A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) (5 page)

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I left school,” Liza said. “I flunked out, your Honor. That’s why I’m here. Yesterday I had to move off campus and…” Her voice began to quaver, threatening to give way to tears but she choked them back. In spite of my irritation at being forced to play a role in this family drama, I felt a grudging respect for the way in which my niece refused to get carried away by emotion. She was definitely a Burgess.

“I didn’t know what I should do, so I caught a bus to New Bern,” she said in a more composed voice. “Mr. Spaulding was my mother’s attorney and is in charge of her estate.”

He was? He is? I shot Franklin a look, but he ignored me.

“There wasn’t much left after all her medical expenses, but he made sure my school bills got paid and, after she died, he helped me with the funeral and everything.” She shrugged. “He was nice to me.

“I don’t know why,” she continued, “but I just wanted to talk to him about what he thought I should do. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I caught a bus to New Bern. When I got to Mr. Spaulding’s office his secretary said he’d left early, to go to my aunt’s birthday party. The secretary knew my last name was Burgess; I guess she assumed I was in town for the party. She told me to go downtown to the restaurant and I’d find Mr. Spaulding there. So I did, even though I wasn’t invited to the party. There were a lot of people inside. I could see them through the front window, laughing and talking.

“The stores are open late on Thursday, so I decided to check them out while I waited for Mr. Spaulding. That’s when I went into Kaplan’s and…” she hesitated and then, for the first time, turned to look at me.

“I didn’t plan on this,” she said in a defiant tone, “and I wasn’t trying to get your attention. No matter what you might think, I’m not a thief.”

That’s funny,
I thought, tossing an arch look in her direction.
How is it you happen to have stolen goods in your possession?

Judge Gulden groaned and rubbed his face with his hands. “So, Miss Burgess, are you saying that, as of yesterday, you are no longer a college student? That you have no permanent home or address?” Still scowling, Liza nodded.

“Well, this presents something of a problem. I can’t just let you walk out of here and hope that you’ll come back when you’re supposed to. It was already complicated enough since you were going to school out of state. However, I had planned on making contact with someone at your college and asking them to be responsible for you…”

“I can be responsible for myself!” Liza snapped.

“Yes, we can all see that,” I mumbled under my breath.

“Hey!” Liza shouted. “Who asked you? I never asked you to come down here! You can just keep out of this!”

“That is perfectly fine with me. I never wanted any part of this to begin with.”

I rose from my chair and was getting ready to walk out the door when Harry pointed a finger at me and said in a commanding tone, “Abigail! Sit down!”

I hesitated, but the look on his face told me I’d better comply. Smoldering, I slowly lowered myself back into the chair while the judge started speaking to Liza.

“Miss Burgess, you may think you are capable of being responsible for yourself, but in the eyes of this court, that is clearly not the case. And Abigail,” he continued, turning to me, “you may not want any part of your niece’s life, but given her current living situation, there really isn’t another choice.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, the gist of Harry’s meaning beginning to dawn on me. “Are you saying that…”

He nodded to me and then spoke to Liza and me in turn. “Miss Burgess, I am releasing you to the custody and recognizance of your Aunt Abigail. Abigail, from this moment forward, you are responsible for your niece—for her care, her conduct, and for making sure she returns to my court in thirteen months’ time.”

It wasn’t possible! He couldn’t mean it! I started to tell him exactly that and Liza was doing the same thing, but he wasn’t listening.

“Ladies!” he bellowed, stunning us into silence. “Enough! That is how I have ruled and that is how it will be. Unless, of course, you’d rather we explore some other options, trials, jail-time, that sort of thing?” He paused as if waiting for us to respond before getting to his feet. No one said a word.

“In that case, I’ll be going. I’m already thirty minutes behind schedule,” he muttered to himself, walking out without even saying goodbye.

I couldn’t believe what had just happened.

“He can’t be serious,” I said, turning around and looking at Franklin, who was looking at me with an expression that, had I not been certain that he had to realize the disastrous nature of the situation, might have passed for amusement. “This will never work! Not in a million years.

Franklin didn’t say anything, just stood there with that odd look on his face.

