And then it hit me: these pieces were proportioned for ten-foot ceilings and rooms with twenty-foot-long walls.
Everything was too upscale and too scaled up for me. Even if I could afford to buy a few pieces, they’d look squashed in any house of mine.
A few feet away, as if to underline how hopelessly I was out of it, a high-powered blonde dressed in brown linen and shiny gold cuff bracelets imperiously waved away the fabric swatches that a Century representative was trying to show her.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a voice which held no regret, “but as far as my clients are concerned, chenille is last week. Over. Finished. Dead!”
The representative immediately laid those swatches aside and reached for another set, and for a silly moment I pictured flocks of amorphous little puffy chenilles keeling over in mortification before the interior decorator’s scornful pronouncement.
With my furniture envy now in check, I skimmed through the galleries that, altogether, must have covered several thousand square feet. I turned a corner and there ahead of me was a head of blonde hair pulled back in a French braid. I quickened my pace till I was sure it was Drew Patterson, then called her name.
She glanced around and seemed surprised to see me. “Hey, Deborah. Enjoying the Market? Where’s Lynnette?”
“I was hoping maybe you’d seen her,” I said and quickly explained how I’d lost her. “I just don’t understand how she even knows Savannah well enough to go running after her like that. Dixie sounded as if last night was the first time anybody had seen Savannah in years, so how would Lynnette—?”
“My fault, I’m afraid,” said Drew. “She was here with Chan last week and I took her for ice cream. Savannah saw us and came over to our table and wound up charming her. Even on Prozac and lithium or whatever she’s supposed to be taking, Savannah is magical the way she can relate on any level to anybody, old or young.”
I might be curious as to why Drew was the only person who seemed to know current details about Savannah, but the mention of those mind-calming drugs made me more uneasy than ever for Lynnette’s safety and I said as much.
Drew smiled. “Don’t worry. For some reason she’s convinced that Lynnette’s my daughter. She’d never hurt her.”
Nevertheless, she joined the search and minutes later we found them seated side by side on an overstuffed loveseat in a corner gallery. Lynnette was almost as big as Savannah and she had leaned her head on the woman’s shoulder to see the sketchpad Savannah held on her lap and to watch the pencil that flashed and darted as ladybugs and humming-birds flowed across the sheet of paper chased by a little girl whose braided pigtail seemed to float on the breeze.
Savannah’s small face broke into a genuine smile when Drew spoke to her and she even seemed to remember me, but whether as Ms. Sotelli from Newark or Judge Knott from Colleton County wasn’t quite clear.
Drew cupped Lynnette’s chin in her hand and gently scolded her. “You really scared Miss Deborah running off like that, punkin.”
“I’m sorry,” said the child, “but Savannah-Nana said she’d draw me again next time and I was afraid she wouldn’t see me.”
“We knew you would find us,” Savannah told Drew. “A mother always knows where to find her daughter.”
Drew touched the older woman’s hand. “No, Savannah. I told you before. Lynnette’s my friend, not my daughter.”
“You do not want to talk about it,” Savannah nodded knowingly. “Never mind, my darling. No one cares about such things these days.”
Bewildered, I looked at Drew, who gave a tiny shrug of exasperation.
Savannah tore off the two sheets of sketches she’d made, handed them to Lynnette, and said to me with kindly courtesy, “It was very nice of you to call. I hope you will visit us again.”
I was dying to ask her how my tote bag wound up next to Chan last night and whether my penicillin tablets were still inside my purse when she left it, but my internal preacher was yammering about little pitchers.
Instead, I said an equally formal goodbye and held out my hand to Lynnette. She started to protest, but Drew forestalled her. “You need to let Miss Deborah take you back to your grandmama before she starts worrying about you, too. I’ll see you in a little while, okay?”
“Okay.” She slid down off the loveseat, stuffed Savannah’s drawings into her green tote, slipped her arms through the straps, and reached for my hand. A sudden thought made her smile. “Maybe Shirley Jane’ll be there.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, not looking forward to the emotional scene that was bound to play out when Chan’s sister arrived.
Drew remained behind and Heather McKenzie was disappointed when I returned to the entrance with Lynnette in tow, but no Savannah.
“She’s back in a far gallery with Drew Patterson,” I said and pointed in the general direction. “She seems to be in a good mood, too, so maybe you’ll luck out if you approach her now.”
“She doesn’t like to talk to people,” Lynnette piped up. “Just me and Drew. That’s all she likes.”
Heather wasn’t much taller than Lynnette and she gave the child a humoring smile. “And why do you suppose that is?”
“ ’Cause she’s Drew’s other mother,” said Lynnette.
13
« ^ » “The firm have in their employ several designers or artists who occupy separate rooms, in different parts of the building, and who do not intercommunicate, each depending upon his own unaided genius in devising sketches for the models.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
“Other mother?”
Drew smiled when I repeated Lynnette’s words later that night. “I guess it probably sounds like that to a child. I’ve known Savannah since I was a baby and she took me under her wing when I was a bratty kid not much older than Lynnette. She was doing a catalog for Fitch and Patterson and she let me help dress the sets. She was really more like a mentor or a fairy godmother and I absolutely worshiped her to the point that it made my mother a little jealous. When I thought I wanted to become a freelance designer, Savannah let me hang out at Mulholland and taught me some of the basics.”
“That’s what you do now?”
“Except that I design exclusively for Fitch and Patterson.”
A cynical thought crossed my mind and she must have seen it on my face.
“I may be a Patterson, Deborah, but that doesn’t mean I’m a dilettante. I work pretty damn hard and I have a good eye for fabrics.” She said it as a matter of fact, not conceit. “There are only so many designs for a chair or a couch. It takes fabric and color to keep the product fresh. I was one of the first in the industry to recognize how popular chenille could be. Because of me, we were ahead of the curve, not following it.”
Again, an absurd image of fuzzy chenilles romped through my mind. “I heard someone today say that chenille’s dead.”
“Fading perhaps in the premium market but it’ll hold strong in the upper- to mid-range for at least another year or two. Longer in the low end, but by then we’ll be into something else.”
The April night was so mild that my light sweater was warmth enough. We were sitting in white wicker rocking chairs on Pell Austin’s screened side porch where we could see the steady stream of people coming and going from Dixie’s house. Market people, Fitch and Patterson people, people who had known Chan and who cared about Dixie—it looked as if half of High Point had come to pay their respects to Chan’s mother-in-law and sister tonight
A local TV van had been there earlier, in time for the 5:30 news. Dixie had made a statement So far, my name had been kept out of it. Since she was Chan’s mother-in-law and the one who called 911, the reporters seemed to assume she was the one who found him. So far, everyone who’d spoken on-camera—including Jay Patterson, Kay Adams and Jacob Collier—was profoundly shocked and everyone was just devastated by his death.