Mrs. Finley clucked her tongue and shook her head. “I told him he was crazy, that a seventy-six-year-old man had no business trying to break a wild horse, but would he listen? No, sir, he would not. He’s lucky he didn’t break his fool neck,” she muttered. “Oh, but he was a stubborn old goat.”
“So, Stormy has never been ridden?” Rob Lee asked, ignoring her editorial.
“Oh, no,” the old lady replied. “He was a pacer, a harness racer for a few years, but I don’t think he ever amounted to much. They retired him from racing and sold him to the Amish and he pulled a buggy for a while. But then, I think it was a year before we got him, he was pulling the buggy and got into an accident. I heard it was a semi-truck, but maybe it was just a pickup; I don’t know for sure. Anyway, it was a miracle nobody got killed.
“After that, Stormy wouldn’t let them put him in a harness or even touch him. He got sent to the auction and the rescue folks bought him and he ended up here. After that one time Harlan tried to ride him, he just decided to leave him be, let him run with the herd. He kept that rope halter on him with a short lead, so we can grab him in case of emergencies, but that’s it. If you’re on horseback, he’ll let you get hold of the rope and lead him along.”
Rob Lee sniffed and pulled at his nose. Holly looked toward him and she could see he was thinking; it was almost like you could see wheels and gears turning behind his eyes.
“So he gets along all right with other horses?” Rob Lee asked.
“Oh, yeah. He likes horses just fine. It’s people he can’t stand. He won’t let anybody on foot get close, and he won’t be touched for anything. That’s why he looks so scruffy,” she said, her voice at once apologetic and defensive. “We can’t get close enough to groom him.”
“I’m sure you’ve done the best you could,” Mary Dell said, touching the older woman lightly on the shoulder.
“Harlan felt bad for him. So do I. Life hasn’t been too kind to him,” she said, turning her gaze to the far corner of the paddock, where Stormy was still standing, looking out toward the road, where, earlier that day and the day before, twelve horse trailers had come and gone.
“Look at him. He’s been standing in that corner of the paddock all day. I think he’s waiting for his herd to come back for him. Poor old nag.” She sighed.
“I tried calling the rescue folks, but they couldn’t find anyone willing to take him. And I’ve done all I can. But I told Miss Holly here unless she could find an experienced handler and a good place to board him, that I flat out wouldn’t sell Stormy to her, not for any price.”
Holly saw Rob Lee’s eyes shift toward his aunt. He sniffed and they exchanged a look; then she stretched her neck and gave a quick, half nod. Rob Lee nodded back and looked toward Mrs. Finley.
“Holly can board him at the F-Bar-T. I’ll take care of him.”
Mrs. Finley furrowed her brow and clutched at the neck of her flowered blouse. “Oh, I don’t know. If something happened to this sweet young girl, or to you, Rob Lee, trying to ride that devil, I’d just never forgive myself. Maybe it’d be better to send him to the auction.”
“Oh, don’t do that!” Holly exclaimed. “Please, don’t. He’s not a devil. The buggy accident wasn’t his fault. Mrs. Finley, please. I won’t try to ride him until Rob Lee says it’s safe. Promise.” She held up her hand, Girl Scout fashion.
“It won’t never be safe to ride him,” Mrs. Finley said.
“Then I’ll pay for his board and he can live out his days at the F-Bar-T.”
The old woman frowned even deeper. “What about you?” she asked Rob Lee. “You going to try to ride him?”
“Not unless I felt sure he’d let me. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Finley looked down at the ground and muttered to herself. “I just don’t know.”
“Annie,” Mary Dell said, “Rob Lee is a good horseman and a grown man. If he survived Afghanistan, I’m sure he can take care of one old horse. He’s not going to take any chances.”
Mrs. Finley kept her eyes cast toward the ground for so long that Holly began to wonder if she’d heard what was being said to her. They all stood there, waiting. Finally, the gray head lifted.
“All right. You can have him,” she said to Holly, and then to Rob Lee, “You better talk to the vet about tranquilizers. When they brought him here, the rescue people had to sedate him to load him into a trailer.”
Rob Lee shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m not going to put him through that again.”
Her wrinkled brow wrinkled even deeper as Mrs. Finley listened to Rob Lee’s response. “Then, how do you expect to move him?”
Rob Lee lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes, looking across the field at Stormy.
“Slowly.”
CHAPTER 21
Three days later, with only five to go before they were to begin shooting, Mary Dell invited Holly to come to the Patchwork Palace for some private tutoring.
When she arrived, Mary Dell was busy going over accounts with Cady and promised she’d only be a minute. But when a customer approached, asking advice about making a baby quilt for a long-hoped-for grandchild, Holly realized this would take more than a minute.
She told Mary Dell to take her time, that she wanted to look around the shop anyway, which was true. Because Cady always met her at the cottage and brought fabrics with her—inexpensive things from the clearance rack that would be fine for practice—Holly hadn’t had a chance to spend any real time in the Patchwork Palace or see what all the fuss was about or why quilters came by the busload, sometimes driving hundreds of miles to shop there.
