“Where the women lead, we must follow,” he told his son, and they followed along behind Angelo.
It was quite the scene. A woman, who might have been Graziella’s evil, though equally attractive twin, was hopping up and down on one foot in her impatience. “C’mon, Manuel, if you cooked any slower you’d be as bad as Angelo.”
“Ah, Luisa,” the Mexican chef at the center of the cook line teased back as he slid across a beautiful plate that must be the braised venison with wild morel sauce that Bill had almost ordered. “Beware, señora. You encourage me to follow in the footsteps of the maestro.”
Luisa growled, dressed the plate with tiny dots of some dark sauce, and turned around with perfect timing to place it in Graziella’s hand just as she breezed through the kitchen.
Perrin was leading the kids down the line to meet everyone. Without breaking their amazing flow, they greeted his kids as if this was a normal thing to do, and even described a bit of what they were doing.
Angelo remained beside Bill, off to the side watching the line’s progress. He nodded once to himself, clearly satisfied with what he was seeing.
“Maria will be sorry that she missed a chance to meet your children. She starts early and usually leaves before dinner service.”
“She works here?”
Angelo eyed him carefully. “With how long you spent talking to my Mama at dinner on Tuesday, I thought you would know everything. She is the best pastry chef you can imagine.”
“Uh, I kind of remember that,” Bill searched his memory. It was there, but way down the list. “We talked about a lot of things that night.”
Angelo nodded down the cook line to where Perrin and the kids were sampling a red sauce, though where they’d fit another bite after that meal, he had no idea.
“I’ve known Perrin for two years. She’s a very positive person, always glad to see you, always great fun to be around.”
“But?” Bill could hear it clear as day. However good they were together, their relationship was still fragile. If Perrin’s friends decided Bill and his family weren’t good for her in some way, it could shatter what little they’d built so far. He knew Perrin sometimes relied on them more than herself in such matters. But that didn’t seem right somehow. Maybe she only let them think they did… She still confused him much of the time.
“But,” Angelo acknowledged his question. “I always assumed she was happy. But now that I see her overflowing with it around you and your children, I have to wonder about how she truly felt all this time I’ve known her.”
Bill didn’t know what to say to that one. From the moment that she’d shattered his pigeon-holing of her, by staggering into the Opera drunk with exhaustion and glowing like the Empress, he’d only ever seen her as joyous.
But happy? And that he and his family made her feel that way was something else again. A part of him worried that some addictive part of her past had become dependent on him for her happiness.
Then he had to remind himself that the Perrin Williams he knew was strong and incredibly smart. Maybe Angelo had known a different Perrin. But the one Bill knew didn’t strike him as the sort of person to entrust her emotional well-being to another. Share with them, absolutely. Care about their opinion? She couldn’t help it, she wanted everyone around her to be happy too. Depend on them for how she felt? Not a chance.
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, Angelo, she’s making me super happy as well.”
Perrin and the kids began heading back from the far end of the cook line, each bearing another serving of the dessert. Even the somewhat fierce Luisa stopped her service to meet the kids.
“Back when Russell and I were first bringing girls home to the kitchen where Mama cooked for Russell’s parents, she said something to us that I’ve always tried to do. ‘Follow the quiet voice of joy. Follow it like nothing else matters.’ Best advice Mama ever gave me. It’s why I cook. It’s why I’m married to Jo. Might have made the road a little easier if we’d listened to her a bit more often.”
“You ended up in an amazing spot, Angelo.”
“I did, my friend.” His friendly thump on Bill’s back was almost as solid as one he’d deliver to Russell. It was an acceptance. A welcoming.
As he returned to the cook line, Angelo kissed Perrin on each cheek, scruffed Jaspar’s hair, and bowed so deeply to Tammy that she blushed fiercely.
“Hey, where’s my second dessert?” Bill complained as they reached him.
