A short while later, Mama waltzed in carrying a vase bursting with lavender. For a split second, I thought it was a young Meemaw. Mama looked just like her mother, Coleta, who was a dead ringer for Loretta Mae. There was never a doubt that a Cassidy was a Cassidy—the auburn hair with the trademark blond streak was our genetic signature.
The teakettle whistled. I was bursting with news of my commission, and a thread of worry that I’d bitten off more than I could chew, but I held my tongue. “Where are those from?” I asked, gesturing to the flowers.
She set the vase in the middle of the pine table next to my sketchbook. Adjusting her Longhorns cap and tucking in a wayward strand of hair, she sat down. “I planted lavender, and you know how it goes. Start with one, grow a million and one.”
That’s not how it went for everybody, but that happened to be my mother’s gift. Her thumb was greener than the Jolly Green Giant’s, while mine was the color of an eggplant, more or less. I didn’t have a bit of talent when it came to gardening.
“How’d your day go?” she asked as she arranged the flowers, fixing the few that had torqued during transit.
I beamed, determined to do whatever it took to make the dresses. “I talked to Josie Sandoval today. Do you remember her?”
“Does a ladybug have wings? Of course I remember her. I saw her a few days ago when I was leaving—” She suddenly stopped, regrouped, and finished with “—when I was, er, visiting a friend.”
“Well, she’s getting married and can you believe that the place she bought her dress from went out of business?”
Mama tsked. “That’s awful.”
“That’s not the worst of it. Her gown and the bridesmaids’ dresses are MIA.”
My mother sucked in a breath. “Very bad luck.”
Tessa Cassidy was a firm believer in superstition. She was forever tossing salt over her left shoulder and crossing herself, even though she wasn’t Catholic. I didn’t know if a missing wedding dress was universally bad luck, but sometimes it was better just to nod than to argue a superstition point.
“Their wedding’s in a few weeks,” she said. Her eyebrows pulled together as she eyed me. “What’s she going to do?”
“Twelve days, actually. Her misfortune is my good luck.” I felt a smidgeon of guilt over being happy about the Bridal Outlet going belly-up, and although Josie was out the deposit on the dresses she’d ordered from the store, I firmly believed it was her absolutely good fortune that I was on the job. “She hired me to make them. Her gown and all the bridesmaid dresses.”
Mama placed her palms flat on the table, interlaced her fingers, and stared me down. “Oh, no, Harlow Jane, you can’t do that.”
“Of course I can. It’s an unbelievable opportunity!” I slid into the ladder-back chair opposite her, pushing the vase of flowers out of the way so I could look her in the eye. “So far, everything I’ve designed and made has been for myself, an assignment, or based on someone else’s vision. If I lay eyes on another Maximilian dress with the artsy collar and the structured shoulders, I’ll scream. Bridal gowns. It’s such a niche market. They may be just the thing to put me on the map.”
But my mother was shaking her head. “Making someone else’s wedding dress means bad luck for your own romance.”
I sat back, folding my arms over my chest. “Mama, I’m not going to turn away this contract because you think it’s bad luck.”
“I don’t want the Harlow and Cassidy names to die out,” she said with a frown.
“So that’s what this is about? Grandchildren?”
“I’m not getting any younger, and your grandmother would sure love some great-grandbabies from you.”
Nana spent every waking moment in the company of her goats. I didn’t think she was holding her breath over me producing great-grandbabies for her. “You both have Red’s kids.”
“You know I love those boys to pieces,” she said, a smile ticking up one side of her mouth. My brother’s kids were the apples of the Cassidy family’s collective eye. Cullen was four and Clay was two. “But,” Mama continued, “they don’t have the Cassidy gift.”
“I don’t have the Cassidy gift!” I exclaimed. I’d held out hope throughout my childhood, into my teenage years, and even into my twenties that my charm would make itself known. It hadn’t happened, and I was resigned to the fact that it never would. “Even if I have a daughter someday, she probably won’t be charmed, either,” I added wistfully. “Time to let it go, Mama. If there’s romance out there for me, great, but I’m not going to stop living in the meantime.”
“Your charm will materialize one of these days. It’s in you,” she countered, as if she knew it for a fact. “And your daughters will have it, too.”
I was firmly into my thirties and hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in more years than I cared to remember. And now she had me bearing multiple daughters. Enough was enough. I picked up my sketchbook and opened it to the designs I’d done earlier for Josie and her bridesmaids. “I took the job,” I said, burying my lingering doubts and sliding the book in front of her. “The wedding’s in a week and a half. I’m going to need another seamstress to get it all done in time.” I batted my eyelashes at her. “Will you help me, Mama?”
Chapter 6
My love of sewing had started when I was nine years old and had spent an October weekend at Mockingbird Lane with Meemaw. She’d laid out a length of blueand-white-checked gingham on her cardboard cutting board, pinned McCall’s pattern pieces onto it, and cut it apart with shiny silver shears. I’d watch in awe as she sat at her Singer, telling me step by step what she was doing, and before I knew it, the day was gone and Meemaw had created a dress identical to Dorothy Gale’s from The Wizard of Oz. I’d worn it for Halloween that year, and nearly every day after that until my mother had looked at me sideways and said, “Should we make another dress so you can give that one a rest every now and again?”
My eyes had gone wide and excitement bubbled inside me. “Will Meemaw make me another one?”
“I’m sure she will,” Mama said, “but I think we should teach you how to do it. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime.”
I’d stared at her, not understanding what fish had to do with sewing, but I understood now. Meemaw had made me a dress and I felt like a princess when I wore it. Mama and Meemaw had taught me to sew and from that moment on I had been a queen. When I’d made a mistake and cried, Meemaw had said, “Darlin’, there are no mistakes in sewing. Only opportunities for design.”
Those were words I still lived by today.
“These are beautiful,” Mama said, flipping through the pages of sketches I’d done for Josie. She tapped the book with her index finger. “This is your gift, Harlow Jane.”
It wasn’t a Cassidy charm, but if I’d been a peacock right then, my feathers would have spread with pride. “Thanks to you.”
“Pshaw!” She waved away the credit. “Meemaw and I gave you the foundation. What you’ve done with that is damn impressive.”
A sound from the sink caught my attention. The faucet was suddenly dripping, slowly at first with a steady plop, plop, plop. It grew faster, changing until it sounded like yep, yep, yep. I jumped up and adjusted the rusty handle until it stopped dribbling. “This place needs a lot of work,” I said. I penciled “leaky faucet” on my list of things to repair—right next to “doorstop” and “hole in workroom wall”—and sat back down at the table. “Meemaw wasn’t great at maintenance, was she?”