Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series (3 page)

Her first relationship in college ended when, after almost a year of dating, Adam informed her he wasn’t “ready to commit to anything more serious.” Sheila said “he was up to no good.” Three months later, he married her roommate.

Nina spent her life walking through the mine field of her mother’s judgments, and no matter where she stepped, something was going to blow up. Tonight, forgetting to thank the intern? Not even a minor blast.

Nina shut down her laptop, slipped her feet back into her not-at-all sensible suede peep-toe shoes, and decided fettuccine and an upcoming story on the new ambulance service weren’t compatible. All she needed for home was herself. She hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and headed for the door when she remembered she forgot to email Daisy about a possible interview with one of the preservationist candidates she profiled. Since she was only a few steps away from Daisy’s desk, Nina pulled a blank sheet of paper out of the printer, jotted the information, and set it on her calendar pad next to a screaming yellow sticky note. Certainly, Daisy couldn’t miss that. Neither could Nina because what Daisy had written on it shocked her: “Ask JB about the opening in NY.”

As soon as she put her key into the lock, Nina heard Manny’s canine symphony of yelps, barks, and squeals on the other side of the door. She scooped him up after she walked in because, if she didn’t, he’d be doing figure eights around her legs until she did. “Okay, okay, little man, I’m happy to see you, too,” she said as she petted Manny and calmed his enthusiastic, cold-nose nuzzling greeting.

Aretha stood at the kitchen sink filling a teakettle with water. She looked over her shoulder at Nina and smiled. “You know, I hope to find a husband who’s as excited to see me come home as that dog is to see you.”

Nina laughed and released the wiggling puppy who headed to his water bowl, his stubby legs causing him to toddle on the oak floors like a canine Charlie Chaplin. “I’d be willing to sacrifice some of the excitement if he didn’t have doggy breath.” She hung her purse on the hall tree and felt her body sigh in relief as if it had just been permitted to acknowledge it was tired. Nina pulled off her shoes and left them at the foot of the stairs before sitting on one of the kitchen barstools. “I’m so glad we ended up living here in the city; otherwise, I might have had to spend the night at the office.”

“You’re so welcome,” Aretha told Nina and smiled, knowing they shared the memory of that decision. Nina, with the exception of college dorms, grew up in neighborhoods where the ranch style homes differed only by their brick color and front door placement. After college, she moved into an apartment complex that wasn’t much different. Coming home at night required close attention to make certain the door you attempted to unlock was your own. But, it was close to her job then and, even after she was hired by
Trends
, she grew accustomed to the long drive.

Her choice of rentals was one of the few intersections of belief that Aretha and Brady, the then Brady, had. When he asked if she planned to move closer when the lease expired, Nina had shrugged and said, “I’m not sure. It’s not that bad.”

The two of them had driven to Baldwin Park to let Manny, just months old then, experience grass and sunshine and other wonders of nature he couldn’t see from his kennel in Nina’s kitchen. Brady had stopped the game of fetch he played with the puppy to look at Nina. “Don’t you want more from life than, ‘it’s not bad’?” She sensed, by the way he averted his eyes so quickly, that he could see she’d never given it a thought.

Aretha had been dating Franklin, a friend of Brady’s, when they met. The four of them would often meet for dinner or brunch on Sunday mornings. At first glance, the two women seemed the unlikeliest of friends. Nina was as fair as Aretha was dark, as tall as she was short. While Aretha kept her wits about her, Nina scattered hers everywhere. They became fast friends, the kind of comfortable that allowed them to be quiet or rowdy in one another’s presence, and knowing which one the other most needed. Their relationships with the men in their lives ended, one sputtering to a close, the other screeched over the finish line. Instead of feeling abandoned, the two
young women picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and started all over again.

When they’d first committed to become roomies, Nina had thought she and Aretha should consider renting a garden home in one of the upstart suburban communities miles outside of Houston. Manny would have a yard, and they wouldn’t have to worry about crime. Aretha countered that since Manny was smaller than a five-pound bag of sugar and would spend almost all of his time inside, a yard the size of a beach towel would be sufficient. “And you will have to deal with crime,” she’d told Nina, “because if I have to drive back and forth to school and work fighting that traffic, I’ll want to kill you myself. Plus, a woman with cornrows named Aretha has no business being anywhere but the city.”

