The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw Read Free Book Online

walls, I pumped the treadle until my leg grew hot. Jack's father's shirt needed a patch, and while I was at it, I would reinforce the shoulders, where the stitching was starting to pull. If the mending was done perfectly, if I repaired the tears and wear spots on every piece of cloth on the farm, then no one could object if I turned my hand late at night to a dress for Lucille. A good mother wanted to make clothes for her child. The first dress boasted more than a hundred pin tucks across the front. Each tuck was the width of a needle. Children in Mercer County didn't usually have such dresses, Jack's mother remarked. No, they certainly did not, I told her.
    While my baby slept, I made her dress after dress, teaching myself ways to form tiny cambric rosettes around the neckline or a flounce at the hem. A flounce! For a baby too small to crawl! Jack's mother said that people all the way in Grant Station were talking about Lucille's dresses, an observation that only made me stay up later. Given the chance, I would talk about these dresses, too. "Guess Nell's planning to take that child to a palace," I would say if I were some person who lived in town. "Guess she expects to meet a queen." Squinting in the lamp's poor illumination, more shadow than light, I made a cuff with stitches so minuscule the white band seemed to float at the end of the sleeve, as pretty as something in a magazine. "I don't know what that child's mother is going to do when she wakes up and remembers they're in Kansas," I would say.
    "There's something wrong with a mother who sews dresses like that," I would say back to myself. "She's making up for something. You can see it."
    "That baby—she's not right." I leaned forward. "The way she carries on. A child doesn't naturally act like that. She's
learned
to act like that."
    "Dresses can't cover up. A baby can't lie."
    "Those dresses, though—they're pretty things, all the same."
    My fingers became extra deft. I embroidered a field of violets, each one eight stitches plus a rolled knot, on a bib for a dress that Lucille would outgrow in six months. By then, the next baby would be along. Another feeling came, harder to name, and from the cradle Lucille murmured and turned her baby glare on me. I held my breath, and she closed her eyes again. I sewed. Then daylight came, and I left the house to walk.
    Some weeks passed before Mama and Pa and my sisters joined us for Sunday dinner. Other families came together every Sunday, but Pa was fond of his own table, as wobbly as it was, and I had to invite them three times, until it became an embarrassment not to come. He made Mama bring a crock of her crunchy sweet pickles, as he didn't care for anybody else's.
    Lucille had been screaming since dawn, and she kept screaming right through dinner, though I had walked with her and tried to feed her and put her down for a desperate half-hour in the barn, wrapped up too tight to harm herself. By the time I came to look in, her face was soaked in tears, her sweet purple dress and the hay beneath her soaked in urine. Our big old gelding Rufus, normally as gentle as a pup, tossed his head indignantly when I opened the barn door.
    It was gone three o'clock before she consented to nurse. Then she fell into sleep like a stone, letting me carry her heavy little body back to the house where my mother-in-law had just cleared the table.
    "I left a plate for you on the stove," she said.
    "Thank you."
    "You might want to go out and talk with your folks. Your pa is needing to get back shortly. The cows."
    This meant either that he had let his latest hand go or he wanted to get away from Mrs. Plat and her parlor with a carpet in it. I knew that my mother-in-law understood all of this, and that Pa expected her to. I knew that I would repay her for cooking a pork butt for my parents, and I knew that I would repay Pa for asking him over to eat it. "It looked like a fine supper," I said, in case Pa had not.
    "Go, now," she said, dipping