“But Rob Lee practically grew up in those barns. He used to tag along after Graydon, our stepdad, like a lovesick pup. Graydon was an expert on anything with hooves, and he passed it all on to my little brother. Rob Lee wasn’t ever that wild about dealing with the cattle and sheep—I think he did that mostly to please Graydon—but he sure loved horses. And they loved him. It was like he could read their minds. For a while, I thought he might grow up to be a competition rodeo rider, but after Momma and Graydon died, he seemed to lose interest in a lot of things that he’d loved before.
“I just really thought having Rob Lee home would be a help. If not for me”—she sighed—“at least for Linne.”
Cady tossed aside the fabric strip, then picked up a seam ripper and started attacking the knotted thread on Holly’s mangled quilt block, leaning against the table while she worked and talked.
“You know, Nick got sent on so many deployments that Linne barely knew him. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse,” Cady said, methodically tearing through the tangled threads. “On the one hand, I worry that she won’t remember him at all when she gets older. On the other hand, not remembering him means she doesn’t miss him so much. But Linne just wants a daddy. Or someone like a daddy.”
Holly hadn’t met Linne, but her heart hurt as Cady spoke. She knew how it felt to be fatherless, adrift and unclaimed, like a piece of lost luggage with no label, nothing to explain where and to whom you belonged.
Holly blinked, embarrassed in case Cady should see tears in her eyes. But Cady’s eyes were on her work, her voice solid but soft, as if she, too, had fallen into the habit of talking to herself.
“I hoped Rob Lee would step into the void when he came home,” Cady said. “When Linne was born, he was so excited. He bought this huge stuffed giraffe for her nursery—four feet tall. Now he won’t even look her in the eye.”
Cady shoved the ripper hard along a long line of stitches. The severed threads made a popping sound, like buttons bursting off a fat man’s shirt.
“She came into the house crying this morning, asking why Uncle Rob Lee hates her. Hates her!”
Cady looked up, and her eyes, far from tear filled, were snapping with anger.
“I stormed out to the barn to ask Rob Lee if it’d kill him to spend half an hour playing with his niece, but we just ended up in a shouting match. Which I actually kind of enjoyed,” she said, lips bowing into a grim little smile, “seeing as he was hungover. That was his excuse for telling Linne to get lost, but it would have been the same even if he was sober—which is getting to be kind of a rare occurrence.”
“He wasn’t like that before, was he?”
“Before Nick died?” Cady shook her head. “No. Not even when he came home between the first deployment and the second.”
“Sounds like he’s depressed.”
“Yeah. He’s not the only one.”
Holly felt her cheeks go hot again. Genius. Next maybe you could tell her that the sky is blue.
Holly had seen Rob Lee only twice, on that first day here at the house, and the day after, when he’d come to trim the hedges—well, more like hack the hedges. They were so overgrown. Even though it was December, it was hot, so she’d brought him a glass of ice water. After he drained it, Rob Lee handed her the empty glass, said thanks, and went back to work.
That was it—the sum total of their exchanges. Holly obviously couldn’t claim to know him, but she was sure he’d never intentionally hurt anybody. He was suffering, drawing into himself and sometimes lashing out, like a wounded animal. He was in pain. So was Cady.
“I’m sorry,” Holly said, “that was a stupid thing to—”
“No,” Cady replied, brushing off Holly’s apology. “I didn’t mean to snark at you. I’m still mad. Seems like I always am these days,” she said, and started picking tiny threads off Holly’s quilt block.
“For the first three months after Nick died, I cried every day. Then I got mad and stayed that way. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever just feel like . . . like me again.”
Cady paused, fingers still, head lowered, staring at the bit of patchwork.
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “I wish I’d never met Nick. Isn’t that awful?”
Holly didn’t know what to say to that. She really wanted to get up from her chair and give Cady a hug, tell her to go ahead and cry. But she didn’t think she knew her well enough for that. Besides, Cady didn’t look like she wanted to cry. She looked like she wanted to punch something.