Mr. Corey picked up his briefcase. “Well, it looks like we’re all finished here. Mrs. Burgess-Wynne,” he said breezily, nodding to me before walking out the door, “you’re certainly fortunate to number someone as prominent and wise as Judge Gulden among your friends. I’d say you got very lucky today.” He grinned in a manner that told me how he really felt, that far from being “let off the hook,” I, the innocent bystander to this whole affair, had just been handed a thirteen-month sentence.

Turning to look at my scowling, belligerent, delinquent niece, I couldn’t have agreed more.

S
tanding in a puddle of not-quite-subsided water, the plumber shook his head.

“A quilt shop? In New Bern? Lady, you must be crazy. You won’t last six months.”

“So I’ve been told”—I yawned, weary from a night of bailing—“about six hundred times. Just figure out how to fix the pipe and give me the estimate, would you please? I’ll be upstairs, making coffee. Would you like a cup?”

“Oh yeah. That’d be great. Thanks. With cream if you’ve got it.”

“I do.”

I trudged up the wooden staircase at the back of the shop that led to my small apartment and plugged in the coffeemaker before flopping onto the sofa. When I’d peered through the dirty window of the shop, more than six months before, and decided that this filthy, decrepit ruin of a building was the stuff dreams were made of, I didn’t realize that there was an apartment above the store. But then again, there were a lot of things I hadn’t realized six months ago. And it was probably just as well. If I’d completely understood what I getting into, I might have changed my mind.

When I went back to Texas to pack up the house and have my things shipped to Connecticut, almost everyone thought I’d lost my mind. When I asked my neighor, Maureen Stimmons, to check the mailbox for a day or two after the moving truck left, just to make sure the mail was being forwarded properly, she was quite vocal in her disapproval.

“A quilt shop? You’ve never even held a full-time job! Evelyn, if you ask me, I think you’re a few sandwiches short of a picnic,” she declared, which was her way of saying she thought I was crazy. It’s more colorful and maybe a teeny bit more polite than just coming out and telling someone they’re nuts, but it means the same thing. There’s a lot of that in Texas.

But I hadn’t asked her, so I just smiled and said good-bye. My mother had an old saying too; not as colorful, but it had always stood me in good stead: If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. And I definitely didn’t have anything nice to say to Maureen or, for that matter, to most any of my former friends—if you could call them that.

For the previous couple of decades, we’d lived in the same neighborhood, wheeled our babies and walked our dogs together, been in each other’s babysitting co-ops, belonged to each other’s book clubs, served on the same PTAs and high school booster clubs and church committees, gone to each other’s Mary Kay Cosmetics parties, and yet, when it came to my divorce, most of those women dropped me like a hot potato, as if I suddenly carried a contagion that threatened to infect their own marriages.

When I saw them in the grocery store, they would ask how I was holding up, their faces a picture of sympathy. Initially, I’d told them the truth, how devastated I felt, how betrayed, how foolish, how lost. For a minute or so they’d keep their eyes fixed to mine, clucking sympathy, and nodding in all the right places, but then they’d look at their watches, suddenly recalling an appointment and scurrying off, promising we’d have lunch real soon, but we never did. It didn’t take me long to realize that when someone asks you how you are, “Fine” is really all they want to hear. So the fact that my former friends disapproved of my plans didn’t bother me a whit; I’d written them off months before.

There was one person, however, who thought my move to Connecticut was a good one—Mary Dell Templeton. I’d met her only a few months before Rob came home and announced that he wanted a divorce, but I don’t know how I’d have gotten through it without her. She was a gift from God. Isn’t that strange? Here I was, surrounded by people who’d known me for years, and in the end a woman whom I’d just met turned out to be the best friend I had.

Mary Dell is a native Texan, the real deal. She has a voice like praline syrup, dark and honeyed, and I never saw her without a Dr. Pepper close at hand. We met at the fabric store, where we were both taking an appliqué class. She had recently moved from Waco and was a first-rate quilter. Later, when I went to her home, I saw that the wall of her sewing studio was studded with ribbons she’d won for her original quilt designs, but her skill was obvious from the start. When I expressed surprise that she was bothering to take a class, she said, “Baby Girl, there’s always more to learn, you know what I mean? Ripe fruit rots. Isn’t that right, Howard?”

