Impressed, Porter reached out and pumped Mary Dell’s hand. “Well, that’s terrific! A thing like that could really put New Bern on the map! Bring in the tourists. Let ’em know the Hamptons aren’t the only place to spend their money.”
Lydia nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right. And Evelyn has invited me to participate in the broadcast. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course, I’m sure she’ll want you there, too. After all, you’ll certainly want to include New Bern’s most prominent political figure in your program, won’t you, Evelyn?”
My head suddenly started to hurt and it wasn’t from the wine. “Well, yes, normally I would, of course, but it is a show about quilting and…”
“Wonderful!” Porter boomed. “I’ll have someone from my office call you next week. Lydia, we’ve got to run now. I’m supposed to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at the game. It was nice to meet you, Miss Templeton,” he said, grasping her hand again before walking to the door with Lydia on his arm. “Good night, everyone.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked once the door was closed and the Mosses were out of earshot. “Not only has Lydia, who as far as I know can’t even thread a needle, horned her way in on this broadcast but now she wants to bring her husband in, too? This is a nightmare. All I wanted to do was raise a little money for breast cancer research and suddenly I’m surrounded by gate-crashers and groupies!
“Seriously, Mary Dell. This is a bad omen. Let’s just forget about doing the show here. I know you’re trying to do a good deed, but the whole thing is getting out of hand.”
“Hush now,” Mary Dell said. “Don’t go getting your bloomers in a twist. Pull yourself together, Evelyn. So the mayor, or the First Electman…”
“Selectman,” I corrected.
“If the First Selectman and his wife want to be on the show, fine. Let them. We’ll stick them in a corner somewhere. They’re just two people. What matters is that by the time this show airs, Cobbled Court Quilts will be a household name.”
“That’s not why I agreed to do this.”
“I know,” Mary Dell soothed. “I know that’s not why you’re doing it, but think, Evelyn! You’ve got a chance to really do some good! You could help raise thousands upon thousands for breast cancer research! And did Sandy tell you? We’re planning on having your doctor on the broadcast.”
“Dr. Finney?”
Sandy jumped in. “That’s right. We thought it would be a good idea to have her talk about the importance of regular mammograms and we’ll have her use a model to show the viewers how to perform self-exams. Charlie is exaggerating the size of our viewing audience, but it is considerable. Think of the chance to educate people about early detection! This broadcast will be about more than just quilting, it’ll be about saving people’s lives.”
I was silent for a moment, thinking. “But, couldn’t you just do a show about breast cancer anyway?”
“We could,” Sandy said, “but the story of how you risked everything to open your own shop, and were diagnosed with breast cancer right before hosting your first Quilt Pink Day is so compelling. Women are going to be inspired by your story, Evelyn, and by your recovery. That’s going to make them more willing to go in for early screening.”
I knew there was something to what Sandy was saying. Sometimes people ignore the signs and symptoms of their disease because they are afraid of finding out the truth. Stories of breast cancer survivors and understanding how treatable the disease can be, especially in the early stages, can make women more willing to engage in early detection, and early detection saves lives.
“Charlie? What do you think I should do?”
His handsome blue eyes were full of encouragement. “I think it’s a great opportunity for you to help other people and, knowing you like I do, I suspect you’ve already made up your mind.”
I took a deep breath. “You’re right. This is too important to pass up. But, I’m just so nervous.”
Charlie put his arm around my shoulder and then reached up to brush the hair off my face. “You needn’t be. You’re absolutely up to this. And I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
“You will?”
He nodded.
“Well, you can start by not saying anything more about millions of people tuning in to watch the show.”
“So noted,” Charlie said. “So that’s it, then? You’re going to do it?”
“I guess I am.”
“That’s the spirit!” Charlie cheered and everyone else joined in, even Ben, who had finished eating and was looking for a waitress, probably wondering what was for dessert.
“This calls for a toast!” Charlie declared, getting up from the table. “Mary Dell, your glass is empty. I’m going to open another bottle of that pinot noir you like so much.”
“Oh, no,” she protested. “Charlie, darlin’, I really couldn’t.”
“Don’t be stupid, woman. You’re staying with Evelyn tonight. That’s a one-block walk from here. Of course, you can,” he insisted as he headed over to the bar.
Mary Dell turned toward me, the sparkle in her eyes matching the sparkle in her crystal chandelier earrings. “I like that man so much.”
6
Ivy Peterman
A champagne-colored sedan pulled up at the bus stop. It was raining so hard that, until I rolled down the window, I didn’t realize the driver was Abigail.
“Ivy? What are you doing standing out here in this deluge?”
“My car broke down.”
“What? Again?” Abigail pursed her lips and clucked, as if my car breaking down had been a matter of extremely poor planning on my part. Much as I appreciated all Abigail had done for me, her high-handed manner could be irritating. It wasn’t like I enjoyed standing at the bus stop in the pouring rain. Of course, it might have helped if, before I’d left the shop, I’d remembered that the buses only ran every forty minutes instead of every twenty after five-thirty. I’d have stayed inside a bit longer before venturing into the downpour.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” Abigail ordered. “Get in. I’ll drive you home. I’ve got a board meeting to attend at the Stanton Center.”
