Threaded for Trouble (3 page)

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 refreshment 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.

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.

Another boy, a slightly younger replica of Russ, complete with the sneer, torn jeans, T-shirt, and uncombed hair, slouched in behind his siblings. With a sardonic toss of the head, he held up a white cowboy shirt trimmed in mint green for the audience to see, then bunched it between
his hands and stumbled into the row to sit beside the girl in the unfortunately tiny dress.

“And now,” Felicity announced in her nasal voice, “the winner of the Chandler Challenge, Darlene Coddlefield!”

It should have been a proud moment for Darlene Coddlefield, but as she marched into my shop, she frowned down the row of seats at her older offspring. She tossed what looked like a white cowboy shirt trimmed in candy pink onto Russ’s lap. I couldn’t hear her words, but the meaning in her attitude was obvious. “Put it on.”

Darlene Coddlefield was nearly as wide as she was high. Her eyes were bloodshot and baggy, as if she’d spent the night finishing her beautifully tailored ivory silk pants suit and ironing the children’s dresses and shirts. She trundled up the aisle and straightened the smallest boy’s collar before shaking hands with Felicity and me. Darlene’s hands were clammy.

“My, my,” Felicity said with a brightness I didn’t expect, “now we understand why Darlene won Mother of the Year back in—when was it, Darlene?”

Darlene waved her hand in front of her face as if driving smoke away. “Many years, and six children ago.” The audience laughed. “It was easier to be a good mother with only two babies.” I guessed that would be Russ and the scowling older girl.

With a grunt of disgust, Russ stood, threw the pink-trimmed shirt into the lap of the sister wearing the matching dress, and climbed over the back of his chair, which folded and slammed down onto the floor. He flung himself out the front door. My sea-glass wind chimes banged and clattered.

Together, the owners of the yarn, notions, and quilting boutiques turned to watch him stride off the porch and out of sight down Lake Street.

I couldn’t help comparing Darlene Coddlefield to these Threadville colleagues. Opal, Naomi, and Edna had met each other in kindergarten and had immediately become closer than many sets of sisters. By the end of junior high,
after reading
Macbeth
, they’d started calling themselves The Three Weird Sisters. Then, at sixteen, Opal had become pregnant, and her folks kicked her out of their home. Edna and Naomi had teamed up to help look after Opal’s fatherless child. The three women had lived together and taken turns working and going to school. They’d all ended up with degrees and professions. They’d also ended up with a clever, polite, kind, and sensible daughter whom they all adored.

Naturally, that daughter, Haylee, called them The Three Weird Mothers. When I’d moved to Threadville to open In Stitches, The Three Weird Mothers had figured out that my mother was distant in more ways than one. Opal, Naomi, and Edna had adopted me, and Haylee seemed glad to share them.

Haylee’s mothers didn’t divulge their ages, but Haylee was my age, thirty-three, so the math was easy—her mothers must be nearing or had quietly celebrated their big five-oh. Often, the rambunctious and enthusiastic women acted like they were still seventeen, and Haylee and I had to keep them out of mischief.