But now her cornrows were long, loose braids whose movements reflected an energized or subdued Aretha at any given time. She placed a bag of Earl Grey tea in one of the vintage cups from her collection, this one decorated with delicate violets and sprigs of greenery. “Guess my evening ritual will include nuking that dinner of yours,” Aretha said and took a lemon for her tea and a to-go box out of the refrigerator.

Nina ran her bare feet along the bottom rung of the chair trying to restore her cramped toes to life. “I had one of those horrible, no good, terrible, awful days. I felt like Alexander in that children’s book. And it started this morning.” Elbows on the counter, cradling her face in her hands, Nina might have fallen asleep except for the lush smell of garlic and butter and rosemary escaping from the microwave. And Manny barking at his empty food bowl.

“Mister, I fed you earlier. Don’t pretend you’ve been neglected just because your momma’s home.” Aretha always translated his barks, growls, whines, head tilts, and chirps into words, and he almost always ignored hers. He circled the bowl
as if to reassure himself he’d not missed a nibble, eyed Aretha, then Nina, and settled himself in his dog bed. “He’s pouting,” Aretha concluded. “He’ll get over it.”

Knowing Aretha took this conversation seriously, Nina just nodded her head and tried not to smile. Especially since, after hearing Aretha’s voice, Manny turned his head away from them and faced the wall.

She transferred Nina’s dinner to a plate, “Take this, you can tell me your sad story while I do my homework.” She nodded in the direction of the den where a mini-library spilled over the sofa cushions.

Nina sat in the worn leather chair next to the sofa. She draped a placemat across her lap and balanced her plate as she propped her feet on the glass-topped coffee table. Between bites, she narrated her dreadful day, ending with the cryptic note on Daisy’s desk.

“Give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe all those initials are wildly incidental,” Aretha said in that voice she used when she complimented someone’s rather ordinary-looking baby. She didn’t sound convincing then either. Her legs tucked under as she sat on the sofa, Aretha had formed a moat of books and magazines around herself in search of historical photographs for her upcoming design assignment.

“You couldn’t even make eye contact with me when you said that. If you don’t believe it, why do you want me to?” Nina ate the shrimp she’d stabbed with her fork and waited for Aretha’s response.

“Look at this stunning Louis XIV armoire,” said Aretha, her brown eyes lit with a reverent awe as she held up a picture of a massive wardrobe with a star of Bethlehem carved on each door. “Sorry.” She closed the magazine. “Got distracted.” She rearranged an almost toppling stack of art books, unwound her
legs and stretched them out on the ottoman. “I doubt if there’s an inner office conspiracy at
Trends
. Just ask Daisy tomorrow.”

Nina looked up from her pasta-twirling. “Sure. I’ll ask her what the note on her desk, not mine, meant. She wouldn’t at all think it might be an invasion of her privacy. And, anyway, she’s not once expressed an interest in going to New York. Wouldn’t she have said something when I told her months ago that I wanted that position? Do you think . . .” She stopped, her voice shifted into worrisome. “Do you think maybe she wanted to go? But not with me?”

“If you were any more neurotic, I would have to take you to work and pray someone would take pity on me and commit you. Those county mental health specialists don’t fool around,” said Aretha, her words edged with just enough seriousness to pinch Nina’s ego. “Maybe it’s time for you to reassess.” She looked over Nina’s shoulder. “And take Manny for a walk.”

Nina looked down to see her dog, holding one end of his leash between his teeth, the rest of it snaked behind him.

“See, even he knows, sometimes you just have to be upfront about what you want,” said Aretha.

