Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Okay, new plan,” Hope said, coming into the living room with that week’s book club book in her hands.
They only had the one copy between them, because it had seemed silly to have two copies of one book when they were living in the same house.
But trading back and forth was also taking too long, especially since Hope had to catch up on some of the earlier chapters, since she’d joined the book club when they were already midway through.
“I’m going to read the pages out loud,” she told her grandmother, not yet looking up from where she was flipping through to find the place where she had left off. “That way, we can both absorb the information at the same time. I’ll be like your own personal audiobook narrator.”
“Perfect,” Miriam said. “That way I can finally finish this. It’s been mocking me.”
Hope glanced over to see her grandmother working on a quilt.
Most of the work was done; the squares were each in a perfect pinwheel pattern that made the whole thing look like a gorgeous, whirling array of color.
That part, Hope recalled, could be done by machine, and Miriam did have one in her spare room. This part, though…
“This part has to be done by hand, right?” she asked, joining her grandmother on the couch. The layers of the quilt were pinned together: the patchwork top, the batting in the middle, and the large, solid piece that would make up the back of the quilt.
“Yes, this part is called the quilting,” Miriam explained as she stitched a careful pattern with white thread that went through all three layers. “It’s what stops the batting from bunching up in the middle as soon as you pick the quilt up.”
Hope ran her fingers over the material. There was a faint drawing in the kind of water-soluble fabric pencil that she recalled from her own childhood sewing projects.
Miriam was stitching carefully along this line, which added another layer of dimension to the quilt’s texture.
The lines she’d drawn looked like lapping waves; combined with the pinwheel pattern in jaunty blues, with the occasional splash of red thrown in, it made the whole thing feel very beachy to Hope.
“I haven’t done any crafts projects in so long,” she said as she imagined what the final product would look like.
After this elaborate hand-quilting process, her grandmother would take the border that was attached to the front piece of the quilt and wrap it around the edge of the batting, then connect it to the back.
This was another aspect that had to be done by hand.
“Me neither,” Miriam said. “My mother taught me quilting, as I’m sure you recall. Your dad never wanted to learn. He was too much the consummate boy. Never happy unless he was covered in mud. And Felicity couldn’t sit still long enough when she was little either. But I taught you!”
“You did,” Hope agreed. She eyed her grandmother’s sewing kit.
Just the sight of it brought back memories from childhood.
Hope had only intermittent interest in quilting, which was a pretty long-term project for a small child, but she had sewed her own little ragdoll and then made tons of clothes for it.
Now she eyed the project with interest. It wasn’t precisely a brag to say that now, at thirty, she had more patience than she had possessed when she was six years old.
But an enduring project that would, at the end, give her an object that she could hold up as a sign of her perseverance and success was definitely appealing.
There was probably some sort of psychological link between her job vanishing into a puff of air after a decade of labor and this desire, but Hope didn’t think that was bad, just logical.
Miriam saw her looking at the project and smiled.
“Would you like to help?” she asked. “This is the kind of work that goes more quickly with two hands.”
The sentence was barely out of Miriam’s mouth before Hope was reaching for the sewing basket. She didn’t bother to hide her eagerness. She knew that Miriam would be just as pleased for the help as Hope was to offer it.
“Okay,” Miriam said when Hope had threaded the needle with the right color and weight of thread. “So see the width of my stitches?”
Hope nodded, peering at her grandmother’s neat, precise work.
“Try to do them about that long,” Miriam said, “but honestly, this project is just for fun, so it’s a good place to get the cobwebs out, so to speak. Follow the lines, but again, it doesn’t need to be perfect.”
This warning proved useful, because Hope did, indeed, have some cobwebs to work out. After a few minutes of stitching, though, she felt the old muscle memory begin to come back, and her stitches grew more even, the tension in the thread more regular.
They lapsed into a comfortable silence for a little while, each stitching from one corner of the quilt. Eventually, though, Miriam made a querying hum.
“So, Hopey,” she opened, her mischievous smile dancing around her lips. “Tell me. Any potential paramours in your life?”
Hope paused in her work to give her grandmother a wry look.
“When would I have found any potential paramours?” she asked. “I left my whole life in Boston behind, and since I’ve come here, I’m mostly hanging out with you. I have no complaints about that, obviously, but it doesn’t exactly leave me overflowing with date possibilities.”
Miriam hummed noncommittally.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Well, indulge an old romantic, eh? Tell me about the last romantic intrigue you enjoyed?”