Howard was Mary Dell’s son. He was about Garrett’s age and had Down’s syndrome. He accompanied his mother to every quilting class because, as Mary Dell said, “Howard’s got a gift for picking out just the right fabrics. Me? I can sew, but I got no more color sense than I got fashion sense, do I, Howard?”

“No, Mama,” Howard said with a regretful shake of his head. “None at all.”

Which would cause Mary Dell to laugh and me to join in because it was so true. With Howard’s help, Mary Dell’s quilts radiated a subtle vibrancy that set them apart from the ordinary, but when it came to her wardrobe, subtlety went out the window. She liked to mix bright colors and bold patterns, usually several within the same outfit, as if she were a walking, talking crazy quilt. And topping it all off were her astounding earrings: enormous hoops, dangly beaded chandeliers that nearly brushed her shoulders, and huge clip-ons studded with geegaws and rhinestones that would have come in real useful if she’d ever been stranded on a desert island and needed to signal a passing ship.

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I like them and I’m the only one I’m looking to please. The way I see it, little earrings are for little girls, and I’m a woman. W-O-M-A-N!” she declared, and then she said it again, just for good measure.

Though we’d only known each other for a couple of months, on the day I showed up at class with bags under my red-rimmed eyes, Mary Dell quickly assessed the situation. She insisted on taking me out to lunch after class and listened while I sobbed out my heartache over a pile of extra-spicy buffalo chicken wings. It was the longest I’d ever seen her sit without saying anything.

“I’m sorry,” I sniffed, blowing my nose into a paper napkin then adding it to the tear-soaked pile next to my plate. “People are going to think I’ve lost my mind, crying in public like this.”

“No such thing,” Mary Dell assured me. “It’s just the wings—all that hot sauce is making your eyes tear up. Here, drink some more Dr. Pepper. The sugar’ll do you good.”

From that day forward, Mary Dell was by my side. She called me every day and made up all kinds of excuses to get me out of the house, insisting that she and Howard needed dates for lunch, fabric shopping, shoe shopping, and quilt shows. And when I came back from Connecticut and announced my plans, Mary Dell was my cheerleader, telling me that I was absolutely up to it, helping me begin working on my business plan, brainstorming and daydreaming about the kinds of fabric I should stock, even helping load the boxes into my car for my trip north.

I was excited and nervous when we said good-bye in the driveway, but Mary Dell gave me confidence, saying, “You’re going to be a real big success! This is going to be your lucky year. I’m sure of it!”

“Really? Why?”

“Because you’re due, Baby Girl!”

At the time, I’d found some logic in her argument, so I drove to Connecticut and a new life, certain that my fortunes were about to change. But that was six months before. Recently, my confidence had begun to wane. Waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of running water and stumbling downstairs to discover four inches of wet ruining the freshly painted walls and the carpeting that had been installed just the day before hadn’t helped matters.

The night before, I’d been so busy running around trying to find the water shut-off valve and bailing that I really didn’t stop and consider the magnitude of this setback. But now, lying back on the sofa with my eyes closed, listening to the steady drip of the coffeemaker, I realized that leak was going to seriously delay my opening.

“Again!” I groaned aloud and clutched a sofa pillow to my stomach, then called out to the ceiling, “Why? Why does everything have to happen to me? Couldn’t you cut me some slack, just this once?”

“Sorry? Are you talking to me?” the plumber asked, standing with one foot in the door, not quite committed to entering my apartment. I sat up and tossed the pillow aside.

“No, I was talking to God. Actually, I was just complaining to God, but don’t worry about it. He’s used to it.”

The plumber nodded slowly and stared at me, trying to decide if I was joking or not.

“So,” I asked, “what’s the damage?”

He smiled, clearly relieved to be on more familiar ground. “Well, it could be worse—a lot worse. There’s only one leak. It’s a big one, but it won’t be that hard to fix. I can get started on it today, probably finish tomorrow or the day after. Considering the age of the building, the pipes are in pretty good shape. You shouldn’t have any more trouble once this is fixed.”