My sodden clothes and hair dripped a rivulet onto the seat. Abigail pursed her lips again, reached behind the seat, pulled out a towel, and handed it to me.
“Here. Franklin insists on bringing his dog, Tina, with us when we go on hikes. She’s a big darling of a black Lab but she makes a mess of my upholstery. I started keeping a towel in the car to dry off her muddy feet. It’s clean. Use it to dry off a bit.”
“Thanks,” I said, wrapping the towel around sections of my sopping hair and squeezing out the water. “Sorry about dripping on your upholstery.”
“That’s all right. It’s leather.” Abigail pulled into the road quickly, without bothering to use a turn signal, ignoring the protesting honk of a white SUV she’d just cut off, as if she were accustomed to living in a world where others yielded to her. Looking at her, with her perfectly coiffed hair the exact same shade as the string of pearls that circled her long, elegant neck and hung to rest above the pearl buttons of a powder-blue cashmere cardigan that probably cost more than my last paycheck, it was easy to believe that traffic—or crowds, or the seas—parted for her. Abigail, I was sure, had always had things her own way and probably always would.
I flexed my toes inside my shoes and felt water squish out of the stitching. Some people had everything handed to them, I thought. It wasn’t fair.
Abigail pulled up to a stoplight, waiting for the signal to turn green, and looked at me curiously. “Where is your umbrella?”
“I don’t have one!” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.
“Oh.” She lifted her chin as she made the turn. “I see.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Abigail. I’ve had a bad day. First the car wouldn’t start, then I hurt my ankle running to the bus stop, and then I got caught in that downpour. Your coming along to offer me a ride is the first good thing that’s happened to me si
nce I woke up. Sorry I snapped at you.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t trying to make you feel foolish. It just seemed odd to me that someone as bright as you are would have forgotten to bring her umbrella with her on a day when it’s raining cats and dogs. It never occurred to me that you didn’t own one.”
“Well, if you have to choose between buying school supplies for your daughter or an umbrella for yourself, school supplies win every time. Besides, when I left the apartment this morning, I hadn’t figured I’d be taking the bus, so even if I had an umbrella, I probably wouldn’t have brought it with me. See?” I said cheerfully, hoping to ease past the awkward moment. “I’m obviously not as bright as you thought.”
Abigail returned my smile, arching her eyebrows as she pressed her foot farther down on the gas now that we were in the less populated part of town where there were fewer police cruisers on the lookout for speeders. “Somehow I doubt that. Bethany is as bright as a new penny and, in my experience, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. In another situation, I might suppose she could have inherited that from her father. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I’m guessing he wasn’t all that intelligent. If he was, you and the children wouldn’t be here in New Bern, would you?”
I didn’t respond. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss my invented past with Abigail. But I did appreciate her insight. For all her imposing, sometimes intimidating aura of self-certainty, she meant well. And she’d certainly been kind to the kids.
“I’m sorry you’re having a bad day. My own hasn’t been exactly red letter,” she said, launching into an explanation before giving me a chance to ask for one.
“I am not looking forward to this meeting. It’s just going to be another exercise in futility, everyone sitting around the conference table grumbling and groaning about the need for more emergency and transitional housing to help women like you, and reaching no consensus about how to solve the problem. At the end of three hours, we’ll be lucky if we’ve agreed on so much as when to hold our next meeting! And the whole time we sit there, drinking coffee and doing nothing, the waitlist of families needing our services grows longer. It’s so frustrating!”
“Well,” I said slowly, not quite understanding why the solution to this problem wasn’t obvious to Abigail, “why don’t you get a new building? Something bigger.”
“Of course, that’s what we’d like to do. We’ve discussed it at excruciating length, but it isn’t as easy as just digging a foundation and putting up walls. To begin with, there’s the question of money. The kind of facility we’d need would cost millions, perhaps tens of millions. I’d be perfectly willing to pay for it through the Wynne Family Foundation. But Donna Walsh, the director, feels very strongly that it must be a community-wide fund-raising effort, something that people in town could all get behind. If I just swooped in and paid for it, Donna thinks it could start a backlash against the very families we’re trying to help.” Abigail drew her eyebrows together thoughtfully.
“I suppose there’s something to that,” she mused. “We don’t want people to start looking at the shelter residents as an alien population that has been imposed upon them without their input or consent. But a big fund-raising effort can take years to mount. We’ve got people knocking on our door who need help now, not ten years from now!”
“I can see why you’re frustrated.”
“And that’s not the half of it. Even if we had the money in hand today, I’m not sure where we’d find land in a location that would be suitable for a project of this size. We need space to house at least ten families. And in a central location, somewhere close to schools, community services, and public transportation.”
This subject hit too close to home. My resolution to say as little as possible melted like an ice cream cone on a summer day.
“You can say that again!” I huffed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that we were able to move into the Stanton Center, but it would sure make things easier if it weren’t so far off the beaten path.
