Chapter Thirteen
Evelyn made the walk to Mrs. Montgomery's in record time that morning, her ankle barely complaining, the cold barely registering, because a woman on a mission moved faster than a woman on a stroll, and Evelyn Granger had woken up with a mission that sat so clear in her head she could have drawn it on a map.
Mrs. Montgomery opened the door in her house shawl, her eyes still puffy from sleep or from crying or from both, because the woman had been carrying a bank letter behind her books for days and Evelyn doubted she'd slept a full night since it arrived.
Nobody slept well with an eviction notice in the house.
Evelyn had never received one herself, but she'd shared a dormitory with a girl named Pauline who'd lived in three different homes before the orphanage—each one lost to debt or drink or both.
Pauline had described the particular terror of it, that slow countdown to the day strangers showed up and told you to leave the only place you'd ever belonged.
Pauline had stopped sleeping properly by age nine.
Evelyn suspected Mrs. Montgomery had stopped sleeping properly about three days ago.
"Mrs. Montgomery, I got me a plan. Can I come in?"
"A plan?" The old woman stepped aside, flustered, pulling the shawl tighter. "What manner of plan, child?"
Evelyn sat her down at the table and laid it out straight because Mrs. Montgomery deserved straight and Evelyn had no patience for circling a subject when the subject had a deadline.
The town fair. End of the month. Stalls for rent.
Evelyn could sew, hats and gloves and scarves and whatever else people needed before winter bit down hard.
Mrs. Montgomery could make jam, the finest chokecherry jam in the territory, the kind of jam that made you close your eyes and forget your own troubles.
Together, a stall at the fair, goods for sale, money toward the debt.
"We ain't gonna sit here and wait for the bank to come callin'. We're gonna fight 'em with jam and stitchwork, Mrs. Montgomery, and they ain't gonna know what hit 'em."
The old woman's chin trembled first, then her mouth, then the rest of her face gave up the fight entirely.
The tears came, but different tears this time.
Not the terrified kind from yesterday. The kind that broke loose when a person who'd stopped expecting rescue heard somebody say they were coming anyway.
"You'd, you'd do that? For me?"
"I done already started. Sam's ridin' to the town hall tomorrow to put our name down for a stall. All I need from you is every jar of jam you can put up between now and fair day. Can you manage that?"
Mrs. Montgomery straightened in her chair, wiping her face with the back of her hand. A different look came into her eyes, the look of a woman remembering she had capable hands.
"Child, I been puttin' up jam since the year you was born.
You get me the sugar and the jars, and I'll fill 'em fast as you can count 'em.
Chokecherry, huckleberry, wild plum if I can turn up any put by in the cellar.
Mr. Montgomery always did say I could can my way through a famine if the good Lord provided the fruit. "
"Then that's what we'll do. I'll sew the goods, you'll put up the jam, and between the two of us we'll raise every dollar we can."
"What about the rest? If it don't come to enough?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now I need you makin' jam. Can I count on you, Mrs. Montgomery?"
The old woman grabbed Evelyn's hands in both of hers, gripping hard enough that her swollen knuckles went white. "You can count on me till the day they put me in the ground, Miss Granger. And maybe a spell after that, too."
***
Evelyn came through the front door of the Cooper homestead at a pace that made Sam look up from the harness he'd been mending at the kitchen table, the leather and awl going still in his hands.
"We need supplies. Fabric, yarn, thread, buttons, all of it. Harlow's got a fabric shelf in back. I need you to hitch up the buckboard and take me into town."
He looked at her standing in the doorway with her coat still on and her cheeks red from the walk and that particular set to her jaw that he'd started calling her "Missouri mule face," though only inside his own head because saying it out loud would start a fight she lacked the energy for.
"Right this minute?"
"Right this very minute. Mrs. Montgomery's itchin’ to get started. We're burnin' daylight, Sam."
He set the harness down and reached for his coat.
***
Evelyn went through Harlow's fabric shelf with the eye of a woman who'd spent years turning limited materials into presentable garments, which amounted to the only professional skill the orphanage had given her worth keeping.
She selected the cotton flannel for scarves because it had warmth and weight.
The calico for bonnet linings and decorative trim.
The wool, despite a crease permanent enough to qualify as a feature, for gloves, because Montana winters required wool and people would pay for fingers that didn't freeze.
She bought yarn, three skeins of the heaviest weight Harlow stocked.
Thread in four colors. A packet of needles because Sarah's sewing kit had exactly two that hadn't gone dull.
Buttons, bone and shell, the plain kind that lasted.
A card of blue ribbon, because blue sold and Evelyn had opinions about what colors people bought in November that she'd developed over three years of retail sewing and had never once been proven wrong about.
Harlow tallied the bill on his scrap of brown paper, licking his pencil between figures, and the total came to four dollars and sixty-five cents.
Evelyn pulled the money from her pocket—her personal savings—and counted it onto the counter.
Sam stood by the door through the whole transaction, his arms crossed, watching.
He looked at the coins on the counter, then at Evelyn, then back at the coins.
His jaw did the thing it did when he wanted to say a thing he'd decided against saying, that slow lateral movement followed by a clenching at the hinge, and then he picked up the packages from the counter and carried them to the buckboard without a word.
