Chapter 11 #2
She eyed him playfully. “How do you know I studied in high school? You and I didn’t hang out then.”
“I used to watch you from my back window while you were lying on a blanket in the grass, with all your textbooks spread out around you. You read for hours.”
“Stalker,” she teased, making him chuckle.
The humor in his eyes gave her flutters.
“You know, I took Abbey Nichols to senior prom when I really wanted to ask you.”
She sucked in a breath. “Really?” His admission hit her like a ton of bricks. “I hated senior prom,” she said. “I went with that football player, Martin Albert—remember him?”
Charlie wrinkled his nose. “I remember his belching contests at lunch. He always won. Why did you go with him?”
“Because he asked.”
The vehicle came to a stop on the edge of North Thompson and Buck Drive, a one-lane intersection outside the country market where students used to gather after school.
“How’s this?” He gestured toward the clapboard building in front of them.
Emmy had been a few times, but most of her after-school hours were spent studying. The market had seating inside and country cooking in the back.
“It’s perfect.”
“I mentioned to my parents that I wanted to swing by this place. They said if I did, to get them each a cream soda.” Charlie waggled his eyebrows. “Let’s get ourselves a bottle. My treat.”
She grabbed her handbag along with her sketchbook and the drawings before they got out of the car and walked up to the building.
A pine wreath hung on the door and blinking colored lights outlined the large window.
A pair of tarnished brass bells jingled when they entered.
With the envelope and notebook under her arm, Emmy followed Charlie, pacing along the wooden floor.
He nodded to the young man behind the counter, who didn’t look any older than sixteen.
“You didn’t want to come with your parents?” she asked.
“I offered. They said it was too cold to go out. They’re under blankets on the sofa, watching Christmas movies—and probably asleep.”
“That sounds wonderful actually. What are you doing driving around? Wouldn’t you rather be cuddled up on a sofa at home?”
“Nah, this is just as entertaining.” His gaze lingered on her for a tick. Then, he led them over to the wall of refrigerators.
Emmy tried not to interpret the fondness in his eyes. She browsed the array of bottles, then opened the glass door and pulled out a cream soda for herself. He grabbed an Orange Crush and a couple more cream sodas for his folks.
He paid for their drinks, and they settled at the picnic-style table at the back of the shop. Emmy set the little stack in front of her.
Charlie popped the top off her bottle of cream soda and then opened his own. “Show me the drawing you want to do.”
“Why are you so interested? I’m curious.”
He leaned back in his chair. “It’s intriguing to watch you draw the same things that you used to when we were kids. I’m interested in seeing how your talent has progressed.”
She pulled out her mother’s sketches and found the one with the classic silhouette of a woman in the tea-length dress. She ran her fingertip down it. “She was brilliant with the shading. See how she added the darker pencil here to make the dress look perfectly cinched at the waist?”
Charlie moved his bottle to the side and peered over at the drawing.
“I’ll bet you can draw one just as intricate.”
“I don’t know.”
She took her drawing pencil from the spiral and opened her sketchbook to an empty page. “It’s nerve-wracking with you watching,” she admitted.
“You’ve drawn in front of me before.”
She frowned. “Yeah, but not seriously. They were just little doodles.”
“When we went to the pool when we were young, you would sit with your snack at the table under the umbrella and draw dresses like your mom’s, dripping wet from swimming, wrapped in a towel.”
“I’d forgotten about that. How did you remember?”
“Because your drawings fascinated me. I wished I had the talent you had.”
She met his gaze. “You never mentioned that.”
He shrugged and took a drink from his bottle. Then he waggled a finger at her open notebook. “Let’s see what you can do. Show off for me.”
With a steadying breath, Emmy picked up her pencil.
The emptiness of the page cried out for shape and form, but an invisible barbed wire fence of fear encircled it.
She hadn’t drawn to this scale in front of anyone before, and she worried about being compared to her mother.
After all, the drawings were right there; surely Emmy’s shortcomings would be evident.
She was certain her mother had flaws, but Emmy never saw any.