“Sorry,” Cady said, shaking off her reverie. “I don’t know why I told you all that.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers.”
“Maybe. Here you go.” She handed Holly the fabric patches, now free of knots, tangles, and stray threads. “Give it another go. But not on that machine.”
Cady bent down and opened the lid of the cardboard box she’d left on the floor and pulled out a white sewing machine, slightly smaller than Holly’s, with two dials on the front.
“I brought you something, kind of a belated Christmas present. Although, it’s just on loan, so it doesn’t really qualify as a present. Anyway, this is one of our class machines. It has eighteen stitches,” she said, pointing to the dials, “which is still fifteen more than you need at the moment, but it’s a lot simpler to operate.”
Cady thunked the machine down onto the table. Holly got up to investigate. “Thanks! Is the bobbin easier to load?” she asked hopefully.
“The bobbin’s the same. You just need more practice. If you hear the machine making that thunkety-thunking sound, stop stitching and check the seam before you sew for ten miles. If it’s tangled, rethread the bobbin and try again. If that doesn’t work, rethread the whole thing, top and bottom thread. Nine times out of ten, that’ll solve the problem.”
“Really? Why?”
“No one knows. It’s a mystery.”
Holly pulled a chair up next to the table. She wished Cady had told her about rethreading the top thread before. But maybe she had and Holly forgot. She’d listened to so many instructions and read so many manuals that she was starting to feel fuzzy, like maybe there was lint in her bobbin case.
“Do you think I’ll ever get the hang of this?”
“Absolutely. But it’s going to take more than a few days.”
“But I’ve only got a few days! Why did I take this job? I am going to end up looking like a complete idiot.”
Cady walked over to the sewing table and stood frowning at Holly’s pile of Snowball blocks—blocks that were supposed to be easy enough for a beginner. The first couple had turned out, but then it all went horribly wrong. They were all different sizes, and the triangles in the corner were so inconsistent that none of the seams matched up. Cady sorted through the pile of blocks, shaking her head.
“This is hopeless,” Holly moaned, watching her. “I’m hopeless. Why did you even agree to take me on as a student?”
“Because you seemed nice. And a little desperate. Also because I want the show to be a success. Every time a new episode of Quintessential Quilting airs, our online sales quadruple. We can’t make it with a local customer base. We need online sales and tourists to survive. Without the show, I’m not sure we could. If the quilt shop closed, I’d be out of a job. So would a lot of people.”
The pebble of anxiety that had been with Holly ever since arriving in Too Much became a boulder. It was bad enough to risk her own career by taking on a job she was so superbly ill suited for; now the future and livelihood of other people were on the line too—Cady, and little Linne, and Mary Dell Templeton, whom she was sure must be a nice person. She had to be to inspire such loyalty in her niece.
But Mary Dell had no way of knowing that her own network was betting against her, setting her up with a clueless co-host precisely because they hoped the show would fail and had recruited Holly to actively assist in its demise.
Well, she wouldn’t. That was all.
Jason could weave all the webs he wanted,
but that didn’t mean Holly was going to play spider to Mary Dell Templeton’s fly, not even if it meant she never got the spot on that design show that Jason had bribed her with. No way. No matter what Rachel had advised, she couldn’t do that to anyone.
Of course, the way things were going, she could probably sink Quintessential Quilting without even trying. Holly buried her face in her hands and groaned.
“Oh, c’mon,” Cady said, clucking her tongue. “Don’t give up now. Everything is going to be okay.”
Holly looked up. “Do you really think so?”
“Sure. Absolutely,” she said, in a tone that was only marginally convincing. “But I’ve got to ask you something: What happened there?”
She pointed at Holly’s sleeve. Confused, Holly looked at her arm. Sure enough, she had somehow managed to stitch a Snowball block to her top.
“No idea,” Holly said.
Cady laughed. Holly had never heard her laugh before.
“Girl, you are just one hawt mess.” Cady picked up the seam ripper to detach the block from Holly’s sleeve. “How late were you up sewing last night?”