Good. Because Evelyn had no interest in discussing it.
***
She set up the sewing area on the kitchen table the moment they got home, spreading the fabric out and laying the scissors, thread, and needles in the order she liked, left to right by frequency of use.
It was a system she'd developed at the orphanage, carried into Mr. Ridley's shop, and now carried into Sarah Cooper's kitchen, because a person's work habits traveled with them wherever they went, even to the Montana Territory.
The first scarf took forty minutes. She cut the flannel to length, folded the edges, stitched them down with a running stitch tight enough to hold through a season of wear.
The work calmed her the way sewing always calmed her, the rhythmic push and pull of needle through fabric, the quiet accumulation of progress one stitch at a time.
She could measure her life in stitches if she had to, starting with the first one the orphanage taught her at age seven, crooked and loose, the matron standing over her telling her to tear it out and do it again because "sloppy stitching is a sign of a sloppy character, Miss Granger.
" She'd torn it out. Done it again. Kept doing it until the matron stopped finding fault and started finding usefulness.
By the time she was twelve, Evelyn could stitch a straighter seam than any girl in the building.
The second scarf went faster. The third faster still, her hands remembering the rhythm.
By late afternoon she had five finished, folded in a neat stack beside the cutting board.
She started on gloves next, cutting patterns from the wool, her shears moving steadily through the fabric while the light outside the window shifted from afternoon to evening without her permission.
Sam came through from outside work around dusk and stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the table.
"You got need of any help with all that?"
"Can you cut fabric?"
"I can cut most anything a body puts in front of me."
"Then sit yourself down and cut me twelve rectangles, eight inches by ten, from that bolt of flannel. Straight lines, Mr. Cooper. Straight. I ain't got time to be fixin' crooked cuts."
He sat down across from her, took the shears, and cut the first rectangle. It came out seven and a half inches on one side and eleven on the other, which constituted neither eight by ten nor straight by any definition Evelyn had encountered in her professional career.
"That ain't nowhere near straight."
"It's close enough, I reckon."
"Close enough gets you a lopsided scarf that no self-respectin' person'd pay two bits for. Try again. Measure first. Use the edge of the table to guide you."
He measured, cut again. This one came out closer, maybe eight by ten and a quarter, with a slight curve along the bottom edge she could trim later. She set it in the usable pile and pointed him at the next piece.
He cut, she stitched, and the kitchen filled with the soft sounds of scissors through fabric.
At some point—she couldn't have said when because time had stopped moving in a straight line about two hours ago—a cup of tea appeared beside her elbow. Hot, steaming, brewed strong. She looked up from her stitching.
Sam had gone back to his chair across the table, cutting another rectangle with a concentration that seemed excessive for the task. The teapot sat on the stove behind him, recently used.
She picked up the cup and drank. It was stronger than she usually made it, brewed to Sam's preference rather than hers, but hot and welcome.
She went back to stitching. He went back to cutting. Neither of them mentioned the tea.
The clock on the shelf ticked past nine, then past ten.
Evelyn's fingers had started to ache from the needle, that deep throb in the joints that came from hours of fine work, her eyes blurring at the edges when she tried to focus.
Eleven scarves done, four pairs of gloves, two hats cut but unfinished.
She ran the numbers in her head while she worked.
"If we price the scarves at fifty cents apiece and the gloves at seventy-five, the hats at a dollar—"
"Fifty cents for a scarf?" Sam set down the shears. "You been workin' on them things all the livelong day. The labor alone's worth more'n that."
"Fifty cents is what folks'll pay. These here are ranch families, Sam. Miners. Homesteaders. They ain't the kind of people got money to throw around on fancy goods. If we price too dear, they'll walk on past and we'll sit there all day at a table full of scarves nobody can afford."
"And if you price too cheap, you'll sell every last one and still come up twenty dollars short of what's needed. You ain't runnin' a charity stall, Evelyn. You're tryin' to raise a hundred and twenty-seven dollars. The prices gotta reflect the work, else the work don't mean a blessed thing."
"Seventy-five cents for a flannel scarf is too dear. I'm tellin' you straight, nobody at a town fair is gonna—"
"Then make 'em fancier. Put some trim on 'em. That blue ribbon you bought at Harlow's, stitch a line of it along the edge. Folks'll pay more for a thing that looks like it cost more to make, even if the ribbon only set you back a penny."
Evelyn opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again because the man had just made an excellent point and she hated giving him the satisfaction of being right about sewing adjacent matters.
She picked up the spool of blue ribbon and measured a length against the nearest finished scarf.
It would add maybe three minutes of work per piece.
It would also add a stripe of color that caught the eye, dressed the piece up.
Mrs. Krauss had taught her that years ago.
"You sell with the eye first, girl. The hand comes second. "
"Sixty cents."
"Seventy."
"Sixty-five."
"Seventy. And the hats at a dollar and a quarter."
"Sixty-five. And the hats at a dollar. And that's my final word on it, Sam Cooper."
"It ain't your final word on nothin', and you know it good as I do. We'll be squabblin' about this the mornin' of the fair, I'd wager."