An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler (96 page)

Megan’s work had piled up during her absence, but instead of griping about how the other engineers on her team hadn’t picked up the slack, she was guiltily relieved to be too busy to spare Keith much thought. By Saturday, though, she knew she had to stop procrastinating. She warmed up by sending Donna an email and writing letters to Vinnie, Grace, and Julia, then steeled herself and began a letter to Keith.

Her first two drafts went straight into the trash. They were too accusing and shrill, and she knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with him if she put him on the defensive. After two more failed attempts, she considered phoning him instead, but her stomach twisted at the thought of hearing his voice again. It had to be a letter, or nothing.

She took a break to do the laundry and fix Robby his lunch, then forced herself to swallow her pride and try again. She imagined she was writing to a colleague, and this time she managed to strike a cordial, professional tone free of whining and neediness. She couldn’t bear it if he thought she was begging for his attention, although in a way she was—not for herself, but for their son.

It was difficult to invite him to visit Robby, because she knew it would hurt her to the core to see him again. She prayed he’d have the decency to leave his new wife, Gina, at home. She reminded him that school would be starting soon, and Labor Day weekend would be perfect for Robby’s schedule as well as his own.

She mailed the letter and tried to put it out of her mind for a while. The annual bustle of activity that heralded the new school year provided a much-needed distraction, but when a week passed with no reply, she began to grow anxious. Then, two days later, an envelope arrived. Inside Megan found a check for two hundred dollars filled out in loopy, girlish handwriting. The memo read “Back-to-school clothes.” There was no letter.

Fuming, Megan was tempted to tear up the check. She had asked for Keith’s time, not his money. But then practicality set in; she could hardly complain about his sporadic-at-best child support payments and then refuse to accept the money he did manage to send. But why hadn’t Keith sent so much as a sentence in response to her request? Maybe his new wife had intercepted Megan’s letter, and Keith knew nothing of either Megan’s request or the check. It was difficult to imagine Keith willingly sending Megan money, after the way he had fought for the house and the car in the divorce proceedings. He had won the car but lost the house, and ever since, his reluctance to send his child support payments clearly indicated he still held a grudge.

After a day of indecision, Megan sent another letter. Labor Day was fast approaching, she told Keith, and she would need a definite answer one way or the other. If traveling to Ohio would be too inconvenient, Robby could come to Oregon. Megan swallowed hard as she wrote the lines; she was reluctant to send Robby on a plane by himself, but she would, if there were no other way.

Labor Day came and went, and Robby started the third grade without a visit or even so much as a phone call from his father. Megan was furious and heartbroken for his sake, and her only consolation was that she had kept the proposed visit secret, just in case it didn’t work out.

Two weeks into September, another envelope came, bringing Megan a letter from Gina. “Dear Megan,” she had written, “I hope Robby’s school year is off to a good start. I’m sorry the Labor Day visit didn’t work out. Keith would have come, but I’m expecting a baby and he is saving up all his vacation days for after we deliver. Maybe next summer, Robby can stay with us for a week or so and meet his new brother or sister. All the best, Gina.”

They were expecting a baby. Gina was carrying the second child Megan longed for and would never have. And Keith, who had gone back to work the day after Robby was born and had not changed a single dirty diaper in his life, was now planning, with this new child, to make up for all the attention he had withheld from his firstborn.

Or was he? A thought struck her then: Keith had national holidays off, so Labor Day weekend wouldn’t have cost him any vacation days. And something about Gina’s letter was strangely familiar, too. Megan recognized in Gina’s strained apologies the same excuses she herself had made for Keith for so many years.

Gina was expecting, and it was while Megan was carrying Robby that Keith had first turned away from her. Surely Gina would remember that.

As Megan threw the letter away, she wished her former rival luck. Unless Keith had truly changed, she would need it.

If not for the lifeline her upcoming role in
A Patchwork Life
provided, Julia thought the new fall television schedule might have driven her to drink or to her plastic surgeon’s office for another face-lift. She couldn’t believe the cheap vulgarity that passed itself off as comedy these days, and as for the dramas, she had never witnessed such self-indulgent whining in all her life. She could click from channel to channel all day long and see nothing but beautiful twenty-somethings bemoaning the trivia of their empty lives. It sickened her almost to the point of throwing her flat-screen, high-definition television into the swimming pool, but it had been one of the few possessions she had argued out of her third husband’s clutches during the divorce proceedings, and, knowing how much he had treasured it, she intended to hold on to her trophy until its wires fused together.

Occasionally an especially inane scene would have Julia seething. Her assistant had long ago adopted the policy of leaving the room whenever Julia turned on the television, so Julia had no one to complain to except the actors on the screen. Not only was that unsatisfying, it made Julia feel uncomfortably like some elderly eccentric who had lost touch with reality. She had enough insecurities about her age without adding that one to the list.

Eventually she abandoned her critique of the fall television season and resumed practicing her quilting. After her return from quilt camp, she had sent her assistant out in search of the supplies she would need to perfect her skills. Since most of her quilting scenes involved hand-quilting, Julia set her pieced and appliqué blocks aside. At camp, one of the Elm Creek instructors had traced a pineapple motif on a piece of unbleached muslin for her; now Julia placed it on top of cotton batting and another piece of muslin and held the layers snugly together in a lap hoop. With a short needle called a “between” and a piece of cotton quilting thread, Julia worked the needle through the layers along the traced line until the picture began to emerge from the smooth muslin. As the weeks passed, the rocking motions of hand-quilting became more familiar until her work acquired a soothing rhythm. Often she would sit outside on the patio of her hilltop estate in Malibu, quilting and enjoying the fragrances of orange trees and flamevine as a gentle breeze tinkled wind chimes overhead. As her stitches became smaller and more even with practice, she wished she could show the Cross-Country Quilters how much progress she had made.