And as she matured, she was compared to her mom, but she never felt like she could live up to her mother’s high standard.
So through high school, Emmy had set incredibly high goals for herself that she couldn’t meet—her own self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
The belief took hold that she would always be too flawed to be as successful as the one woman she held in high regard, and she’d never been able to shake it.
Over the years, she’d tried to make sense of her feelings, knowing that she put a lot of pressure on herself, but her own criticism had become her inner voice.
She looked up at Charlie. His lips were drawn just slightly upward, his interest clear.
With a deep breath, she dragged her pencil down the page. She mapped out a similar silhouette, accentuating the hourglass figure like her mother had done.
“You said you have a PR job?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.”
“Have you ever considered design?”
She frowned. “No. Drawing designs is all I really know how to do. And it’s always been this private thing I had with my mom.
I’d hate to taint it.” She stopped drawing.
“You know how work is—the day in and day out can suck the life out of anything.” She dared not admit that doing it every day would remind her of the colossal hole caused by her mother’s passing.
Designing would be too painful. As it was, she had to be in the right mindset to draw, and sometimes even sketching was too distressful.
“Yeah, I get it.”
She went back to drawing and sketched the long, slender limbs of the woman and then, from the waist, she completed a skirt that fanned out the way her mom’s had, but she shortened it a bit to make it more current.
“I do love designing dresses particularly. I sometimes wonder if I could ever get tired of it.”
“Design a formal line,” he suggested.
She lengthened the quarter-length sleeves and added a ruffle.
The square retro neckline needed a slight change as well, so she widened it off the shoulder.
“I rarely even wear dresses, but I’m obsessed with them.
I note their hemming and seams…” She looked back up at him.
“There’s this second-hand shop near me called The Garnet & Petticoat.
It has a dark green dress in the shop window that I can’t seem to let go of. I even went in and looked at it.”
He grinned. “Was it your size?”
“It looked as though it would fit like a charm.”
“Maybe it was meant for you then,” he said.
“It’s an extravagance I don’t need, but I did look inside to see if it was one of Mom’s. I’m always hoping there are other dresses out there.”
“Why?”
“I suppose I just can’t come to grips with the fact that she had all that talent and never used it.”
He met her gaze. “It’s a shame she didn’t.”
Something told her he was no longer talking about Emmy’s mother.
She turned her attention back to the sketch to avoid any further discussion.
Before she knew it, she was lost in the work, everything around her fading away.
The only thing she was aware of was Charlie’s quiet attention.
But instead of worrying her like she thought it would, he calmed her.
She colored in her drawing with the edge of her pencil, her attention moving from her mother’s sketch to her own, as if her mom were quietly coaching her the way she had when they drew together.
Emmy was so engrossed in the work that her inner thoughts weren’t her own.
“You’ll want the lines lighter here, to give the fabric movement,” her mother’s voice whispered to her as if she were over her shoulder. “Take the curve lower, like this.”
Emmy’s hand moved effortlessly over the page, and with every line, she felt stronger than she had with any of her other drawings.
When she finished, she turned the sketch around and then took a drink from her cream soda, her heart pattering.
“That’s absolutely incredible. You should definitely not be getting anyone’s lunches for a living.”
She smiled. In that moment, she believed him.
“Promise me you’ll call me and fill me in on what happens at the meeting with your boss,” Charlie said as he stood with Emmy at the front door.
“I promise.”
Happiness quivered through her at the thought of having a reason to contact him after the holiday. She looked into his eyes, not wanting to say goodbye.
“Have a good flight home,” she said.
“You do the same.”
A cold wind whipped around them, and she shivered.
He bounced his eyebrows the way one does when there’s nothing left to say. “You should get inside where it’s warm.”
She considered asking him in, but he probably needed to get home to his parents. He was there to see them, not her. And, at the very least, he had their sodas in the car.
“Well, I’ll see ya,” she said.
“See ya.”
She turned away and opened the door. Should she have said something else? She spun back around, but he was already heading to his car.
Gripping her notebook, she went inside.