A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) (11 page)

“That really must have smarted,” she said sympathetically. She reached for a scrap of cast-off fabric and pressed it against my finger to stop the blood. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right in a minute.”

But it wasn’t all right. It wouldn’t be all right in a minute, or a month, or maybe ever. The words I’d been trying so hard to smother in my mind—cancer, chemo, radiation, drug therapy, survival rates, and mastectomy—boiled to the surface in a confused jumble. My body started to shake involuntarily as the tears came faster and harder. I couldn’t keep them back.

“What am I going to do? What? I’m thousands of miles away from home. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no one. Why is this happening to me! Just when things were finally starting to go right. I can’t have cancer! Not now!”

I covered my face with my hands and gave myself up to despair, sobbing until I was dry. Long moments passed, and I finally raised my head to look at the three strangers standing witness to my collapse.

Abigail was silent, her face still and unreadable. What little color there was in Liza’s cheeks had completely drained away. Her eyes were full of tears but empty of answers. Only Margot moved toward me, reaching out to wrap her arms around me.

Turning to her, I whispered, “Please. Somebody please tell me. What am I going to do?”

W
hile I was getting dressed that morning, I dropped the cameo brooch, the one Woolley bought for me in London. The fall chipped it. I knew it was not going to be a good day.

Of course, I didn’t need a jewelry omen to tell me that. There was nothing about the idea of spending the afternoon sewing a quilt that appealed to me, especially sewing a quilt while Liza sat next to me glaring recriminations. But there was no way to avoid it, so I finished getting dressed and walked across the Green, slowly, to meet Liza.

I was late, though not nearly as late as Liza claimed when she blurted this information out to two strangers. The girl dramatizes everything. Thinking that correcting her would only make things worse, I decided to ignore her, focus completely on the task at hand, and get through the ordeal without becoming engaged in some sort of emotional scene. But at the end of the day, it was unavoidable, though the drama erupted from an unexpected source—not my angry, bitter niece, but the owner of the quilt shop, Evelyn Dixon.

When Evelyn entered the storeroom, where Liza, Margot Matthews, and I were seated, I was surprised by her appearance. Her newspaper photograph had made her appear so elegant and well put together, but today her clothes looked careless and rumpled, almost as if she’d slept in them. Perhaps someone else had supervised her wardrobe selection for the newspaper picture, I thought.

In any case, I was glad to see her. My goal was to make the quilt block as quickly as possible, fulfilling my promise to Liza, and leave Cobbled Court Quilts, never to return. But I was getting frustrated trying to understand the instruction sheet that the frowzy woman with the horrible rhinestone glasses had handed out along with the kits. And Liza and Margot were just as confused as I was.

In spite of Liza’s rude and embarrassing outburst, once Evelyn started showing us what to do, there was a definite easing of tension, and I began, if not to enjoy myself, at least to become more interested in what I was doing. In school, I’d enjoyed geometry, and as Evelyn explained the basic construction of a quilt and quilt blocks, I saw that the whole thing was based on geometric theories. After a time, I was so concentrated on my task and trying to make sure that all my angles and points were cut and sewn properly, so as to make a perfect square, I forgot why I was there in the first place. It was a pleasant distraction from tensions of the day. Time passed quickly, and, while focusing on the quilt block, it was easy to avoid making eye contact with Liza.

By the time Evelyn began to demonstrate the appliqué technique, I’d started to think that the day might not turn out as badly as I’d feared and that, at least in terms of blackmail payments, I’d gotten off fairly cheaply after all. All it cost me was a half a day spent sewing a quilt block that was actually turning out rather nicely, and allowing Liza to repaint the walls of her bedroom, not black, but in shades of blue, gray, and green with a technique that made the walls look like Italian marble. It wasn’t a look I’d have chosen for myself, but she’d made a good job of it. If I had paid a decorator to do it, I’m sure it would have cost a fortune.

All in all
, I said to myself,
this is a small price to pay to preserve your niece’s neck in its current pristine state, free of a family monogram.

But I spoke too soon. Without warning, Evelyn Dixon’s calm veneer cracked. She pricked her finger with a needle, producing a few drops of blood, a veil of tears, and the shocking revelation that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer on the day before she was hosting a fundraiser to fight the same disease.