Perrin held out a spoonful of caramel-covered sorbet. “If I have to finish this on my own, I’ll die of a pleasure overdose. You have to help me.”
He took the bite, and did his best to relish the quiet voice of joy, as the four of them stood to the side watching the busy kitchen and eating their three desserts.
Chapter 14
Since the dinner, it had been a great week for Bill. The sets for Ascension were almost back on schedule, not quite, but that was normal with only a couple weeks to go until opening night.
The knit costumes, once completed, had totally wowed the cast members and the director. They quickly scheduled an extra photo shoot as soon as all of the primary cast were costumed. It hadn’t been hard to convince Wilson Jarvis to foot the additional advertising costs of a last minute poster-and-banner campaign. Even Geoffrey Palliser had decided to amend his contract so that the Overlord could stand beside the shining Empress.
In a moment of inspiration, Bill had tried to contract Russell for the photo shoot. Except it turned out that one didn’t just contract Russell Morgan. Even trying to do so really pissed the man off. That’s when Bill had learned that not only was Russell rich, but he was also the heir to the Morganson shipping fortune. He only did projects he was interested in. Perrin, bless her, said that she hadn’t had to work very hard to talk him down, despite Bill’s bungled initial approach.
Perrin and Jerimy’s makeup artist, a big Polish man named Mika Kalinski with a heavy accent, massive hands, and remarkably delicate control, had conferred at length on the final looks.
It was too late to hit the national and international press, but the new Ascension poster now graced the back of several Seattle buses as well as a couple of I-5 and Aurora Avenue billboards. It was hard to tell if the spike in ticket sales was due to that, or the ever growing yarn-bombs.
Bill had finally asked Perrin once about the yarn-bomb campaign, over a lunch they’d managed to share in his office. She had evaded the question of her involvement by turning the conversation sideways into how creative they were. After that, Bill adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding them.
The campaign grew rapidly over the next few days. At first the knit advertising had appeared only on the occasional crosswalk sign and light pole. Now it seemed he couldn’t turn a corner without spotting one. The news services picked up the story, then they showed one that impossibly ran across the large bar holding stoplights out over the middle of a busy intersection. That looked dangerous to install and was probably illegal.
That was too much. He pulled Patsy and Jerimy into his office for a meeting.
“Not one of ours,” Patsy didn’t even take a moment of thought.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve only been doing verticals on the big stuff. Also, you said this happened last night. We were busy then doing thirty tree trunks around Green Lake. Every jogger on the three miles of shoreline track this morning saw them. For horizontals it’s been mostly bicycle racks. We don’t mess with any traffic signs. One of my friends actually went to jail for ten days because she yarn-bombed a Stop sign a couple years back.”
“To jail?” That was not the kind of publicity he wanted for the Opera under any circumstances.
“Yeah. She exactly recreated the whole sign in red and white knitting, and then built yellow petals all around the edges. The problem was, it wasn’t reflective. Turns out those signs are specially designed to reflect headlights back at the driver. It was really pretty, the arresting cop let h
er take a picture before cutting it down, but we know better than to mess with any of that.”
Bill slumped back in his chair, “So how did it get up there at the corner of Broad and Western?”
Patsy whistled. “Did you get a picture?”
“I didn’t have to.” He did a quick search on his computer and turned the screen for them to see. It was already on the Seattle Times news site.
“Wow. That would be a tough installation, and to not get caught there would be even tougher. They have to have traffic cameras in an intersection that big, but we’re clean. It’s definitely not one of ours. No tag.”
Bill looked at the picture but he didn’t even know what he was looking for.
Patsy had him scroll down to another picture in the article until she found a yarn bomb on the courthouse flagpole. She pointed to the bottom, below the last “N” in Ascension.
He could just make out a tiny “S#1KG.”
“We put that on every single thing we do. That’s our gang’s marker or tag, Seattle’s Number One Knitting Gang. Some people go anonymous, but we felt that was like making book reviews under false names on Amazon, kinda low brow not to take ownership of your own words, or knitting.”
