"Are you sure you don't mind working again so soon?” Harriet asked Aunt Beth the next morning as the two women sat in the sunny yellow kitchen. Harriet's fuzzy gray cat Fred wove between Aunt Beth's ankles under the table.
"It's no trouble. I had a full month to rest while I was on my European cruise.” She wheeled her arm around. “My shoulder feels great, and besides, I think most of the Loose Threads are going to the workshop so no one will be breathing down my neck waiting for anything. And it'll give you a chance to network with other quilters from our area."
"Mavis said you'd say that. I guess I'll fax my registration in, then. This late maybe they won't have room for me, so it won't even matter."
The two women got up and passed through the door that connected the kitchen to the studio. Harriet picked up the registration form from her desk and pulled a fax cover sheet from the shelf behind the desk.
"Oh, I think they'll make room,” Beth assured her. “They're already paying the teacher to appear, so the more people they cram into the class the more money they make."
"That sounds kind of harsh,” Harriet said with a smile at her tell-it-like-it-is aunt.
"Wait until you get assigned a bed in the sleeping room that's ten flights of stairs up and is really an attic to the attic."
Harriet pulled her papers back from the fax machine.
Aunt Beth laughed. “I'm exaggerating. They only over-booked us once and they got such an uproar they had to refund people's money, so they never did it again."
Harriet put the papers back into the fax machine and hit the send button.
"I'm still not sure I should be leaving,” she said. “I'm just barely used to being back in Foggy Point. My mail still has yellow forwarding stickers on it.” She paced the length of the workroom.
"Would you settle down? You aren't moving to the other side of the moon, you're just going to a workshop in Angel Harbor. It's only a two-hour drive from here and you're only going for a week."
"Two hours and a ferry ride,” Harriet began unhooking the tension clips and loosening the roller from a yellow-and-white Sunbonnet Sue quilt on the long-arm machine. Aunt Beth had christened this particular machine “Mabel” when she'd purchased it as a replacement for “Gladys,” her previous machine. Mabel's guide handles and stitching head reminded Harriet of the horned milk cows her boarding school in France had kept.
Aunt Beth had remodeled the parlor of her house to accommodate Gladys when she'd first started the long-arm quilting business more than ten years ago, and fortunately, she'd made the room large enough it had no trouble accepting Mabel's larger frame. The twelve-foot-long table could hold a king-sized quilt with no trouble, and its fifty-two-inch width gave Harriet lots of room to work any pattern her customers could imagine.
She finished unpinning the current project from the frame, spread it on her large cutting table and ran her hand over the surface, looking for threads that needed clipping. She had checked for threads on the back as she'd unrolled it from the machine, but she always checked both sides a second time on the flat table before folding up a quilt and returning it to its bag, just to be sure.
"Well, I'm going down to Pins and Needles,” Beth announced. “Margaret is sending Carla to the workshop, and I want to buy the girl a sewing bag."
Margaret was the owner of Pins and Needles, Foggy Point's quilting store. She had hired Carla after she'd been laid off from her job at the Vitamin Factory, a business that had been owned and operated by Aiden's mother until her untimely death a few weeks prior. Harriet, too, had noticed the young single mother carried her sewing supplies in a grocery sack.
"Here, let me make a donation,” she said, going back into the kitchen and rummaging in the coat closet, emerging with a black nylon duffel bag. “I got a new overnight bag when I went to Tacoma with Robin and DeAnn last week. Carla will need something to put her clothes in, too. This one…” She held up the bag. “…has a few more trips left in it."
"That's very kind of you,” Beth said, “I did raise you well, didn't I?” Beth took the bag, picked up her purse and jacket and went out the door.
"Well, Fred, all I can say is it's a good thing Aunt Beth can't read minds, ‘cause she wouldn't think I was so nice if she knew what I was thinking about Lauren. That woman's nuts if you ask me. And I still don't see why we have to go reward her for bad behavior."
Fred meowed once and went to the connecting door.
"It's not lunch time yet,” Harriet told her furry friend and went back to start on the next project on her to-be-stitched shelf.