I ran into the bedroom closet and pulled out the second dress I’d made, same pattern but a different fabric—pale blue background printed with pen-and-ink style drawings of the Eiffel Tower and bright red and blue suitcases. Showing it off to my friends, I explained about the owl dress I’d made for Sunny and how her reaction had inspired me to run right home and make another dress that I intended to donate to a nearby homeless shelter.
“It’s only a dress,” I said, when I realized I’d been gushing. “It’s not like it’s going to change her life or anything. In fact, she hasn’t been around since yesterday, so I’m sure she’s off on some kind of bender. She does that sometimes. But the look on Sunny’s face . . . I’ll never forget it. Is it crazy to hope that getting a new dress might not just help her feel seen, but actually convince her she’s worth something?”
“It’s never crazy to hope,” Nan replied. “Whoever gets this dress will love it just as much as Sunny did.”
I folded the dress over my arm. “I hope so. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve done in a long time. I hope my new job, whatever it is, leaves me enough spare time to make a few more. I’ve got yards and yards of fabric stowed in my closet. It’d be nice to put it to good use.”
Nan, who was only halfway done with her ice cream, put down her spoon. She stared at me for such a long time that it started to feel uncomfortable, like when somebody sees you’ve got spinach in your teeth and can’t look away but doesn’t tell you either.
“What?” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. Those stuffed shells did have a lot of spinach.
“The dresses. Don’t you see?” she asked, turning from me to Monica and back again, her expression suddenly bright. “That should be your job!”
My heart beat a bit faster when Nan said that, but it didn’t take long for me to start thinking of reasons it couldn’t work. I mean, I would have had to sell a lot of dresses to actually make a living doing it. Those dresses took me half a day each to sew. And, as Monica pointed out, opening a business from scratch was risky; it required capital and experience. I had neither.
“She’d need to hire employees,” Monica said. “Open some kind of workshop or factory. She can’t mass-produce dresses with one used sewing machine, cutting them out one by one on her kitchen counter. Besides, the reason Grace found this so satisfying is because she was giving the dresses away, not selling them. It could end up being a nice hobby, but”—Monica shook her head—“I just don’t see how this could be a business.”
Neither could I.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t sleep either. Around three in the morning, I finally gave up trying and got out of bed. Maisie gave me a bemused look, then scooted herself onto the warm spot I’d left on the mattress.
I went into the living room, got out my sewing basket, and stitched a couple of seams in the Lemoyne Star block I was working on, made from Jamie’s red flannel shirts. Sewing normally relaxes me, but that night I just couldn’t settle into it. I kept thinking about the conviction in Nan’s voice when she said that dressmaking should be my business and then Monica’s voice, equally insistent, saying there was no way it could work. Since Monica is the only one of us who’d ever run a business, she was probably right.
After a few minutes, I put my stitching aside and opened the coat closet, thinking I’d sort through the miscellaneous box I’d shoved in there earlier. Now was as good a time as any.
Like so many of the other boxes I had unpacked in the previous days, this one contained a lot of junk, stuff I couldn’t believe we’d bothered to pack and ship halfway across the country. But there were some things that mattered, a copy of our marriage certificate, some pictures I was glad to find, including one of Jamie in the orchard when he was about nine years old, sitting in the top branches of one of the apple trees. I put that aside, deciding to get a copy made to send to Penny.
Near the bottom of the box I found a sealed envelope with my name on it. Seeing Jamie’s handwriting, that jagged, cramped script only I could decipher, my heart beat faster.
The card had three watercolor hearts in shades of blue and green on a white background and a printed inscription inside that read, You’re the woman I love, making life beautiful, filling my years with joy, and the world with light. Opposite the inscription, he had written a note.
My beautiful Grace,
Ten years is a pretty long time, more than a third of our lives, but the only regret I have in life is that I wasn’t able to marry you even sooner. Although, if I had, I guess we’d probably have been breaking the law—
Feeling my throat tighten, I stopped reading to wipe my eyes, remembering our tenth anniversary, the camping trip, that magical day, our last full day together. So many people, after losing someone they love, look back and think if they’d known that day was the last day, they’d have done or said something different. But when I think of my final day with Jamie, I have no regrets. It was perfect.
We’d closed on the condo the day before. Leaving the boxes unpacked, we went on an anniversary camping trip to the North Cascades of Washington State. Sitting on a boulder at the top of Mt. Pilchuck, panting from the effort of the ascent, I held Jamie’s hand and was awestruck