“Then how did this happen, Patsy?” Bill scrolled back up to the picture of the street maintenance crew going up in a bucket truck to cut down the yarn-bomb.
Then she smiled. “We’re going viral, boss.”
And she’d been absolutely right. Over the next week after the release of the posters, magnificently designed by Russell, yarn-bombs began appearing in the oddest places. Bus bumpers, store signs that had nothing to do with the opera. They often wouldn’t even say Ascension but Perrin’s color palette was unmistakable.
The Fremont statue of Waiting for the Interurban, of a half dozen people and a dog waiting for a bus, was seriously bombed. People were always dressing up the statues: warm scarves in winter, ridiculous sunglasses when spring finally came to the rainy city. Someone had taken the poster to heart. They’d made costumes for each of the figures, following as many of the details as possible from Russell’s poster. Even the child cradled in the woman’s arms now wore a fair imitation of Jaspar’s costume.
Russell had called and told him to get him and his cast down to the statue for a group photo. By the time Bill had them there, Russell had somehow corralled a half-dozen news services into showing up, including a pair of nationals. The resulting media blitz had been amazing, and cost nothing.
Jaspar and Tammy loved the photo shoot. But they didn’t stand together like he would have expected. Even Russell’s attempt to coax them together had no effect. They stood on either side of the Empress and Overlord. It worried Bill, but he let it go as too far down his list of things to worry about. The kids always worked everything out.
Reports were coming in from Tacoma, even Portland was getting bombed, but most of it was concentrated in Seattle.
The day he saw one across the steel bumper of a fire truck stationed near his house, he decided that keeping his mouth shut was definitely the better part of discretion. That it was still there days later, smoke-stained, worn in a few places, but left in place by the crew, only spoke more to the popularity of the event.
“It isn’t just sales for this opera that are increasing,” Wilson Jarvis happily told King 5 News. “The Seattle community’s support for this Emerald City Opera production of Ascension has also begun translating into a sharp increase in subscription sales for the next season. We’re just thankful for this opportunity to be attracting more interest and tourism to our great city. By the time Ascension opens two weeks from tonight, we expect to be fully sold out, despite adding two performances. So be sure to get your tickets to Ascension soon.”
Leave it to Wilson to work the title of the opera into every other sentence.
Bill had to miss the Tuesday dinner because of a rehearsal. It was too bad, he thought the kids would really enjoy it. At least having the kids in the opera saved him from palming them off on Lucy or a baby sitter. Though Tammy was getting so grown up, maybe he could trust her to be the responsible adult when they had to be home alone. He knew there were younger girls than Tammy who made money babysitting, but still it felt too soon for him, if not for her.
He’d asked Perrin to send his apologies to Maria personally. She reminded him that this week was Manuel and Graziella’s wedding reception at the restaurant. He’d forgotten and felt awful, but he couldn’t get out of it.
After a quick round of begging Marci, he’d managed to bag two of the last tickets to the only Monday night performance when the restaurant would be closed. He’d swiped one of fundraising’s best ECO-stationery note cards, thankfully Consuela stocked some without “Thank You” embossed on them in gold foil. Bill wrote a cute note, slipped in the tickets along with an invitation to come backstage after the show, and made Perrin promise to not forget it in her purse.
When Jaspar tried to beg off from going sailing, Bill should have seen something bad was coming. He should have, but he didn’t.
Chapter 15
Perrin felt as if she were floating when she arrived at Cutters Crabhouse. It was Friday evening, a week since her dinner with Bill and the kids. The place was hopping with Seattle’s finest, well-dressed for after work mingling, ready to see and be seen.
Perrin even saw two of her own designs, but didn’t know the women. That felt odd. Even though Raquel and Kristin were doing a great job of running the store, it still felt odd to be disconnected from the day-to-day contact with customers. Not that she’d have had time even if she had the desire to work the front of store again.
