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“That table is too low for cutting. It’ll hurt your back. If Dad were here he’d make a plywood box and raise the table to counter height.”
“I bet you miss your dad a lot,” Tris said as he put old phone books under the legs of the table.
Jecca gave him a sharp look. She knew he was doing something in secret, but try as she might, she couldn’t get him to tell her what it was. At night as they slipped into bed together—half the time in her bed, half in his—she tried to get him to answer her questions. But he’d start kissing her, his hands would be all over her body, and she’d forget what she was saying.
All she knew for sure was that Tris had suddenly become an avid photographer—mostly of Lucy—and his phone never stopped buzzing. He’d excuse himself often to take a call from his cousin Rams. Jecca had asked him about the man, but all Tris would say was, “It’s short for Ramsey,” then he’d get busy on some task.
Twice, a young man brought Tristan papers to sign, and when Jecca asked about them, he was evasive. “Tell you later,” he said then hurried off.
If Jecca hadn’t been so overwhelmed with work she would have pursued it, but she couldn’t. Everyone had questions for her, from which buttons to use, to how deep the hem was to be, to the color of the hat brim.
Tris and Roan were great at cutting out the patterns, and all handwork was done by Mrs. Wingate. Lucy did the bulk of the sewing with her marvelous machines, but by the fourth day, after late nights and early mornings, she was wearing out. She pulled out the chair in front of the serger.
“Tristan,” Lucy said sternly, “if you can stop taking pictures of me for a few minutes, I’m going to show you how to do a four-thread overedge.”
Tris hesitated for a moment and they all looked at him.
“Pretend it’s a ruptured aortic valve,” Nell said.
“Just what I was about to say,” Jecca said, and they all laughed. She couldn’t help wondering if Nell had been making medical comments all along but Jecca just hadn’t noticed.
The job Nell begged for was to change the colors of thread on the embroidery done on the big Bernina 830. Lucy taught her how to hold the thread in place with her right hand while feeding it through the channels with the left. Nell loved pushing the white button for the automatic needle threader, and she made a little sound of triumph when everything was ready and she could press the green Go button.
Roan often escaped to the kitchen, and they brok aneryte for lunch to whatever he’d cooked for them. He didn’t seem in any hurry to get back to the isolation of his cabin.
But no matter how busy they got, at 3 P.M. sharp, the women stopped to work out.
On the first day, Tris gave a very nice speech about why he thought he and Roan should be allowed to participate, but the women just laughed at him. They hurried down the stairs to the basement, Nell with them, and an hour later they were back upstairs, lightly glowing with perspiration, ready for the afternoon tea that Roan had prepared.
“So what did you do today?” Tris asked as he ate a crab sandwich that Roan had made.
“The usual,” Lucy said.
“Nothing we haven’t done before,” Mrs. Wingate said.
“Mmmm,” Jecca said, her mouth full.
“Cuban dancing!” Nell said.
“Salsa?” Tris asked.
“You guys were doing salsa?” Roan asked. “Don’t you need a partner for that? I could show you a couple of moves that—”
“No,” Jecca said firmly. “No men allowed.”
The men sighed.
On Friday morning Nell’s mother, Addy, walked into Lucy’s studio. “Tristan!” she said loudly from the doorway, with more than a little anger in her voice. “Did it ever occur to you that I’d like to see my own daughter now and then?”
Tris was unperturbed and didn’t even look up from the Baby Lock serger. “Glad you’re here. Roan needs help cutting. It’s going to be a late night.”
“Mom!” Nell yelled as she extricated herself from Lucy, who was pinning a sleeve to her shoulder, and ran to hug her mother. “Come see what we’ve made.”
Addy looked over her daughter’s head at the busy room. It was a moment before she noticed two little girls near the far wall. The pretty young woman who she assumed was Jecca Layton was sitting on the floor pinning up a hem on one girl’s dress. Addy recognized the two girls as Nell’s f
riends. They were smart children, the kind who got straight As, but they weren’t pretty or fashionable enough to be included in Savannah McDowell’s circle. This year they’d been included in the fashion show, but it was going to be torment for them.
“Yes,” Addy said, “I’d like to see everything.”
