A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) (7 page)

I
t was a Saturday in midsummer, which meant that even at seven-twelve in the morning, the Blue Bean Coffee and Baking Company was crowded. The bells above the door jingled cheerily as I walked inside, and the line of customers waiting for their morning fix of java turned to look at me.

After only a few months in New Bern, it was easy for me to distinguish the tourists from the locals; it was all about the clothes.

The tourists—or the NFH, as Charlie called them, which stood for Not-From-Here—fell into two fashion categories: those who were from New York and owned only black clothing, and those who were also from New York and tried to fit into the New England landscape but didn’t. The latter sported a kind of Ralph Lauren country-preppy-chic with fabrics so crisp and bright you knew they’d been purchased at Saks the day before—a dead giveaway.

The locals were the ones wearing the authentic version of New England style that designers romanticized—run-over loafers worn with no socks, faded cotton button-downs, slightly wrinkled chinos, and, because a summer rain had chilled the air, pilled, shapeless sweaters with varying degrees of wear at the elbows. New Englanders believe in getting value for their money, and as long as the yarn stayed more or less knit together, they kept wearing the same sweaters they did every year. Fashion trends don’t enter into it at all. I know a man well into his fifties who proudly wears the same blue cashmere his mother bought for his freshman year at Yale. It’s stretched so tight over his post-freshman stomach that you can see pinpoints of his undershirt peeking through the weave, but he insists that it still has plenty of wear in it. He’s a true-blue Yankee.

All of them, locals and NFH alike, looked grumpy. The NFH because they couldn’t understand why these yokels didn’t take a tip from Starbucks and hire enough people for an assembly line instead of relying on one seventeen-year-old girl to take orders, ring them up, and then, one at a time, and taking her time, brew, steam, ice, blend, or foam each individual drink.

Likewise, the locals were irritated because they knew if these people who were Not-From-Here were somewhere else, they’d have had their coffee twenty minutes ago. And though my livelihood depended on the patronage of both groups, at the moment I stood firmly on the side of the locals. I needed my coffee, and I needed it now.

Sitting at one of the Blue Bean’s only two tables, a man rattled a newspaper as he turned the page and cleared his throat. It was Charlie. He lowered the paper and peered over the top.

“You’re late,” he said, holding out a cardboard cup. “I was thirty seconds from drinking your coffee.”

“Sorry.” I stepped out of the line and pulled up a chair. The other customers, still caffeine deficient, glared at me, jealous of my good fortune.

“Thanks for ordering for me. I thought you’d already come and gone.” Several months before, I’d run into Charlie at the Blue Bean and it had become our habit to have our morning coffee together. I dug three dollars out of my purse to pay him back. He put the money in his pocket and then folded up his paper.

“How can you possibly be late? You only live half a block and one flight of stairs from here. Looking at the state of your hair, I know it wasn’t because you were up there primping in front of your mirror.”

“Thanks very much. It’s not like you’re so much to look at in the morning yourself.”

“True, but Irishmen are known more for wit and our words than looks. Rakish and frumpy—it’s part of my charm.”

“Seems to me that you rack up a lot of things to your Irish charm.”

“Well, I’m a charming man.” He shrugged.

“So you are. At times.” I took a first sip of coffee, closing my eyes and savoring the moment.

“Mmmm! I needed that. I didn’t get to bed until two.”

“Out salsa dancing, were you? Having yourself a little TGIF party?”

“Not quite. More like trying to balance my books and then doing it again, hoping to come up with some different figures.” I yawned.

“And did you?” Charlie asked.

I shook my head. “Sadly, no. If something doesn’t change, drastically, and soon, the naysayers of New Bern might turn out to be right in their predictions; Cobbled Court may not live to celebrate its six-month anniversary.”

Charlie looked at me, his blue eyes concerned. “Oh, come now. It can’t be as bad as all that. The grand opening was just two months ago. You started out so well.”

He was right. I had.