“I don’t know. Till around midnight, I guess.”
“Uh-huh. And what time did you start up this morning?”
“Six.”
Cady tossed the Snowball block into the pile. “At least you got a break during the holiday. What did you do for Christmas anyway?”
“I kept busy,” Holly said casually, not wanting to lie. “You know.”
“Oh, no.” Cady smacked her palm against her forehead. “I forgot you don’t have any family around here. Why didn’t you say something? We’d have been happy to have you out to the ranch for Christmas. My grandma Taffy loves cooking for a crowd.”
“It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted to impose. Besides, I’ve got so much to do. We start filming in another week, and look at me,” Holly said, spreading her hands to take in the whole disorganized mess that was her sewing room, wonky blocks and all.
“Listen to me,” Cady said. “You can’t quilt for eighteen hours a day. I’ll bet you ten bucks that the three good blocks you made were the first three. Am I right?”
Holly nodded.
“You need to take a break. Get out of this house and go have some fun.”
Holly glanced at the pile of Snowball blocks—a hopeless cause if ever she’d seen one. Maybe Cady had a point.
“Okay. So what do people do for fun around here?”
“Not much,” Cady admitted. She thought for a moment. “Especially two days after Christmas. But there’s an auction over at the Finley farm this afternoon. Old Mr. Finley died last month. His wife wants to sell, but that could take a while. In the meantime, she’s got to auction off their horses. She just can’t take care of them at her age. Anyway, I promised Linne we’d go.” She shrugged. “Not too exciting, but you’re welcome to tag along if you want.”
CHAPTER 15
Normally, Mary Dell and Howard would have gone home to Too Much for Christmas, but with the move coming up so quickly, they’d had a hurried holiday in Dallas with a few presents, no decorations besides a tabletop tree, and a simple meal of roast beef, potatoes, salad, and pie, served on stoneware instead of the good china, which was already packed away. As soon as the meal was done, Mary Dell washed the dishes while Howard dried, then wrapped them in newspaper and packed them as well.
On December twenty-seventh, the moving truck arrived.
“Ma’am?” A man dressed in blue coveralls carrying a sewing machine case put it down and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. “Where does this one go?”
Mary Dell looked up from the cupboard she had just opened, pulled out a teapot and saucepan, and said, “The four big machines go into the truck. Put the small one in the van. It should go to Howard’s apartment.”
“Never met a lady who had four sewing machines before. What about the boxes of fabric? There’s twenty-three of them,” he reported. “You want all those in the big truck too?”
Mary Dell set the teapot down on the counter. “Leave that for last,” she advised. “I’ll sort it out.”
The man picked up the machine and went off to the truck. Mary Dell placed the teapot and saucepan in a box marked “Howard—Kitchen,” then added a few more items she thought Howard might need.
Howard would eat his dinners with the Morris family, so he would only have to prepare his own breakfasts and lunches and wouldn’t need much in the way of kitchenware, but Mary Dell wanted to make sure he was properly equipped anyway. After packing two boxes with pots, pans, glasses, cutlery, and dinnerware, she went off to search for Howard. Though the house looked like it had been ransacked and the truck was already half-full, she was dismayed to see how much was yet to be loaded.
“Where did we collect all this junk anyway? When we moved in, everything we owned fit into a pickup truck,” she muttered. “Howard! Where are you? I need you to help me sort through some fabric!”
“In here, Momma!”
She followed the sound of his voice into her office and found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking through a pile of old photo albums.
“Baby, we don’t have time to look through pictures right now. We’ve still got to finish up here and get you moved into the apartment. And I’ve got to meet Hub-Jay for dinner in”—Mary Dell pulled up her sleeve and looked at her watch—“seven and a half hours. So come on and give me a hand, will you, please?”
“I will,” he said absently, eyes still on the photo album. “Remember this one?”
