by Janet Bolin
As soon as I was certain that Felicity had not followed me across the street, I did explode. In a giggling fit. “You have to come to the presentation in my shop this morning,” I managed.
One of Haylee’s many sterling qualities is that she laughs with me, even when she doesn’t know what’s funny. “Why?”
“You’ll see.” I was almost out the door before I remembered the real reason for my visit. “Do you have a taller ladder than the one I’ve seen you use?”
Her eyes widened as if she thought the need for a ladder could be part of the joke. “No.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t the one who wanted it.”
Haylee contemplated my grin, which had to hint at mischief. “Want me to tell the other Threadville store owners to come to your presentation?”
“Yes, please. And bring your customers. They’ll enjoy the show.” Still giggling at the impression Felicity’s histrionics would make on the Threadville community of creative yet sensible textile artists, I headed back across the street.
I felt a thrill of pride whenever I approached In Stitches. The shop was on the main floor of a converted Arts and Crafts–style bungalow, with deep eaves and a homey roof sheltering its wide front porch. My customers often sat on that porch, in comfy handcrafted rocking chairs next to tables sporting books, magazines, and pots of flowers. The women discussed their projects, the homework I had assigned, and life in general while sipping fresh lemonade or iced tea. Often, while out there admiring Threadville shops, they realized they needed to purchase a few more crafting necessities, even when they lived in the village or were returning to it the next day.
Today, no one was on the porch, and the most prominent displays in my twin front windows were the linen banners I had embroidered with the words Welcome, Winner! The front door, glass surrounded by metal, clashed with the architectural style of the building, but the shop was homey, especially after I turned the sign in the door from Closed, embroidered in red satin stitches over puffy foam on white linen, to Welcome, embroidered in green letters with three-dimensional vines and flowers twining through them. I opened the door, setting my pretty sea-glass chimes jingling.
“Where’s that ladder?” Felicity bellowed.
Hiding impending giggles with a nonchalant expression, I strolled around the folding chairs toward her. “Nobody has one tall enough.”
The chimes jangled. A teenaged boy slouched in and plunked himself on a chair in the back row. With his long forelock and practiced sneer, he looked like a fifties rock star. I tossed him a welcoming smile.
“What are you doing here?” Felicity demanded. Did she know him?
The boy blushed. “My mom said I had to come.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked.
I reminded her, “School doesn’t start until after Labor Day.” Why was a teenager spending a morning of his last two weeks of summer vacation in an embroidery boutique? He could be with friends, perhaps exploring the riverside trail or enjoying the village’s wide, sandy beach. He obviously didn’t want to be here.
He ducked his head. “I dropped out.”
“Well,” Felicity snapped, “did you learn enough before you dropped out to change a light bulb?”
The boy looked at the floor as if hoping it would open up and swallow him.
I tried to take the pressure off the poor kid. “That light’s too high,” I said. “I won’t be able to find a tall ladder before the presentation.” Felicity was the one who had been harping about being ready for the winner’s arrival.
The boy jumped out of his chair, which promptly folded onto the floor. Apologizing, he set the chair up again. “I know where to get a ladder.” Pushing buttons on a cell phone, he bolted out the front door. Maybe I was lucky that Felicity had insisted on moving my bistro table away from the door. If she hadn’t, the teenager might have swept the table ahead of him out onto the porch, and it could be rolling around, banging into rocking chairs and flower pots.
Minutes later, a red pickup truck parked beside the curb in front of In Stitches. A tall, athletic man got out and began pulling a long extension ladder from the truck bed.
Uh-oh. Clay Fraser.
2
CLAY HAD RENOVATED THIS BUILDING before I bought it. Whenever I had a problem, I called him, and he always came. For a while, I’d thought we might become friends, or maybe more than friends; then I’d made some rather rash accusations, and though he’d seemed understanding, my embarrassment over my behavior had kept me more or less away from him. Lately, I hadn’t needed his help, which was just as well.