Nina pulled away from the drive-through at Starbucks when her mother’s phone number flashed on her navigation screen. Did Sheila O’Malley feel a shift in her frugal universe because her daughter just bought a latte for the price of a pound of coffee? Nina decided to stay on the feeder road and not attempt merging into the early morning Houston freeway. Verbally sparring with her mother while negotiating the traffic version of dodge ball—could it get any worse?
Probably not. Get the worst over with now, and the rest of the day will seem like the set of a Disney movie
. She had the cloud waiting for her to answer; the silver lining couldn’t be far behind.

She took a deep breath, pressed the call button, and prepared herself for battle. “Good morning, Mother.”

“Are you in your car?” It sounded like an accusation, not a question.

“I’m on my way to the office,” said Nina and wished she could close her eyes during their conversation. For some reason, shutting out the world in the soft blackness inside herself made her feel less anxious during these painful volleys. “Is there something you need?” She used her best chirpy voice even after she pushed her brake hard to avoid smashing the
car in front of her. Her purse toppled onto the floorboard and burped out its contents.

“Need? Do I need something? Why would I need something to call my daughter? I just wanted to remind you about Sunday dinner,” she said. “That’s all. You know how much it means to your father to have you there.”

“So, what are you saying? That my being there isn’t important to you? And how could I forget about a dinner you call every week to remind me about that’s been a standing appointment so long my car would drive there without me?”

But, of course, Nina asked none of those questions. She simply said, “I’ll be there.”

Nina took the stairs instead of the elevator, a sort of aerobic decompression to move the tightness in her chest down her body and out through her feet, leaving the tension behind with each pounding step.
Why do I let her get under my skin like a splinter?

She knew the reason. She’d known for decades. She was her parents’ only child. Their only surviving child. When Nina was nine, her older brother Thomas came home after his second year at the University of Miami. At first, her parents told their friends Thomas wasn’t sure he wanted to return, that he might want to attend college closer to home. Nina remembered running to hug her brother, excited about the possibility of his being close. But when the summer ended, he didn’t enroll at a Texas university or any other one. Thomas started helping his friend Rick, a housepainter, which annoyed and disappointed their mother who accused him of wasting his intelligence, his potential to make something out of his life. He told her, “It’s what I put in to life that matters. Every day I
get to make something fresh and new. That is enough for me, for now.”

That was the only part of their conversation Nina heard that day when she walked in to the kitchen after the yellow school bus lurched away from their street. Thomas looked tired, which, as she headed to her room as per her mother’s orders, she understood on some level even then. The emotional tug-of-war with their mother required endurance training. Sheila continued to tug, but eventually Thomas let go of the rope. Nothing to fight for when there was no one to fight with.

Less than a year later, Sheila picked Nina up from school, an act in itself a signal that something was awry in the O’Malley home, to tell her that Thomas was gone. At first, Nina thought she meant he’d left the hospital where he’d been, but her mother told her that he wasn’t coming home. Ever. After Thomas’s funeral, her father retreated into his wordless shrugs, and her mother donned the armor of the self-righteous because, as she told anyone with an ear, “I told him that he wasn’t meant to waste his potential that way.”

Twenty years later, Nina still couldn’t penetrate the shield of her mother’s emotional defenses. And, like her brother, the pain of trying became much greater than the fear of not. But now she needed to sharpen her own sword, fight her own battles. And two of those battles sat in offices on the other side of the
Trends
door that she now opened.

She stepped into the lobby, and the aroma of hazelnut coffee greeted her before Michelle, the new receptionist, had a chance to. She started a month ago, replacing a twenty-something who wore clothes on the verge of vintage and kept an iPod bud in one ear and the receptionist’s headset in the other. The day Elise overheard her tell a client to hold on, “my song’s almost over,” she fired her. Two days later she interviewed Michelle, who looked like she could have been
Elise’s older sister though she was probably old enough to be Elise’s mother. The perfect combination of maturity and chic. Michelle was on the phone, but she mouthed “hello” to Nina when she passed and pointed to a tray of scones and muffins on the hospitality table next to the coffee. Nina stopped to fix herself a cup of coffee and carried it and a cinnamon scone to her desk, whispering “Thanks,” to Michelle on her way.