The page was open to an eight-by-ten portrait that had been taken nearly thirty years before on the front porch of the ranch. Mary Dell was sitting in a rocker, holding baby Howard in her arms, and Donny was standing right next to her with his hand on her shoulder. She was looking into the camera and smiling. So was Donny.
It was a picture of a happy family.
Howard looked up at her. “Can I have this? For the wall in my apartment?”
Mary Dell glanced from Howard’s face to the portrait. It was the only photograph she had of the three of them together. She kept it inside the album instead of putting it on the wall because seeing it always made her heart ache a little.
During all the years of infertility, the miscarriages and dashed hopes, this was the image she’d held on to, a picture of how she imagined life with Donny could be if they were ever fortunate enough to be blessed with a baby—happy, even joyful, and so very close. Close enough to touch.
When Donny abandoned them only weeks after Howard was born, going off to the market for milk and never coming back, Mary Dell had been so depressed she thought she’d die. A part of her had wanted to. After a week or so, Grandma Silky came to visit and, seeing what a state she was in, told her in no uncertain terms to pull herself together, because mommas didn’t just lie down and die—no matter how badly they might want to.
“When your dreams turn to dust, maybe it’s time to vacuum.” That’s what Grandma Silky had said, and she was right. Sometimes you just had to let things go.
“Of course. It’s all yours if you want it. Do you want me to get it framed?”
“No, thank you, Momma.” Howard got to his feet, moving a little slower than usual. It wasn’t even noon, but he was looking a little tired. Mary Dell felt a brief twinge of concern but quickly dismissed it. Why wouldn’t he be tired? It had already been a long day, for both of them.
“Mrs. Morris said she’d drive me to the mall on Saturday. I’ll find a frame then. I want to buy some stuff for my groovy new bachelor pad.” He snapped his fingers and struck a pose, then laughed.
Mary Dell smiled, but not very broadly. Howard took a step toward her, laid his hand on her arm. “Momma? You going to be all right without me?” Mary Dell bobbed her head. “You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She smiled, more sincerely this time. “Your momma is always all right; don’t you know that by now?”
“Me too,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her.
CHAPTER 16
Hub-Jay was waiting for her in the lobby, looking especially handsome in a custom-tailored suit of black worsted wool, holding a ribbon-wrapped florist’s box in his hands.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Howard dressed me,” she admitted. “Okay, that’s not entirely true. I picked out the dress, but he did the accessories. He only let me wear one bracelet and made me get rid of my necklace—the gold choker with those big white urchin thingys on it—because he said it looked like I was being strangled by a sea monster. He made me change my shoes too, black peep-toe pumps instead of the gold sandals with the rhinestone straps. But the cocktail dress was my idea. Leopard prints are in right now,” she informed him. “I know this because I’ve been waiting my whole life for them to be in.”
“The dress is lovely,” he said, and handed her the box. “And so are you.”
“My!” she exclaimed as she opened the box and let Hub-Jay tie the ribbons of the sweetly scented gardenia corsage around her wrist, thinking how glad she was that Howard had made her take off those five extra bracelets. “I feel like I’ve been elected queen of the prom!”
“I wanted to make your last night in Dallas memorable,” Hub-Jay said, lifting her hand to his lips, “so you’ll remember to come back and see me.”
Hub-Jay had never kissed her hand before. Mary Dell was surprised by the gesture, and by the little spark that ran up her arm and through her body as his lips brushed her skin. She laughed nervously and pulled back her hand.
“It’s not like I’d forget. I’ll be back soon for Howard’s birthday party.”
Hub-Jay heaved a melodramatic sigh. “Longest six weeks of my life.”
Mary Dell rolled her eyes and thumped him on the shoulder with her evening clutch, feeling more comfortable now. He was just teasing her, playing the part.
Hub-Jay summoned a nearby bellboy and handed Mary Dell’s bag over to him.
“You’re already checked in. Jimmy will take your luggage to your room so we can go right into dinner.”
“All right,” Mary Dell said, “but first I want to call and check on Howard. He looked so tired when I left, said his back was bothering him a little bit too.”
From Here to Home Page 11