Though Holly was finding her crash course in quilting frustrating and stressful, as she wandered around the shop she started to see how people could get into it. Walking through the aisles of shelves crowded with beautiful bolts of fabric, stacked like lines of toy soldiers standing at attention, was kind of like taking a walk through a big box of giant crayons. How could you not smile when you were doing it? And how could you not want to reach out and touch the bolts of fabric, or start imagining all the pretty things you could make when you started playing with them?
Turning a corner, she came to the reds and found herself pulled almost magnetically to a grouping that was darker than red but lighter than burgundy, and had maybe just a drop of orange, the same color as the bricks of the old courthouse in the Square. Looking through the stacks of fat quarters, those eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch cuts of fabric, which, according to Cady, quilters collected like baseball fanatics collected trading cards, Holly was drawn to one with a swirling pattern of darker and lighter shades of brick that reminded her of ocean waves hitting a beach. She took it off the shelf, and then, before she really thought about what she was doing, found four more fat quarters of the same color but in different patterns and shades and plucked those off the shelf too. Then, thinking she’d need something more neutral to balance out those rich reds, she found a wall filled with grays and picked out a few of those, from very light, the color of an overcast sky, to a deep charcoal with tiny dots of black and thin stripes of metallic gold. There were ten fabrics in all, each folded into a neat little rectangle and wrapped with a matching satin ribbon, creating packages so pretty that just picking them up felt like she was giving herself a present.
When she walked up to the counter with her armful of tiny treasures, Cady grinned and said, “Uh-oh. Looks like somebody got the bug. Nice choices, rookie!”
Mary Dell, who was bent over a table a little way off, showing the customer who wanted to make the baby quilt how to use a big plastic ruler to make a scalloped border, popped up her head in response.
“Oooh, lemme see,” she said, pulling off her reading glasses and walking to the counter, the baby quilt customer following in her wake. “Those are so pretty!”
They were; it was true. Just looking at all those rich reds and cool grays made Holly feel happy, and the fact that Mary Dell and the other women felt the same way only added to the pleasure
of the purchase.
“I don’t have any idea of what I’m going to do with them,” Holly said, the admission making her feel a little foolish, “but I just had to have them.”
“A common malady among quilters,” Mary Dell said. “But think of it this way: Does a painter figure out exactly what she’s going to paint before going to the art supply store? No. She buys a selection of paints in advance so when inspiration strikes she is ready to capture the vision before it fades.”
Cady looked at her aunt with raised brows. “Aunt Mary Dell, that’s got to be the most poetic justification for fabric addiction that I have ever heard.”
“Thank you,” she said with a prim but playful smile. “I’ve been working on it for about the last twenty-five years. Seriously, Holly, half the fun of quilting comes from finding fabrics you can’t live without and then imagining all the possibilities. But,” she said, picking up the wavy red that had first sparked Holly’s interest, “I think these would work just perfectly for the project I have in mind for our first episode. Just let me finish showing Liz how to make a scalloped border, and then you and I can head upstairs and get to work.”
The big classroom was in use, as Pearl was teaching a class on Christmas tree skirts, so they met in the smaller one.
The room was set up with eight workstations: four tables, each with two sewing machines, two padded chairs, and an electrical strip between. There were craft-height cutting tables and ironing stations on each side of the room and a huge design wall at the front, covered in cream-colored felt so quilt blocks could be arranged and rearranged before finally being sewn together.
Mary Dell sat down at one of the tables, motioned for Holly to take the second chair, and then swiveled in her seat so she could face her young co-host directly.
Her expression was uncharacteristically somber, with no trace of a smile on her lips.
“I know that Jason is determined to make sure that the eighth season of Quintessential Quilting will be the last,” she said with no preamble. “I don’t know why he is so set on it, but he is. And he’ll do whatever he can to make it happen, including trying to play us against each other. But we’re not going to fall for that.”
Mary Dell paused. Her gaze was unblinking.
“Are we?” she prodded.
“We’re not,” Holly confirmed. “Neither of us has anything to gain from that. We’d both end up looking bad.”
“Good.”
“But I’m starting to think I’m going to end up looking bad no matter what. Just listening to you talk to that lady about bias binding and sewing curves made my head hurt.” Holly sighed. “I can’t even imagine being able to do that.”
“You will, if you keep up with it. You’ve got more talent than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got color sense, for one thing,” Mary Dell said, nodding toward the bag of brick and gray fat quarters Holly had set down on the table. “Which, I have to say, comes as a relief. I’ve always relied on Howard to help me with that part. My fabric choices can get a little . . . Let’s call them exuberant. That’s the word Hub-Jay used once,” she said, a small smile bowing her lips. “It sounds more refined than saying I’ve got no taste.”
“Now who’s not giving herself credit?” Holly scolded. “I saw you helping that lady pick out the fabrics for her baby quilt. Sure, it was bright and colorful with all that hot pink and lime green, but you didn’t go overboard. Bringing in that bright white for the border and then binding it with pink tied everything together. You’re good with fabric choices.”
“I like what I like,” Mary Dell replied, “and what I like is loud and bright. But I have learned to tone it down a little. Howard and Hub-Jay have been good influences. So, how about we both call ourselves a work in progress?”