Naturally, I felt badly for her. Who wouldn’t? However, it really was her personal business, not mine. Though the irony of the situation was not lost on me, any more than I’d missed the fact that her sobbed confession occurred in front of my eyes, and my niece’s, on the same day my own sister succumbed to her fight with cancer. Clearly, the world was full of ironies. Either that, or God had a cruel sense of humor. Or was there something else to all this?

I didn’t have time to wonder further. The next thing I knew, Margot Matthews had taken charge and was ordering me about. Was there to be no end to the humiliations of this day?

“Abigail, run get a glass of water, would you please? Better yet, make some tea,” she commanded. “Evelyn, do you have a teapot or a microwave around here somewhere?”

Tears streamed through Evelyn’s closed eyelids. “Upstairs. In my apartment.” She sniffed loudly, making a sound I’d rather not describe.

“You live upstairs? Even better. Let’s just take you home.” As if she were an invalid, Margot placed her forearm under Evelyn’s elbow and helped her to her feet, supporting her as she walked wearily toward the stairs. “Liza, would you turn off the lights and make sure the
CLOSED
sign is out on the door?”

I stood there for a moment, uncertain of what I should do. I didn’t know Evelyn Dixon; none of us did. Did Margot expect me to follow her up the stairs into Evelyn’s home and actually make tea for her? Liza, having completed her assignment, hurried for the stairs, brushing past without looking at me, not even bothering to give me her customary glare. It felt silly, standing alone in the now-darkened shop, so I followed the others.

Upstairs, in the small, neatly arranged apartment, Evelyn reclined on a narrow green sofa. Liza was tucking a quilt around her legs, and, though her eyes were red, she was actually smiling. In the time she’d been living with me, I’d rarely seen Liza smile. She was really quite pretty when she did.

Margot emerged from another room carrying a box of tissues and handed some to Evelyn. I went into the kitchen, a galley affair separated from the living and dining area by a counter and stools, and started boiling water for tea. It felt odd, rooting around in a stranger’s cupboards and drawers, but I found the cabinet where Evelyn kept her teabags and sugar. There were some crackers as well. It occurred to me that, what with her shop being overrun by customers and the distress of her diagnosis, Evelyn might not have eaten. Clearly, she had bigger problems than an empty stomach, but hunger and fatigue certainly didn’t help the situation.

I’m not much of a cook, but anyone can slice cheese. I found a block of cheddar and some grapes in the refrigerator and arranged them on a platter along with the crackers.

“Here we are,” I said cheerily as I carried a tray with the food and four steaming cups of tea into the living area. “I couldn’t find any lemon, but there’s milk and sugar for the tea and a few things to munch on. Evelyn, may I fix you a plate?”

“No, thank you. I’m not hungry.” Her eyes were dry now, but still rimmed in red, and I thought that it wouldn’t take much to bring on a fresh wave of weeping.

“Why don’t you just have a little something,” Margot urged and, without waiting for an answer, put some cheese and crackers on a plate and handed it to Evelyn. “I bet you haven’t eaten all day, have you?” Evelyn shook her head. “On top of that, you’re probably exhausted. You can’t think clearly on no sleep and an empty stomach. You’ve got to come up with some sort of plan about how you’re going to live your life and manage your business while you beat this thing. And we’re going to help you.”

We were?

Margot Matthews was awfully free with her use of personal pronouns. Certainly, I admired her capability, her calm reaction in a difficult circumstance. In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder why any company would have let her go and why someone else hadn’t snapped her up, but she was going a little overboard. I’ve nothing against being a Good Samaritan; my involvement in local charity was certainly a testament to that, but hadn’t we all done our good deed for the day? After all, until this afternoon none of us had laid eyes on Evelyn Dixon.

Evelyn swallowed the bite of the cracker she’d been dutifully chewing. “You are? But you barely know me. You never even met me before today.”

My point exactly.

“What difference does that make? God put us on this earth to help one another, didn’t He?”

Oh no. She was one of those. A moderate amount of religious feeling never hurt anyone, but people who wear their faith on their sleeves are off-putting. Margot, I decided, was one of those people. Suddenly her long stretch of unemployment made sense. Perhaps her religiosity made her coworkers uncomfortable. Spying the silver crucifix she was wearing around her neck, I was certain that was what had happened.