In spite of the flood caused by the broken pipe and some delay in receiving my first shipments of fabric, Cobbled Court Quilts opened its doors for business right after Memorial Day, just in time for the tourist season. It was a huge relief. A good summer season was crucial to my survival; I could expect to make as much as sixty percent of my annual income between Memorial and Labor days.

To attract customers on my first day of business, a beautiful Saturday, I took out an ad in the local newspaper and hung banners saying Grand Opening at both entrances to Cobbled Court. I even hired one of Charlie’s off-duty dishwashers to hand out flyers to people on Commerce Street advertising the grand-opening sale offering ten fat quarters for the price of seven and fifteen percent off all bolt fabrics and classes, plus refreshments and a drawing for a mariner’s compass quilt I’d made as a class sample. That was Mary Dell’s idea. When I’d phoned with the big news that, at long last, I was ready for business, she suggested the raffle as a good way to build a customer mailing list.

“Plus, if folks come in and take a look at the quilt, they’ll be more likely to sign up for the class,” she said.

“Great idea! And even if they aren’t interested in that particular pattern, I’ll have their names and addresses so I can send them a flyer whenever I have a sale or a new class brochure. Thanks for the idea, Mary Dell. After all this time, I almost can’t believe that this is actually happening—I’m about to open my own quilt shop! It’s just so exciting!”

“Well, I’m excited for you, darlin’,” Mary Dell drawled. “And I’ve got some news myself. I hadn’t wanted to tell you before ’cause I wasn’t sure it was really going to happen, but I got the call yesterday…” She paused just long enough to give me a chance to guess her news.

“Don’t tell me!” I squealed. “Your book! They’re going to publish it!”

When we’d met, Mary Dell told me she’d written a quilting book that she’d titled
Family Ties
. It gave advice on quilting with children and featured a variety of unique patterns, from the simple to the complex, that families could do together. She’d written it when Howard was little and sent it out to publishers, but none of them had been interested. Recently, noting the increased interest in all kinds of crafts, she’d decided to try again, obviously with more success than she’d had on the first go-round. “Oh, Mary Dell, that is amazing news! I’m just so happy for you!”

I could practically hear her grinning through the phone line. “Yeah, I’m pretty happy myself. In fact, if I was any happier I’d drop my harp plumb through the cloud!”

“This is fabulous! You’re an author!”

“Not yet, but soon. Sometime next year, so they tell me. ’Course,” she said modestly, “I don’t expect they’ll sell more than about forty copies—and me and Howard’ll probably buy thirty-eight of them.”

“What are you talking about? I’m going to order some for the shop today, just so I make sure to get mine before they run out. And when you’re a big, famous quilting writer, you’ve got to promise to come teach a class at Cobbled Court. I’ll probably have to rent chairs just to make room for everybody.”

Mary Dell laughed aloud at the audacity of my vision. “Sure thing, darlin’! If I’m ever a big, famous quilting writer, I’ll come teach at your shop. That’ll probably happen about the time that pigs fly, but if you look up in the clouds some morning and see porkers on parade, then go ahead and rent those chairs, Baby Girl; I’ll be there. In the meantime, I’ll be praying that your grand opening is a real big success!”

And it was. On that first weekend, I was swamped with customers. Well, really there were more browsers than customers, but by the end of the first day I’d signed up four people for the Mariner’s Compass class, seven for the beginner’s class, added ninety-eight names to my mailing list, and rung up nearly two thousand dollars in sales. At the time, it seemed like a fortune. I went to bed that night exhausted but encouraged that I was off to a great start. Really, I was. And though I soon discovered that exhaustion is the permanent condition of a quilt-shop owner, I loved what I was doing.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part of running the shop was the creative side: teaching classes, sewing samples, helping customers pick out fabrics, answering questions about difficult projects, and, of course, poring over catalogs and samples trying to decide which fabrics, books, and notions I should stock. I’d opened my doors with two thousand bolts of fabric, five hundred more than I’d planned on at first, but I knew that the bigger the fabric inventory, the more likely I’d be to attract quilters from places other than New Bern. If Cobbled Court Quilts was going to survive, it had to be a shop that quilters would drive out of their way to visit. There just weren’t enough quilters in New Bern to support it. I had to draw a regional audience.