Hope laughed at her grandmother’s dramatic phrasing. “‘Intrigue’ is going a bit far,” she said. “But I guess it’s been almost a year now.”
The length of time shocked her a little. She hadn’t quite realized how long had gone by without any romance in her life.
Her mind wandered briefly to Jared’s comment about her being pretty…
but she pushed that awkward experience away as quickly as she could.
She had acted like she was fourteen years old with her first crush.
It was not the cool, adult attitude she had hoped to show the handsome chef, and, days later, it still made her cringe with embarrassment if she thought about it too hard.
She quickly turned her thoughts back to Tony, her last boyfriend.
“His name was Tony. He was a prep cook at one of the other upscale restaurants in Boston. A place that specialized in steak and other prime meat cuts. Good food.”
“Darling, I don’t care as much about the place the man worked as the man himself,” Miriam gently teased.
“Oh, right.” Hope pulled a face. “Well, that probably reveals part of why we broke up after a few months. We were both more interested in our jobs than we were in each other. It wasn’t fraught or anything,” she clarified.
“There was no ‘oh you work too much’ drama, because we both worked the same crazy hours. We just… drifted. And eventually, after a string of texts where we both apologized for not managing to make any concrete plans, we realized it just wasn’t working.
I saw him at a few industry events after, and it was totally fine. ”
Miriam was giving her an assessing look.
“What you need, my dear,” she said with the air of someone delivering great wisdom, “is an affaire de couer.”
Hope smiled. “Just because you say it in French doesn’t mean that trying to find someone to fall in love with is any easier,” she reminded her grandmother.
“No. But have you been really trying?”
The question was delivered without judgment, but it still lodged heavily in Hope’s chest.
“No,” Hope admitted. “And I was so busy with my job, which I really liked! So it didn’t seem like a bad thing.
I don’t know. I kind of think it still doesn’t seem bad, per se.
But it does… sting a little, that all that hard work ended up not getting me anywhere.
I don’t know. I guess I feel a little bit like I did have a breakup from a relationship that I really cared about.
It’s just that they were professional relationships, not romantic ones. ”
Hope wasn’t entirely certain that this all made sense; she was still working it out on her own. But Miriam nodded with understanding.
“Life gets busy,” she said. “And it can be hard, maybe even impossible, to attend to all things at once. And when we lose those things, it hurts, even if we understand how or why it happened. And those are different variations of the same hurt, even if they aren’t exactly the same.”
There was a nostalgic look on Miriam’s face, and Hope knew that she was thinking of her late husband. It had been a long time since they had lost Grandpa Harry, but some forms of sadness never went all the way away. Losing a beloved husband or grandfather was one of them.
But Miriam had lived a wonderful life since that loss. And Hope would figure out her next step forward too. And there was comfort in knowing that her professional loss would fade a lot more quickly than a personal one would.
Maybe that was a good enough reason to start paying more attention to her dating life.
Maybe having something that mattered enough that losing it would hurt forever…
yes, it was a risk, as all relationships were.
But she knew without question that her grandmother would never regret the time she’d had with her husband, even if it had ended in sadness.
“I could open myself up to that kind of love a bit more,” Hope admitted.
Miriam reached over and patted her hand.
“It will come in time,” she said. “All good things do. You’ll find the right person, and you’ll find the right job. And in the meanwhile, I’m going to hoard you all to myself.”
She winked and Hope laughed.
“Is that code for trying to set me up with all the eligible bachelors you know?” she asked.
“Because when I said I could open myself up, I didn’t mean right this minute.
I’m not going to be in town for that long, and Magnolia Shore is pretty small.
It’s not exactly the biggest dating scene on the planet.
What are the odds that I would find someone I clicked with?
And even if I did, what would happen when I left? ”
To her dismay, her thoughts flickered back to Jared. She felt like she could click with him, maybe.
But, no. She’d already proven that she was so awkward when the handsome, interesting, kind man paid her any kind of attention. Probably because she was struck by his handsomeness and kindness.
Sheesh. She really was like a kid with her first crush.
“It’s not about odds, sweetheart,” Miriam reminded her. “Because when you meet the right person, it only takes one.”
Hope nodded, but she didn’t say more, instead turning her attention back to the quilt in front of her.
She could think about romance when she got back to Boston. For now, she needed to focus on helping Miriam recover and on figuring out her next steps, so that when she did find romance, she would have a life built, a steady foundation for that relationship to rest upon.
And that meant that handsome chefs were absolutely out of the question.