“Fair enough,” Holly said. “I just wish I was progressing faster. Really, Mary Dell, I just don’t know how I’m going to keep up with you.”
“You can’t. Not when it comes to quilting.”
Holly opened her eyes, a little surprised by the frankness of her remark.
“That’s not an insult,” Mary Dell said, lifting one hand. “It’s just the way it is. Baby girl, I’ve been quilting since before water was wet. Two weeks ago, you didn’t even know what a bobbin was, let alone how to wind one. If you try to make out like you’re ready to play in the same league as me, you’ll end up looking foolish. And I’ll end up looking mean.
“If we’re going to pull this off, we’ve got to work as a team,” she said, leaning forward a little. “I’ve been mulling it over for the last few days and I think I’ve come up with a way to make your inexperience work for us.”
Holly had real doubts when Mary Dell began laying out her plan, but the more she listened, the more she realized that Mary Dell might be on to something.
“So, what you’re saying,” Holly said, dunking a peppermint tea bag into the paper cup of hot water Mary Dell had poured her from the dispenser in the corner of the room, “is that we look at the entire next season as a kind of . . . quilter’s college, for lack of a better term.”
Mary Dell’s bright blue eyes lit up. “Miss Holly! That is the perfect way to put it!”
She grabbed a pen from her purse and scribbled a few notes onto a legal pad she’d brought with her, continuing to talk as she wrote.
“This first season will be freshman year. Every week, we’ll look at a quilt block, each a little more challenging than the week before. I’ll teach you the basic technique for mastering that block, but then we’ll show the viewers ways to take that block and work it into all kinds of different quilts, from the most simple to the most complex. Every week will build on the week before. And if we get renewed, next season will be sophomore year—a little more advanced—then junior and so on.”
“You don’t think your current viewers will be bored by freshman year quilting?” Holly asked.
“Not if we do it right. If we can help novices gain confidence on basic techniques while offering more complex variations and techniques that will appeal to the more experienced quilter, we’ll gain viewership. Any quilter worth her salt is going to understand the concept of mastering and building on the fundamentals. It’s just like football. Hey, that’s good!” Mary Dell started scribbling again. “We should use that. Maybe we could wear football gear for the first show, drive home the point and have some fun. I know I’ve got a couple of Cowboys jerseys around somewhere.”
“Yeah, maybe not. Seems kind of hokey.”
Holly wrinkled her nose and Mary Dell looked a little disappointed.
“It’s not that I don’t think it’d be funny,” Holly said, fibbing to spare her co-host’s feelings, “but if you’re going to establish yourself in the role of teacher, an expert, you need to keep things a little more dignified. Not to say that we can’t have fun, but”—she shook her head—“no costumes.”
Mary Dell gave an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. I’m not even going to bring up my next idea.”
“Which was?”
“Having you dress up as Luke Skywalker and me as Yoda.”
Holly grinned. She really liked Mary Dell. “Terrible idea.”
“Well, then,” Mary Dell sniffed. “Maybe we should just get to work.”
While Holly cut her fabric into strips, Mary Dell explained that for the first episode, she’d be making a Courthouse Steps block, all straight lines and patches cut along the grain, with none of the pesky bias stretch that plagued Holly with the Snowballs.
It was a variation on the Log Cabin block, but instead of sewing strips around the center square in a circular motion, for the Courthouse Steps, two patches are added to opposite sides of a center square; then two more strips would be sewn to the remaining sides of the center, and so on, alternating dark fabrics with light to create the “steps” from which the block got its name.
Mary Dell thought it would be fun to film the opening segment of the episode outside on the actual steps of the old courthouse. Holly agreed.
“T
hat’s a great idea! We should try to do that whenever we can, you know? Find different locations around town. It’ll be a lot more interesting to watch—kind of a little travelogue in addition to the quilting. It’d be really good PR for the shop and the town too.”
“Yes, the thought had occurred to me,” Mary Dell said, giving her a knowing wink as she picked up Holly’s strips and carried them to the sewing machine.
It was supposed to be an easy block, and at first it seemed like it was, just a matter of sewing straight lines. But Holly was tense and anxious, trying to sew a perfect quarter-inch seam, knowing from what little experience she had that failing to do so could ruin the whole block, making it too small or too big.
The trick, Mary Dell told her, was to keep her seams just a teeny bit smaller than a true quarter inch and also to fix her eyes lower down on the arm of the machine when feeding the fabric, rather than staring straight at the needle.
“It’s like driving a car,” she explained. “You need to look down the road a ways, see what’s coming. That way you’ve got time to correct your course before you crash. Relax! You’re wearing your shoulders for earrings.” She walked up behind Holly, placed her hands on her shoulders, which were indeed hunched toward her earlobes, and then pushed them down into their normal position. “Don’t be so anxious, baby girl. Quilting is supposed to be fun!”
Holly took her foot off the pedal and gave her a dirty look.
“It will be eventually,” Mary Dell said. “You just need to quit trying so hard. Let’s try talking while you sew. That’ll distract you from trying to be Miss Patty Perfect and help you master one of quilting’s most important skills, the ability to stitch and gossip simultaneously.”
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