It was a surprise to discover that I also enjoyed the business side of the shop—not that doing accounting, keeping up with inventories, or managing invoices was exactly a thrill, but it worked a part of my brain that I’d let lie dormant for many years. Sure, I made plenty of mistakes, but I was managing the whole operation on my own. I couldn’t help but feel proud of my accomplishment, more confident than I had in years.

You know, it’s so odd, but on the day when Rob walked into our kitchen—the kitchen we’d remodeled the year previously and with the granite counters Rob had said that I’d better make sure I liked because we were going to have to live with them until we died or moved into the old folks’ home—when he walked into the kitchen that day, stood next to the island where I was chopping green peppers, and said that he wanted a divorce, I felt so stupid.

Yes, I also felt betrayed, bereft, heartbroken, abandoned, all those emotions I’d imagined women must feel when their husbands walked out on them—women whose number I was certain I would never, ever be among—but I’d never once thought to add stupidity to that list. But when the unthinkable happened, there it was.

How could I have been so stupid? How could I have believed that buying granite countertops with a lifetime warranty meant that my marriage was similarly guaranteed against chips, scrapes, younger women, and midlife crisis? It was such a cliché. And I’d never seen it coming. How could I have given my trust to this man who proved so untrustworthy? I felt like a fool.

For a long time after that I didn’t trust my own judgment about anything. The thought of having to make a decision simply paralyzed me. Once, when a harried grocery clerk with a long line of customers asked if I wanted paper or plastic, I stood there stammering and unable to decide for what seemed like an eternity. Finally the clerk lost patience and angrily stuffed my bread into a plastic bag, then piled two cans of diced tomatoes and a box of dishwasher detergent on top of the loaves, squashing them flat. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t say anything, just handed her a fifty-dollar bill for forty-two dollars’ worth of groceries and left without waiting for my change.

But somehow, making that one decision, the decision to drive north to see the fall colors in New England, gave me courage to make the next decision and the next and the next: what display shelving to order, how much money to borrow from the bank, which classes to offer, whether or not to order that extra five hundred bolts of fabric. Every decision was mine alone, which meant that the shop’s success or failure was a reflection of me. So when customers said they thought Cobbled Court was the best quilt store around and then confirmed this by making second and third purchases, it was as if they were affirming me personally. I began to have faith in myself again, to believe that, though where my marriage was concerned I might have been foolish, I wasn’t a fool. I was capable. I had something to offer.

The growing number of repeat customers may have filled my heart with pride, but, unfortunately, it didn’t fill my register with cash—at least not enough of it. Like so many novice entrepreneurs, I had underestimated my expenses and overestimated my income. The grand-opening weekend had been an anomaly. After that, my receipts shrank. Not to say that the shop was empty, far from it. My sales were growing, slowly, but even so my cash reserves (my half of the proceeds from the sale of the house plus my divorce settlement) were dwindling much more quickly than I could ever have imagined.

“I’m losing money,” I admitted to Charlie. “Every week I lose a little less than the one before, but the deficit isn’t shrinking quickly enough. Come the end of the tourist season, business will slack off. Unless I get some miraculous inflow of cash, I won’t have enough in reserve to last until next summer.”

There. I’d said it. The night before, as I’d added up rows and rows of receipts, subtracted my expenses, then redone the calculations over again, hoping against hope that I’d find a mistake in the figures, I’d known the outcome of the equation, but I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the truth. Now I had, and the truth gave me a headache.

Groaning, I rubbed my face with my hands. “Oh, Charlie. What am I going to do?” I didn’t expect an answer, just sympathy, but that wasn’t Charlie’s style.