“Take today; when my car wouldn’t start I had to jog a mile to catch a bus and ended up late for work. Evelyn’s a good boss—she understands that things happen—but someone else’s employer might not. Being late to work even once might cost a woman her job. After housing, transportation is the biggest problem most of us face. We simply can’t afford to buy reliable cars, not to mention the gas, insurance, and maintenance to keep them running. If we could live closer in and on the bus line, I’d get rid of my car tomorrow! Everything in New Bern is so close that I could walk to most of the stores. If I didn’t have the expense of owning a car, it would make it much easier to save money.”
Abigail nodded firmly as she made a hard right into the parking lot of the Stanton Center. “You’re right. Absolutely right. But that’s the problem. New Bern is an old New England town and all the in town lots of any size were built on decades ago. The only available building lots around here are either too small for our purposes, or even farther off the beaten path than what we have now. I’ve racked my brain, but I can’t see a solution to this. Not a good one, anyway.”
She spied an empty parking spot between two cars, wedged her sedan between them at an alarming speed, and set her parking brake, stomping on the pedal as if it were some sort of poisonous insect. “I’m simply out of ideas.”
“It’s too bad some of those big mansions in New Bern, you know, those giant places over on Proctor, aren’t for sale,” I said jokingly. “A couple of weeks ago, we went for a walk down that street. Those houses sure are something. One of those places would be big enough to hold ten families.”
I smiled, remembering the day. The calendar had only just turned to spring. Crocuses were blooming in the flower beds that had been covered with snow only a few days before. At one house, the crocuses were sprouting at odd spots all through the lawn, as if they’d just sprung up on their own, like wildflowers in a field, though I doubted that was the case. I couldn’t see people in this neighborhood just letting any old flower pop up in their lawn. Probably someone had planted them there to give the impression of wildness, but that was all right. They were pretty, no matter how they’d gotten there.
The sun was warm. Bobby kept pulling off his hat, a knitted stocking cap with two brown and white ovals that made him look like a teddy bear. He looked so cute, but I knew that by this time next year, he’d balk at being seen wearing a teddy-bear hat, just like he was beginning to balk at riding in the stroller. When I was little, my dad used to joke that he was going to put me in a pickle barrel to keep me from getting any bigger. Now I understood what he was talking about. My baby was almost a little boy and my little girl halfway to grown. Make that three quarters.
She’d insisted on being the one to push Bobby’s stroller, walking behind it like a miniature mother as we ooohed and ahhhed over the enormous mansions and talked about which houses we’d like to live in if we were ever rich.
My favorite was a sprawling white colonial with black shutters and six dormers tucked into the roofline. The main part of the house was huge to begin with, but it was clear that, over the years, people had added on to the original structure, tacking on a solarium here or a library there as their needs and taste in architecture had changed. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest house on the street, but something about the evolution of this home appealed to me, maybe because I liked to see how each generation built upon the foundation of the one that came before. The roofline was slightly bowed, and yet it looked like it had always been there and always would be.
“You’d never run out of guest rooms in a house like that,” I said to Bethany. “On the other hand, maybe you’d have a hard time getting the guests to go home. And of course, there’d be all those bathrooms to clean. Still,” I said wistfully, “it would sure be something to live in a house like that, don’t you think so, peanut?”
Bethany nodded noncommittally, obviously not as enamored with the house as I was. “I like that one,” she said
, pointing off to the far right.
“Which one?” I tried to track my eyes in the direction she was pointing.
“There,” she said, stabbing the air with her finger. “That little white one next door—that happy house. See? It’s smiling!”
I looked again and laughed. She was pointing to a smaller building. Two six-over-six windows sat on either side and slightly above a red front door with three bull’s-eye glass panes across the top. The second story had narrow eyebrow windows arranged in perfect symmetry over larger six-by-sixes on the main floor. I saw what Bethany meant; if you used your imagination, the door looked like an open, laughing red mouth and the windows like smiling eyes. “You’re right. It’s a happy house.”
Bethany pointed to the big white mansion next door. “Do you think the people who live here are happy, too?”
“Well, if they’re not, they ought to be. I could sure be happy living in a place like this.”
“But maybe not,” Bethany said sagely. “We lived in a big house before and we weren’t happy there, were we, Mommy?”
“No,” I whispered, remembering the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch house in an upscale suburban neighborhood where we’d lived for eight years; the house where I’d become an expert in the art of using foundation and concealer to mask my latest bruises because I didn’t want the neighbors to know that our house wasn’t as happy as it looked from the outside. “No, we weren’t.”
“I like where we live now,” Bethany said, referring to our tiny apartment. “But it would be nice to live in a house that smiles.”
Abigail smacked the dashboard with her hand, startling me out of my reverie. “That’s it!” she exclaimed. “The perfect solution! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
“Think of what before?”
“A Proctor Street house! You’re right: If it was modeled into separate apartments, it could easily house ten families. The neighborhood is quiet, within walking distance to schools and the downtown area where most jobs are, and it’s just two blocks from the bus line! Brilliant idea!”
A Thread of Truth Page 5