He and the boy carried the ladder into the shop. Clay was wearing jeans that were just tight enough. The sleeves of his light blue shirt were rolled up, revealing tanned and muscular forearms. The hair on them was the same dark brown as the hair on his head.
The Chandler Champion with its embroidery attachment looked ridiculous and top-heavy on a too-small table in the dog pen. My dogs whined from the other side of my apartment door. Unlike me, Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho weren’t shy about showing their desire to be near Clay. He frowned toward the dogless pen and the closed apartment door.
Penning the dogs in the back of my shop where they could be with me and my customers without causing problems had been Clay’s idea, and he’d designed and built the pen, a railing with a gate, in dark-stained oak that matched shelves he’d constructed for my shop. It all worked perfectly for me and the dogs. Would Clay think I no longer liked him and that was why I’d stopped using the pen for the dogs?
The color of his eyes reminded me of melting chocolate, and the concern in them made me consider just plain melting. “What’s wrong, Willow?”
“Light bulb.” Such astounding wit caused my face to flame. I gestured toward the ceiling and reached even greater heights of conversational ability. “Burned out.”
Felicity was in the ladder’s way. She had dragged one of my bistro chairs to the sewing machine and was adding yet more minutes to its run time. With maddening slowness, she turned off the machine and stood up.
The boy asked Clay, “Can I climb the ladder, Mr. Fraser?”
Clay bit back a grin. “Maybe we should get a new bulb, first, Russ. You steady the ladder. I’ll run next door to The Ironmonger. Be right back.”
Russ and I both said, “I’ll go.”
Clay glanced from me to Felicity and back again. “It looks like you have your hands full.” He turned to Russ and asked, “Do you know which bulb to ask for?”
Russ blushed. Hair fell over his eyes, but he was holding the ladder with both hands and couldn’t do anything about it. “No,” he admitted. He tossed his head, but the lock of hair stubbornly went back to hang in his face.
Poor kid. I was tempted to trim his hair. I had lots of scissors, pairs I owned and even more pairs for sale. None of them were meant for haircutting, but I’d make do. “Me, neither,” I admitted, smiling at Russ.
The boy stared straight ahead, at his hair, no doubt.
Clay left.
Felicity informed me, “You have to do something about those dogs.”
I was used to hearing Tally’s lonely whimper when he wanted something, so it hadn’t dawned on me that his whining was accelerating and beginning to resemble the honking of geese. Sally added yips of distress. “They’ll settle down after Clay leaves,” I answered. If they’d been in their pen where they could have greeted Clay properly instead of on the wrong side of a door, they wouldn’t be fussing.
Clay returned with a new bulb. He gripped the base of the ladder while Russ climbed up and changed the bulb.
Felicity went out onto the porch, left the door open, and hollered into her cell phone, “What do you mean he’s not coming? He has a speech to give.”
Almost hidden by a tower of cookie tins, Susannah arrived. She peered around the tins at Felicity, saw me watching her, and broke into a bigger smile than I’d seen from her in a long time.
I ran to help her carry the tins to the refreshme
nt table I had set up on one side of the store. In her early thirties, Susannah was reeling from a difficult divorce. She had been the star pupil in all the Threadville courses and workshops, so when the other four proprietors and I had decided to share an assistant, we’d offered her the job. She helped each of us one day a week and also went from store to store around lunchtime, giving us breaks. She was certified to repair machines made by every manufacturer represented in the Threadville shops. Today, Wednesday, she would work with Haylee in The Stash. She whispered, “Haylee said something amusing must be going on over here. That woman’s outfit must be it—her sewing skills are hilarious.”
“So,” I murmured in my darkest, most ominous murmur, “is she. Stick around.” We peeked into tins the other Threadville proprietors had contributed. “Wow,” I said. My friends had made T-shirt-shaped cookies and embellished them with icing to imitate intricate embroidery.
