you," he replied.
Carolanne, unfortunately, did not. She stormed into his office a day later, furious.
"How could you?" she demanded.
"How could I what?" Bill asked.
"Your new girlfriend," Carolanne said. Her words sounded like they had been squeezed through a vise. "How could you? I don't care if you hate me, Bill, but don't do this to Jo. What the hell has she ever done to you?"
Bill stared at her. "I'm not doing anything to Jo."
"You're dating the principal of her school? That's just a coincidence."
"I met her during the snowstorm," he explained. "I liked her hair. I gave her a sweater. I didn't know what she did for a living."
She crossed her arms over her chest. "You liked her hair."
"What, did you think this was some devious plot to-- I don't even know what it might have been, to tell the truth, Carolanne."
"If the school finds out about us, she could lose her job, you privileged asshole," Carolanne shouted. "God, think of someone who isn't you for once."
"Why the hell would you think I would-- wait," he said, shaking his head. "They can do that?"
Carolanne sighed. "Yes. Fantastic. Have I just given you an idea?"
"I don't hate you that much," he said. "I don't even know that I hate you at all."
"Oh," she said simply.
"She's better for you than I ever was," he admitted, surprised at how easy that was to say.
"Do you love this woman?" Carolanne asked.
"Yes," he replied automatically. "Look, Laura likes Jo, and she's not-- she's not like that. She wouldn't."
She stared at him for a minute, then she laughed. "You're gonna ask her to marry you, aren't you? You've got that look on your face. You used to look at me like that. The times, they are a-changing, huh?"
"They seem to be," Bill agreed. "You used to look at me like you look at Jo."
"I hope she says yes," Carolanne said. "I mean that. We're both happier this way."
"She took the sweater. I'm hoping my luck holds," he said, smiling.
"Sorry for yelling. It's not easy, sometimes."
Bill had told Laura the truth: he had never really cared for politics, and more than half the time he wouldn't even make it to the polls on election days, but after that, he made an effort.
When he finally did propose, nearly a year later, he tucked the ring into the pocket of a newly knitted cardigan.
"You don't think we're tempting fate? I heard there was a curse, about sweaters," she said, wrapping herself in the warmth of the red sweater he'd made for her. "And yes, by the way. It was always going to be yes."
+ + + +
a cabin in Oregon, present day
"The only real mystery here is why you stopped to help me, when you don't know anything about cars," Laura teases. She's reading over his shoulder again, not that he minds.
"I don't think that's much of a mystery at all," Bill replies, and she smiles at him. "The mystery is why you weren't wearing a coat."
"Serendipity," she smiles, and kisses his cheek before she leaves the room.