Mrs. Harmon

Mrs. Harmon is a domestic, attentive presence in Maren’s life, remembered through knitting, tea, cake, and a locket. Her importance comes into focus after she is absent: Maren finds evidence that Sully has taken belongings from her home, dreams of a final conversation with her, and later recognizes her cat’s severed tail and collar. The contrast between Mrs. Harmon’s generous counsel and the violence surrounding her household makes her memory both a comfort and a source of regret.

Identity and Domestic Life

Mrs. Harmon is associated with practical, handmade work and a home stocked with familiar diversions. While Lee and Sully consult a road atlas at her kitchen table, Maren tries to knit with Mrs. Harmon’s yarn and needles. She casts on twenty stitches, but becomes hopelessly confused on the next row and gives up. Searching the end table, she finds playing cards, a book of Mad Libs, a bird-watching guide, and jacks; a cabinet holds a basket like Mrs. Harmon’s, with a crochet hook tucked into bright red acrylic yarn. The small inventory suggests a home arranged for ordinary pastimes, while Maren’s unsuccessful attempt at knitting shows her reaching toward a skill she has not yet learned.

Knitting returns as an unfinished possibility in Maren’s dream of Mrs. Harmon. The dream’s closing exchange recalls Mrs. Harmon’s regret that she will not be able to teach Maren. That specific offer connects the earlier yarn and needles to a relationship still developing: Maren has touched the tools of the craft, but has not had time to learn it from their owner. The red yarn and crochet hook therefore register as more than household objects; in retrospect, they mark a lesson and companionship that remain incomplete.

Household Objects and Their Afterlife

Mrs. Harmon’s home reappears in Maren’s search through Sully’s cabin. A cupboard by the back door is crowded with jewelry, Walkmans, collectible coins, pewter tableware, and other objects. Among them Maren finds Mr. Harmon’s Sphinx trophy. She tries to think of it as a memento, then recognizes that this explanation does not fit: Sully takes things he can sell, not keepsakes to remember victims. The trophy exposes a connection between the cabin’s accumulated possessions and the people from whom they came, bringing Mrs. Harmon’s household into a disturbing pattern of loss.

The bedroom offers a second, more intimate inventory of things that do not fit in the cupboard: lamps, clocks, and porcelain dolls with rolling glass eyes. On the bedside table, Maren finds more jewelry and credit cards bearing different names. Among them is Francis Yearly’s national park staff ID, with a blurry photograph in which Maren can still make out her father’s smile. In that moment, the objects lead beyond Mrs. Harmon’s home to Maren’s own family history. She later returns to the bedroom, places the trophy on the night table, and puts her father’s ID in her rucksack. Mrs. Harmon is not present in this discovery, but the things associated with her household frame the discovery of evidence about Maren’s father.

Dream and Parting Counsel

After Lee has left, Maren dreams that she is sitting with Mrs. Harmon at the kitchen table. Light from the suncatchers falls in green and blue pools across the linoleum. Mrs. Harmon cuts the promised cake, a moist auburn slice of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and says, “This is the last cake I’ll ever bake, so I’m glad it turned out well.” The image gathers the comforts associated with her—food prepared for a guest, a shared table, and attentive conversation—around an explicit sense of finality. As a dream, the scene gives Maren an imagined meeting rather than a new waking encounter.

Mrs. Harmon watches Maren eat, sipping tea pensively, and asks whether Sully is a very nice man. The question brings the violence connected to his possessions into the intimate setting of the dream. Maren’s reply identifies a complicated response: when asked whether she feels grateful to him, she says that she guesses she does. Mrs. Harmon does not erase that conflict. Instead, she tells Maren that even the worst things in life can teach something, and recalls her husband Dougie’s advice: “leave it go and get on with the business of living.” The counsel is not a claim that what happened was harmless; it gives Maren a way to continue without pretending that the ugly parts have disappeared.

Mrs. Harmon also addresses the locket directly, telling Maren not to worry about it and saying that it makes her glad Maren will think of her whenever she wears it. The gift makes remembrance a continuing, material bond rather than a matter confined to the dream. Her apology that she cannot teach Maren to knit leaves that bond tinged with loss: the locket can be kept and worn, but the promised shared activity cannot be recovered.

The Cat and Maren’s Regret

Later, Maren finds what first appears to be a charm bracelet but proves to be a cat’s collar, with a severed tail attached. The tag identifies the cat as Puss and gives Mrs. Harmon’s Edgartown address. Recognition sends Maren back to the Spare Oom and to the moment she shut the door on Mrs. Harmon’s beautiful white cat. The discovery makes the animal’s fate concrete and turns a remembered gesture into an accusation Maren directs at herself: she thinks she should have let him in.

Mrs. Harmon’s presence in the story is thus shaped by a sharp contrast between hospitality and exclusion. In the dream, she offers cake, tea, advice, and the locket; in Maren’s recollection, her cat was shut out. The domestic details that first signal warmth later carry the weight of what Maren failed to do and what Sully’s violence has touched. Mrs. Harmon remains a figure of kindness in Maren’s memory, but that kindness does not make the story’s losses simple: the unfinished knitting lesson, the remembered gift, and the cat’s collar each preserve a different part of an absence Maren cannot undo.