The Threadville tour bus rumbled down Lake Street. The driver usually parked a couple of blocks away, in the lot down the hill near the beach. In a few minutes, our audience would arrive.
Clay and Russ carefully shortened the ladder and carried it outside to the truck, barely missing Felicity’s flailing arm as they passed her. A piece of cardboard fell out of her jacket. She swooped down and stuck it back inside her lapel. For interfacing, she really had used cardboard, corrugated cardboard, clumsily folded where the lapels should have rolled smoothly, and she’d added it after she completed the jacket. What an odd construction method for a sewing professional to use.
Stifling giggles, Susannah and I and arranged napkins, plates, and glasses.
Her face redder than ever, Felicity stomped into the store. Frizzy might have been a more appropriate name for her. Maybe Mr. Chandler had stayed away because of a fear of home perms gone awry.
Felicity dug around in her shiny store-bought bag and handed me an index card. “Here, memorize this. You’ll have to give my speech. I’ll give Mr. Chandler’s. He’s unable to make it. A death in the family.” Usually, people didn’t look quite that angry when speaking of death.
She’d written almost exactly what I’d planned to say. I had a sudden and very fierce desire to rebel.
Clay drove away. Hair still over his eyes, Russ slunk into the store. Felicity glared at him.
“Thanks for your help, Russ,” I said.
He mumbled, “Yeah.” After undergoing a personality transplant around Clay, he had reverted to being a sullen teenager.
Felicity stumped off and stationed herself by the front door. Locals and Threadville tourists ran up onto my porch and brushed past her. Gabbing about the homework they’d done since yesterday’s class, they surrounded Susannah and me. Several of them mentioned that they hoped this presentation would be short so they could get to work.
Felicity performed a good imitation of a volcano about to bubble over.
She didn’t look happier when they gravitated to the gleaming new Chandler Champion. Maybe she had insisted we should use the dog pen as a pseudo stage because it could be closed off. But neither of us had shut the gate, and if Felicity wanted to shoo the throng of admiring women away from the sewing machine, she was welcome to try.
Russ slumped forward in his chair, elbows on his thighs, hands dangling between his knees. Why would a mother tell her teenaged son he had to attend a presentation with a bunch of chattering women?
Haylee and the other Threadville shopkeepers followed their students into my shop. Mona from the home décor shop came, too, showing a surprising amount of cleavage for an event in a thread art boutique on a Wednesday morning. Rumor had it that she was once again on the hunt for a man. But even before she’d sent her most recent husband packing, she’d dressed in clothes that neither fit nor flattered.
She thrust a flyer into my hands. “This would be a good thing for you and your little friend to do,” she whispered. Mona always shook her head no, even when she was being, in her own way, encouraging. Little friend? I tilted my head in confusion. She flapped a hand toward Haylee, who was at least a head taller than Mona. “It is the citizenly duty of the Threadville shopkeepers to help out in this effort.”
The page’s title was Application to Volunteer with the Elderberry Bay Fire Department. The subtitle was Come Join Us—We Always Need New Firefighters.
Always? How alarming. What happened to the old ones?
Suppressing a shudder, I told Mona, “I can’t join the volunteer fire department. Firefighting requires skill and strength. And knowledge that I don’t have.”
“Nonsense,” Mona countered, shaking her head. “They’ll train you and your little friend.”
“Haylee,” I corrected her.
“You both must be strong from heaving bolts of fabric around.”
Is that all she thought we did? “Are you joining?” I asked her.
She gave me a smile like I was just too, too cute. “I’m not big and strapping like you two.”
First Haylee was my “little friend,” and now she was big and strapping? No one had ever described either of us that way before. Both of us were tall and thin, and some people actually saw us as fragile, which wasn’t true, either. I suspected that Mona’s real reasons for refusing to become a volunteer firefighter had a lot to do with not wanting to wear a big clumsy outfit, mix soot in her makeup, or break a nail on a fire hose. I suppressed a grin at a mental picture of her shaking her head at a fire in hopes of encouraging it to extinguish itself.