Margot smiled brightly and looked around at the rest of us, as if waiting for an actual answer to what I’d felt was a rhetorical question. Liza shot me a look, not her usual evil glare but a pointed gaze that elicited a sudden rush of heat to my face, and said, “Absolutely. No one should go through this alone.”

I shifted my eyes away from Liza’s. “Yes. Of course,” I said. “Anything I can do to help.”

Margot turned back to Evelyn. “You see? The three of us coming into the shop so late and sitting together, getting hidden away in the back room so you’d find us after everyone was gone—none of that was a coincidence. I’ve got a feeling we were all handpicked to be here today. You might feel like you’re alone in this, Evelyn, but it isn’t true. God knows you need some friends to help you through this. Well, here we are! You’ll see. We’re all in this together.”

And, as suddenly as Margot the Cheerleader made this pronouncement, we all were in it—whether we wanted to be or not.

Margot pulled a notepad out of her purse and started conducting a series of probing, fact-finding interviews. First, she began quizzing Evelyn, asking about her conversation with the doctor and what she knew about the details of her diagnosis, which wasn’t much. Apparently, the poor thing had lapsed into something of a state of shock upon hearing the news and either didn’t hear or didn’t comprehend much of what her doctor had said after giving her the bad news.

Then Margot began asking questions about the quilt shop, some of them rather personal, relating to the financial stability of the business, which seemed tenuous, but more about the day-to-day running of the store and any kinds of special projects that might be coming up in the immediate future.

Finally, she asked Evelyn about her family and any friends she had in New Bern. There wasn’t much on either count. She’d moved from Texas after an unpleasant divorce, so there was no husband on the scene. Her only son lived in Seattle, too far away to be much help. Having recently arrived in New Bern, she had a number of acquaintances, customers mostly, like the women who had volunteered to help her with Quilt Pink day, but didn’t seem to have many friends. However, she did seem to have a fairly close relationship with Charlie Donnelly, and that surprised me.

I adore Charlie. He has an almost famously gruff manner that some people find intimidating but I rather enjoy. Over time, I’d discovered that his rough exterior hid a personality of rare charm and quick wit that was well worth the effort it took to unearth them. Still, even after all these years, I couldn’t say we were close. As far as I knew, he had very few close friends. Interesting that he and Evelyn had hit it off so quickly.

Next Margot turned her investigatory skills on the rest of us, quizzing first Liza and then me about our interests, experiences, and contacts before filling us in on her own background in business, specifically in marketing and public relations, which was considerable. It was all very interesting, this whole getting-to-know-you session, but I was having a hard time seeing where it would lead. Besides, it was already eight o’clock. Florence Pearl was hosting a surprise birthday party for her husband, Stephen. Truthfully, I don’t like Stephen, who owns an insurance agency and is forever bothering me about “adequate coverage,” but Florence was nice enough, and I had promised her I’d drop by. I considered saying something about being late for the party, but when I looked across the room at Liza, who was sitting on a plum-colored ottoman with her body turned toward Margot but her eyes continually stealing back to Evelyn, I kept silent. The party would go on for a couple of hours yet. I would just have to be late, which wasn’t such a terrible prospect.

With any luck,
I thought,
I’ll be in and out in thirty minutes, fulfilling my social obligations without being subjected to any conversation with Stephen beyond “Happy Birthday.”

“So, that’s about it for me,” Margot said. I’d been lost in my own thoughts and missed the last part of what she’d been saying.

“Evelyn, I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what you need, at least for the next few days.” Margot chewed on the end of her pen as she scanned the notes she’d taken. “The way I see it, your biggest priority right now is trying to understand exactly what you’re up against—what your diagnosis means and what your best treatment options are.”

Evelyn, who was much calmer now, nodded. “Yes. That’s right. Dr. Thayer is a good doctor. I’m sure he tried to explain all that to me, but I was too stunned to take any of it in.”

“That’s all right,” Liza said quietly, reaching out to pat the quilt that covered Evelyn’s legs. “It’s a perfectly normal reaction.” She hesitated for a moment, and her eyes darted away from Evelyn’s. “At least…I suppose it is.”

“And anyway,” Margot continued practically, “even though Dr. Thayer is a good doctor, you’re going to need a specialist, probably more than one. It’s always good to have a second opinion. That’s where Abigail will come in.”