“Corsets and petticoats?” I asked, although I knew the answer to every question in my mind. Yes, corsets, petticoats for the traditionalists, but crinoline for those who weren’t sticklers. A dress could weigh up to eighty pounds if it was heavy on the beading and had layers of petticoats. Wearing one would be like lugging around barbells, and that was one more reason I was glad I was well past the age of being a Margaret. At least that’s what I told myself.
“Ms. Cassidy?” Fern snapped her fingers in my face.
“Oh!” I blinked, lurching back a step. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
The look she gave me sent a shiver down my spine. Suspicious. Distrustful. As if she thought I were somehow secretly photographing the workshop so I could go back to Buttons & Bows and duplicate them all. “Who’s the girl you’ve added to the Margaret lineup?” she finally repeated.
Oh! They’d asked earlier, but we’d gotten sidetracked. “Her name’s Gracie Flores. She’s just the sweetest girl,” I gushed. “She’s become my right hand at my shop, you know. She already says she wants to go into fashion…” I trailed off when their mouths drooped to pronounced frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“Zinnia is okay with her being a Margaret?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” I bristled, instantly reminded of why I hadn’t participated in the pageant when I was sixteen. Whoever was in charge wouldn’t have been okay with me.
“No reason, dear,” Trudy said, steering me toward a row of sewing machines and sergers.
“Two without,” Fern mumbled behind me.
She had a bad habit of talking under her breath and it was beginning to get on my nerves. I bit my tongue, barely stopping myself from blurting out something I’d regret. They didn’t even know Gracie. I couldn’t hardly stand them judging her. The gowns on the headless mannequins suddenly felt like fashionable nineteenth-century female soldiers closing in. “Two what?” I asked, heavy on the accent, my tone somehow light and friendly.
Trudy shot her sister a hush up look, then said, “Just that Margarets usually come from more… established families, shall we say? Families like the Kincaids—”
“The Kincaids?” I said with a scoff.
“Gracie Flores isn’t your typical Margaret, is all,” Fern said, backtracking.
“But then again, Ferny, are there any typical girls, anymore?” In perfect sync, they both bowed their heads for a moment of silence over the lack of perfect Margarets.
As they raised their gazes again, I could suddenly picture Gracie in my mind, clear as a bell, dressed and primped in the sage green gown from Meemaw’s armoire. That would be her Margaret dress, I decided. No matter who it had once belonged to, it was going to have its second coming with Gracie Flores.
Chapter 10
The second I stepped through the flower-covered archway into my front yard, the scent of homemade cinnamon rolls encircled me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the ribbon of sweetness, letting it nearly lift me up and carry me up the porch steps. Nana must have let herself in, I realized as I took the little handmade sign saying I’d be back at eleven o’clock off the hook to the right of the door. Buttons & Bows wasn’t the type of shop scads of people happened by. It was a destination shop, a place you came if you wanted a custom dress made, or were hoping for a designer off-the-rack outfit. Closing every now and then to run errands wasn’t going to put me out of business.
I followed the cinnamon aroma through the dining room, stopping short in the kitchen. “Nana?”
My grandmother was not there baking pastries. “Mama?” I peeked through the door next to the butter yellow refrigerator. The washer and dryer sat just beyond the kitchen. The clothes that I’d moved into the dryer that morning were now neatly folded in a wicker laundry basket sitting just outside the utility room. “Mama?” Coming in and finishing my laundry wasn’t something my cowgirl mother, Tessa, tended to do, but was something Nana would do. But Nana’s Nubian goats followed her everywhere, a definite drawback to her charm. And they took the majority of her time. I didn’t think she’d take time from her new goat milk pomegranate moisturizer lotions to fold my wash and make cinnamon rolls.
No, the kitchen was empty, but the sweet smell lingered. As I shut the mudroom door, the sweet smell of the cinnamon rolls quickly hit a high note and then, as if someone had snapped their fingers, it simply vanished.
“Meemaw,” I whispered under my breath. Of course.
The faint whisper of a laugh floated in the room.
“I went to see the Lafayette sisters today,” I said to the empty room. I had taken to chatting with my great- grandmother, filling her in on my days. Meemaw was my secret, but one I’d have to share with Mama and Nana before too long. A thread of guilt wound through me each time I saw them and didn’t reveal that Loretta Mae wasn’t quite as dearly departed as they thought.
The soft sound of whispered words came to me, but dissolved into the air before I could make them out. She was trying to communicate with me… or maybe it was me that hadn’t figured out how to hear her. Either way, our interaction was more one-sided than I liked. I talked. She listened. And flung clothes out of the closet, moved my sewing notions, and flipped pages of books and magazines to communicate what she wanted with me.
“Mrs. James asked me to help her with the pageant,” I continued as I pulled a container of Nana’s goat cheese from the refrigerator, a box of crackers from the cupboard, and poured myself a tall glass of sweet tea. “Have you ever seen their atelier? Fourteen gowns, and they were all spectacular. It was like walking into a showroom. They do all the beading by hand. Did you know people get on their schedule when their daughters are newborns? They’d have to. All that handwork is so time-consuming, but you know, I could feel their love for it all. And I found out they made Nana’s Margaret gown—”
I stopped short as the red-and-white-checkerboard curtains under the sink fluttered suddenly and the plantation shutters on the window above rattled. The lights, which I hadn’t switched on, flickered, and the trickling sound of water filling the mechanisms of the freezer’s ice maker magnified. “What? What’s wrong?”
The Dutch door leading to the back porch flung open. “Thelma Louise,” Nana called over her shoulder. “You stay put, you hear?” As she stepped out of her navy blue Crocs and turned toward me, the mayhem in the kitchen instantly stopped.
“Hey, Nana.”
My grandmother, standing there in her pristine white socks, stared at me. “Child, what in heaven’s name are you doin’?”
I was standing in the center of the kitchen, the box of crackers under my arm, the container of chevre in one hand, the class of sweet tea in the other, and a surprised expression on my face. It was as if I’d been frozen for a moment and Nana’s voice brought me back. “I was just… er… getting ready to have some of your cheese,” I finished. I’d almost revealed the secret—that I’d been chatting away with Meemaw—but the chaotic interruption made me hold my tongue and a sliver of skin at the hairline on my forehead tingled. I felt it was a sign she didn’t want Nana to know about her yet.
“Well, what are you waitin’ for?” She took the cracker box and plopped down at the table, her fingers fluttering to her hairline, almost as if she were mirroring me. I started, realizing that the prickling sensation stemmed from the exact spot where all the Cassidy women’s dark hair streaked blond. Odd, I thought. Were we feeling the same thing, or was it a coincidence? Did she sense Loretta Mae?
“You buy the same crackers Meemaw did,” Nana said.
I set two plates and a knife on the table and she began spreading the chevre, filling up both the plates with the cracker rounds.
“Oh.” I looked at the box, realizing that it was the same brand. “I hadn’t realized.”
“You’re more like her than your mama or me ever were. You know that?”
I nodded. I was well into my thirties, but I felt like I was finally figuring out who I was and what I wanted and to hear that I reminded Nana of her mother filled me with a comfortable sense of home. “I didn’t think I wanted to