Women milled around the Chandler Champion. Felicity crowded me. “Tell them to stop touching that machine. They’ll destroy it.”
I started to shake my head, thought of Mona, and settled for looking stern. “They’re all careful around machines. And respectful. They would never harm a sewing machine.”
“Do you know every single one of those women?”
“Most of them.” I didn’t recognize a few of the women poking at the Champion, but they probably attended classes in the other Threadville shops, and my friends could vouch for them.
“Can’t you tell them to sit down?”
I flicked the lights to get everyone’s attention.
Despite Felicity’s predictions, we didn’t have enough seats, and many of us remained standing near the door, including Felicity. She had backed out of my personal space but was still glowering, maybe because of the large crowd I’d drawn. “We can’t start until our winner arrives,” she whined. “Go say something.”
Leaving Susannah near the door to greet latecomers, I folded the fire department flyer into a pocket and walked away from the door, past rows of excited Threadville regulars, to the back of the store.
Beside the dog pen’s open gate, I turned and faced the audience. Most of the people were my students, or had been at one time or another. They beamed at me, and I forgot my annoyance with Felicity and spoke directly to them and to my friends standing by the front door. I couldn’t make eye contact with Russ. He was still studying the floor. He probably felt odd being the only male in the room. To make matters worse, no one sat within two chairs of him.
A siren interrupted my ad-libbed welcoming speech.
3
A RED SUV MARKED WITH THE WORDS Fire Chief stopped in front of In Stitches. Recruiting volunteers?
“Aha,” Felicity announced from the front door. “Better late than never. Here comes our guest of honor.” But instead of staying there to greet the winner of the sewing and embroidery competition, Felicity clomped up the aisle and stood beside me at the railing enclosing the prize Chandler Champion.
The SUV’s doors opened, and children poured out. They arranged themselves and processed—that was the only word for it—into In Stitches.
Everyone in the chairs craned around as if to see a bride. Everyone except Russ, that is. He slumped lower.
A little girl came first. A chorus of oohs and aahs burst from the audience. The child was about three and looked adorable in a pale blue dress under a ruffled white organdy pinafore. The pinafore was embroidered
with blue flowers and birds to match the dress. Golden curls tumbled to her shoulders. She was wearing stage makeup.
The next child was about eight. Her dress and the machine-embroidered flowers on her pinafore were pale yellow. Her hair was darker, but curled like the first girl’s, and she also wore makeup. She gasped for breath, and no wonder. That pinafore was so tight it wrinkled across her middle.
The third girl scowled. She appeared to be about twelve. Her dress was candy pink. It and the pink-embroidered white pinafore over it were much too short, showing off bony knees, coltish legs, and pink ankle socks teamed with black patent leather Mary Janes matching the younger girls’ shoes. The twelve-year-old’s makeup was a slash of purple lipstick that she must have slapped on without the aid of a mirror, possibly during the ride in the fire chief’s SUV. Her hair was dark and straight, and a lock fell across her forehead, like Russ’s.
Exactly like Russ’s.
Felicity called out, “Come right up here, girls, and let everyone see your mother’s winning entry in the Chandler Challenge!” The two younger girls followed her orders, but the bigger girl climbed over two Threadville tourists, fell into the chair next to Russ, and glared. Elbows on knees, Russ hid his face in his rawboned hands.
More children followed the first three. A girl who looked about fifteen came inside in jeans and a tank top. Showing what I was beginning to think of as the family sneer, she held hands with two little boys, one about four and the other about five, each wearing white cowboy shirts. The yokes of the shirts were piped in pastels and decorated with embroidery motifs matching the designs on the little girls’ pinafores. The fifteen-year-old let the two boys go, gave them shoves that propelled them to follow the two youngest girls, then clambered over her sister and Russ to sit on Russ’s other side.