Her life had become a complete blur. She was in a hundred places at once, and needed to be in a thousand. Her emotions were all over the map as well.
Jerimy had insisted on her approval of his and Patsy’s teams’ renditions of her designs. Those had turned into wonderful discussions of what they’d each seen and liked.
Jerimy had a Master’s degree from NYU in Visual Culture: Costume Studies. Who even knew there was such a thing. His deep focus on Western Europe had contrasted nicely with Perrin’s lighter-depth self-education across dozens of global clothing design traditions. They discussed the rise of the pleat, the exposed midriff of the historic belly dancer, the urban Japanese woman, and the modern American teen.
Patsy, the queen of modern clothing, often jumped in with surprising variations that she’d seen. Perrin departed each meeting with so many ideas for new designs clogging her brain that she could hardly think.
Patsy tried to keep her up-to-date on the wild success of the yarn bombing. One evening she’d borrowed Tamara and the three of them had gone out with the S#1K Gang. They’d bombed three seats in every Capitol Hill hospital waiting room, covering them with premade slipcovers in the palettes of the Empress, the Prince, and the True Love. It only took a minute for them to crochet the side seams to hold the premade knitting in place.
They’d all worn masks that Patsy had made, modeled on the opera’s characters. Security guards had been alerted, nurses had applauded, and people stuck in drab waiting rooms for hours on end had been cheered up.
Afterward, they’d all sat around together and eaten tiny scoops of gelato in a brightly lit little shop. Tammy’s eyes had been so wide as she did her best to behave as if she did this every day. Clearly, sitting with six grown women from Patsy’s twenty-three to Cornelia’s sixty-seven, ranked as one of the coolest things she’d ever done.
“I didn’t get that grown-ups could be so much fun!” she’d bubbled as Perrin had driven her home afterward. “I want to grow up to be just like them.”
Perrin had laughed, “Which one?”
“All of them at once, but especially you.”
That had sobered Perrin instantly. Tamara had made it a simple statement of fact. Perrin could see how the others could be role models, but didn’t quite understand how it could apply to her.
She’d talked about it in the kitchen with Bill over m
ore blueberry tea while Tamara took a shower to get ready for bed. Jaspar had apparently sacked out early. They were careful to sit on opposite sides of the dining table in case one of the kids came in.
“Guess he was tired,” Bill apologized on his son’s behalf, but she missed saying hi to him. She actually hadn’t seen much of Jaspar at all since the dinner she’d so enjoyed.
Bill continued, “Don’t see how you could miss the role you’re already playing in Tammy’s life, makes perfect sense to me that she’d respect you.”
At her blank look, he’d laughed.
“The girl never stops talking about you. She’s actually doing better in school, which she was always good at anyway, because she’s staying up late to get ahead the night before. She wants as much time working with you as she can get. She’s begging me for a sewing machine for her birthday in a couple months. She’s even convinced us all to watch one of those clothing design shows on television. It’s a good thing that it’s only one night a week, or Jaspar would be having a meltdown. As it is, he does his best to moan and complain whenever they get to a part she really wants to hear. Took him a while to figure out that she’d just rewind to listen again until he shut up.”
“He’s such a boy, isn’t he? So much like you.”
“Huh,” had been Bill’s grunted reply. Even after she’d explained it to him. “Well, we’re moving into the Opera House this week, the kid always seems to enjoy that. Wilson even signed up for a special rider on our insurance now to let Jaspar hang out with the crews, as long as there is always a responsible person about. The team leaders have been more than willing to have him as a junior apprentice and gofer.”
Perrin wished she could see more of Jaspar, but along with the Opera’s growing popularity, Perrin’s Glorious Garb was receiving more attention. She and Raquel were already interviewing seamstresses to build the copies of Perrin’s designs because she could no longer keep up with the orders. She’d never much liked making the same thing over and over anyway. Yet another small piece of the business to let go of.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 78
