Patsy was asleep in the waiting room when she came out. Pru poked her with one of the crutches the orderly had given her when she was discharged. The orderly had said, “Boy, you must rate. The doc gave you some good drugs. And I never knew him to do his own stitching.”
“I saw Jacob,” she whispered to Patsy.
Patsy sat up, her eyes wide. “My Jacob?”
Pru nodded, and wincing, eased into the seat next to her. “He stitched me up. He wouldn’t do it until I told him how you were. And if Annali had learned to swim.”
Patsy’s eyes darted past her, scanning the corridors behind them. “You’re kidding. What did you say?”
“I said you were fine.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Patsy stared at her for a minute. “Tell me the whole thing,” she said.
Pru told her, word for word, as much as she could remember.
“Weird,” Patsy said, at last.
“I think he was actually in love with you, Pats,” Pru said.
“Yes,” Patsy said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Sorry.”
“Prudence,” Patsy said, looking at the clock above her head. “We open in six hours.”
Twenty
The alarm went off at six o’clock, a mere two hours after they got home from the hospital. Pru hit the clock and groaned. Her ankle throbbed, and the bottom of her right foot felt tight and raw. She didn’t think she’d be able to get out of bed. Then she remembered the piece that was supposed to run in today’s Post, and forced herself up. She was hoping it would generate some interest in the opening. And she wanted to see how she looked in the picture.
When she and Patsy arrived at the shop, it was still dark outside. There was so much to be done, she couldn’t see how they could possibly open the doors by ten. She wasn’t used to the crutches and her foot throbbed constantly, despite the Percocet. She wondered whether Jacob really knew what he was talking about. He’d said that her ankle was only sprained, but it certainly felt worse than that.
They pulled the protective paper off the sign above the door, before going in. The sign looked exactly as she’d hoped, with the store’s name, “peach,” styled in rounded lowercase letters, feminine and hopeful. Inside, they went around turning on the lights. McKay had had the walls painted a soft gray with a slightly blue cast, cool and soothing, and he himself had hand-stenciled a chocolate-brown ribbon around the top, to look as if it were threaded through the walls. A neat, squarish bow faced you as you entered the store. That, at least, was perfect. Absolutely perfect.
The air was still permeated with the faint scent of Chinese meat buns, despite all the fig-scented candles Patsy kept lighting. There were cartons of clothes to unpack, steam, price, and hang. They got to work sweeping up the glass still scattered on the floor after last night’s accident. Pru got a call that the shipment of spring dresses she’d been really excited about had been held up; the girl she’d hired to help out was late; the toilet kept running. Then there were all the things that only Pru could see. The price tags, which she’d insisted on doing by hand, looked sloppy and hurried, not homey and cute, as she’d hoped. And there was the matter of her still-throbbing foot. At nine she took another Percocet, and kept going.
She tried to breathe through these things, or accept them into her karma, or whatever it was you were supposed to do in order not to completely lose your cool. It had all sounded so simple: rent a place, buy some clothes, come up with a cute name. Then you find out that there are all these obstacles and problems. You keep thinking: Once I solve this, it’s smooth sailing. But then a leak pops open, as soon as you’ve plugged the previous one. Before you know it, you’ve run out of fingers and the dam is still threatening to burst everywhere.
It was Patsy, oddly enough, who was the calm eye of the storm. They were still writing the tags when the first customers showed up; Pru hadn’t wanted to unlock the door, but Patsy strode over and let them in, practically pushing Pru out of the way. When Patsy realized that the girl Pru had hired was not going to show up, Patsy stepped in, welcoming customers, continuing to pull things out of boxes, ringing up sales. Any minute, Pru thought, someone was going to figure out that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She hopped around on her crutches clumsily, saying what she was sure were nonsensical things. Her mother and Jimmy Roy showed up in the early afternoon, having driven all morning from Ohio. “Oh!” Nadine said, when she walked in. “I love it! I absolutely love it!” When the cash register’s computer went down, Patsy started writing out each sales receipt by hand. Jimmy Roy fixed the running toilet, and Nadine helped by cleaning out the dressing rooms. By five o’clock, the little shop was crowded with people and noise, things were actually sold, and Pru moved as if in a trance through a swirl of questions, problems, friends, fabric, and Percocet.
And women. Women, women, women, of all shapes and sizes, needs and demands. Some she recognized as former customers of Edie’s. They all seemed to know Pru, probably from the picture of her in the Post, a shot of her from below which made her look, she’d said to Patsy, like Bea Arthur. She’d previewed peach’s inventory for the newspaper’s fashion editor last week, who’d gone mental over it. “Style (at last!) Comes to Adams-Morgan,” read the headline, above the towering photo of Pru.
Patsy had had the brilliant idea to take private appointments— a brilliant idea she’d stolen from Nordstrom’s—and by the end of the day the appointments calendar was booked for the next three weeks.