Already quilt camp and the Cross-Country Quilters had taken on an air of unreality, like something out of a vivid dream only dimly remembered. It was hard to imagine herself confiding in a group of women who were, after all, little more than strangers, especially considering how fiercely she usually guarded her privacy. Still, Julia found herself missing Elm Creek Manor and wishing for a dose of Vinnie’s sharp humor, Donna’s optimistic kindness, and the encouragement and companionship of the whole group—especially after Ares would phone with updates on the movie, reawakening Julia’s fears that she wouldn’t be able to quilt convincingly enough and the director would denounce her as a fraud.

Julia had expected the Cross-Country Quilters to write, especially Donna and Megan, who were avid email correspondents, but the weeks passed without a word. She even took to sorting her own mail, but after a few days she returned the task to her assistant. Perhaps they were waiting to hear from her first, but somehow Julia couldn’t bring herself to initiate the correspondence. Or perhaps they weren’t as close as Julia had thought. Maybe they had only exchanged addresses to be polite. It had been so long since she’d had a friend that she was unfamiliar with the etiquette of such things.

At the end of September, Julia and Ares went to the first of several script meetings. On the way to the studio, Ares filled her in on the rest of the cast. The good news was that the role of Young Sadie had been given to Samantha Key, a virtually unknown actress with only a few bit parts to her credit. She couldn’t afford to play the diva, not with Deneford, so Julia needn’t fear she’d try to expand her role at Julia’s expense. Julia had never heard of Cameron Miller, who would play her younger son, but Noah McCleod, the elder Henderson boy, had a reputation for being talented, professional, and down-to-earth. She had worked frequently with child actors on
Family Tree
, and Julia was confident she’d get along fine with the two young men.

She was less pleased to hear that Rick Rowen had won the role of Augustus. She had worked with him only once, when they had cohosted a holiday special three years before, but he had been an arrogant man then, and rumor had it he had become even worse after
People
magazine named him one of its Fifty Most Beautiful People. Only a month ago, his latest movie, an action film set in South America, had premiered at number one and held steady, which meant that he was no doubt being buried in offers for which he could name his salary. Given his elevated circumstances, Julia wondered why he had accepted a small role in a serious drama and decided that he must have signed the contract before his fortunes rose. Working with him was sure to be excruciating. Fortunately, Augustus would be dead by the second reel.

When she and Ares arrived at Deneford’s conference room, Julia realized at once that they would not be reading from the script, as indicated by the agenda faxed to her the previous day. The sheer number of agents in the room told her they were in for some negotiations first, and as much as she disliked Ares, she was suddenly glad that he had accompanied her. Rick looked bored and cocky, Samantha gazed listlessly at the table, but their agents radiated caffeinated energy. They eyed Julia with carnivorous eagerness as she entered, and only then did she note that the children and their ubiquitous mothers were not present, which suggested they were in for a brawl.

Deneford sat at the head of the table. In her younger years Julia would have seated herself at his right hand, the better to make suggestive eye contact and accidentally brush her leg against his beneath the table throughout the meeting, but in this light she knew distance would be more flattering. She chose the chair directly across from Deneford at the foot of the table, where she would be sure to catch his eye now and then. Ares took a seat at her left hand; to her right sat Ellen Henderson.

When Julia greeted her, Ellen whispered bleakly, “Did you hear? I’m out as director.”

“I know, dear,” Julia said sympathetically, and it struck her that she sounded exactly like Vinnie.

“This was supposed to be my breakthrough project.”

“It still can be. You’re still the writer. You’ll receive plenty of recognition for that.”

Just then, Deneford spoke. “Since we’re all here, let’s get started.” He turned to Rick’s agent, a young man with dark, slicked-back hair who looked vaguely familiar. “Jim, since you have the most to say, I’ll let you begin.”

“Rick isn’t happy with the script,” Jim said. “His talents aren’t being fully utilized.”

Talents?
Julia thought scathingly.

Deneford shrugged. “He liked the script just fine when he first read it.”

“That was before
Jungle Vengeance.
” Jim looked around the table as if to enlist the others’ support, which surely he knew was a wasted effort. “Let’s be honest here. Does it really make sense to kill off your male lead so early in the picture?”

“But that’s how it really happened,” Ellen interjected.

Jim gave her a withering look, then ignored her. “A lot of people are going to consider this a Rick Rowen film. They’re going to see it because they want to see Rick Rowen. Do we really want to disappoint them?”

Ares said, “You’re kidding, right? This is a Julia Merchaud film.”

You’d better believe it
, Julia thought.

“That’s funny, I thought it was a Stephen Deneford film,” Deneford said dryly. “Okay, Jim, you’ve made your point. And I agree with you to a certain extent. The last two thirds of the story—”

“Turn it into a chick movie,” Rick interrupted. Samantha stirred long enough to give him a sidelong look, but then her gaze reverted to the table-top. “I don’t do chick movies.”

“Chick movie?” Ellen bristled. “This is a movie about women—strong, intelligent women going about the difficult business of living in nearly impossible circumstances.”

Rick shrugged, puzzled. “Right. A chick movie.”

Jim leaned toward Deneford as if they were alone in the room. “We both know Rick Rowen’s presence in this picture guarantees a huge opening weekend —if word of mouth is good. It won’t be if his fans don’t get to see enough of him.”

“Now I’m barely making a cameo appearance,” Rick complained. He flipped through the script, shaking his head. “It should be Augustus, not Sadie, who keeps the farm from going up in flames. He should be the one to scare off the claim jumpers. I mean, come on, who’s going to believe a woman did all that?”