When I was little, I had a bad habit of hanging around neighbors’ houses. I would knock and knock at their doors, whether they had kids to play with or not; I would ask questions about the house, their day, what plants they were growing in the garden. And eventually, I was sent home with a warning: “When I say go, I mean go!”

I’m not sure what it was that drew me—the mystery of a neighbor, the hope of a cookie or a story, the pull of a place that was not mine.

But when we moved to Sauk Village, I found a neighbor who was more than willing to take me in.

“Let’s go the Candylady’s house,” Zach said, his hands gripping the bike handlebars. He was one of my younger brother’s friends, a blonde Irish boy who, years later, would call our house from the county jail. “She has candy, and gives it to kids.”

I asked my parents if I could go over to the Candylady’s house. Their eyebrows rose. “She’s not a molester or anything,” I said. “She just likes to give candy to the neighbor kids.”

I didn’t know who or what she was—I just knew that her house was on the corner of our street, a rusty range Cutlass in the driveway.

“Here you go,” she said, the door open barely a crack, the glass bowl of dinner mints trembling in her veined hands. “I’ve got to close the door to keep the air conditioning in, so go on out.”

Her name was Shirley. She owned the house, and the car, which she kept telling me was a classic. Shirley let me sit on her porch, laughed at my jokes, and was excited to hear my bike clip up the driveway. She had an orange cat named Gandalf, and gave me sodas to drink while she smoked and talked.

Shirley was my friend.

“I think you need to learn how to crochet and knit,” she said one day, seeing the Little House on the Prairie books that I brought to read on the porch. “Those pioneer women knew how to live. And you should, too.”

Shirley bought me my first set of knitting needles, and helped me knit a baby blanket for my cousin Amanda, who I met once before my uncle relocated his family without sending us an address.

And she helped me learn how to crochet, the long chains running down my lap in the afternoon light.

But things began to crack between us. Shirley started demanding that I help her grocery shop, and I would lug in a month’s worth of groceries, the plastic bags wringing my hands red. She would call during snowstorms and ask me to shovel her driveway, her voice high and tight. “Otherwise, I will be trapped here, Allison.”

And there were strange betrayals. I once complained that a boy was mean to me, and the next day, his mother flagged me as I biked past her house.

“Shirley told me that you said our son was fat and lazy,” she said, “and you are not welcome to play with him anymore.”

I stopped coming over, keeping my knitting needles and books to myself. I got a rush out of biking past her house, hands off the handlebars, knowing that she would recognize the sound of my wheels clipping down the curve of road.

One day, grocery shopping with my mother, I saw Shirley. I ran into an aisle to grab something off our list and there she was, staring into her cart piled high with tuna and canned soup. I sprinted to my mother in a full panic. “Can I please have the keys and just sit in the car?”

My parents thought that Shirley had done something to me. “Did she touch you, Red?” my dad asked gruffly, bewildered by my behavior. I shook my head no.

But in a way, Shirley did touch me. I was more than an eight year-old looking for candy and company; somehow, I helped bear the unspoken brunt of her anger and loneliness with every visit, every bag carried to the kitchen.

And I was looking for more, too, even if I didn’t know it. I was looking for family, and what scared me about Shirley was her closeness, the possibility of her anger. The threat of being responsible.

It is a threat that haunts my relationships still. All Shirley did was poke a wound that had already burrowed deep.

I’ve started crocheting blankets for our home after our wedding, and although the patterns are simple, they work. And last week, my father sent me an email that said “I’m wearing that gray scarf you knit me years ago that keeps me warm every winter.”

The scarf is too short, and has a couple holes. But I’m grateful to Shirley for what she could give me, a small craft that has kept my hands going. That, true to her word, helps me live.