“How much is it going to cost?”

“Not too bad. Maybe fifteen hundred depending on time and materials. Definitely no more than seventeen fifty,” he declared and then, seeing the look on my face, quickly added, “but don’t worry! I’m sure you can bill the landlord for it. You don’t own the building, do you?”

“No, I’m leasing. I signed a two-year lease with the stipulation that I wouldn’t have to pay anything for the first six months while I did the remodeling. At the time, I thought I was so clever. I was sure I’d have my doors open in three months.” I rolled my eyes at the memory of my own naïveté.

“But first there was a holdup on the closing of my house in Texas, so I didn’t have the money to start remodeling, then I unknowingly hired an architect who was the estranged ex-husband of the woman who issues building permits, then my sheetrocker decided to go to Florida to pick up some work after hurricane season, then I managed to order the only carpet in the store that was backordered for a month, not that anyone thought to tell me this at the time! And then, just as a little extra bonus, my painter won sixty-three thousand dollars in the lottery and decided to give up painting and go to law school!”

“Oh, you know Tommy?” the plumber asked brightly. “Yeah, wasn’t that something? First time he ever bought a lottery ticket, and it turns out to be a winner. You know, I said to him…” He stopped and looked at me. “Oh. Sorry. Yeah, you’ve had a run of bad luck, that’s for sure.”

I nodded grimly. “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

He grinned. “Is that one of those Texas sayings? My cousin’s wife is from there, and she’s always saying stuff like that. Like when Tommy won the lottery, she said he was so lucky he could sit on a fence and the birds would feed
him
.” He laughed.

“Of course, it wasn’t true. Tommy was real sick with Lyme disease year before last, and then, when he finally got well, a guy ran into him and totaled his truck. The insurance company didn’t want to pay but half of what it was worth. That’s why Tommy decided he wanted to go to law school, so I was real happy for him when he won that money, you know? He was due.”

I bit my lip and decided not to comment.

“What it all comes down to,” I continued, “is that, as of last week, I had to start paying rent on a shop I’ve spent twenty thousand dollars fixing up but has yet to make its first dollar or welcome its first customer.”

“Well,” the plumber observed, “at least you’ve been able to live rent free for six months. That’s worth something. And it’s a nice place you’ve got here. Small. But nice.”

I looked around at the apartment and sighed. “Small” was the word, all right—just one bedroom and bath with a tiny closet, and this room, the living-sewing-dining-kitchen area. But it had a real wood-burning fireplace, which I’d always wanted but never had, exposed brick walls, the perfect backdrop to display my favorite quilts, and two tall windows that let in plenty of sunlight and looked out onto the cobbled courtyard. There was just enough room for everything I needed: my sofa, the easy chair with my standing quilt hoop, a scarred oak table and four chairs I’d found in one of the antique stores, and, most importantly, my sewing machine and cutting table, tucked neatly into a well-lit corner. He was right. It was a nice apartment, and, up until last week, it hadn’t cost me a thing to live here.

“Thanks. I like it, too,” I said, standing up and taking three strides to get from living-sewing to dining-kitchen. “Coffee’s ready. Would you still like a cup?”

“Sure. That’d be great.”

I opened the cupboard and took out two coffee mugs. “You said cream and sugar?”

“No. Just cream. If you’ve got it. Otherwise black is fine.”

“No problem,” I assured him as I opened the refrigerator door, “I just bought some yesterday, and—oh no!” I cried and then turned my face to the ceiling again. “I suppose you think this is funny!” I called out, my voice cracking.

Concern creased the plumber’s brow, and he stepped up behind me, gingerly.

“Lady, you okay? What is it? Oh jeez. That’s a shame,” he said as he peered into the open refrigerator. “All your food is spoiled. The leak must have shorted out the power to your fridge. Well, at least you still got power everywhere else. But it don’t smell too good, that’s for sure.”

“No,” I echoed softly, “it sure don’t.”

“Hey, lady. Cheer up. It’s not that bad. You’re not going to cry or anything are you?” I shook my head silently. The plumber looked relieved. He pulled on his nose, thinking.