The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard Read Online Free

with a face meant to be indifferent.
    "Like you. I thought I knew everything I had to know." She waited while I studied Earl's well. Eventually I glanced back; the wind had teased most of her hair from its knot. "People will surprise you," she said.
    "Not Jack. He's a glass of plain water."
    "I'm not talking about secrets," she said. "Just—things you hadn't expected."
    "He'll wait till after the wedding and lo and behold! He'll show me he has a wooden leg."
    "No," Mama said.
    I rested my shoulder against hers and picked up her hand, stroking the surprisingly soft skin. "I know him as well as anybody can. And that's a lot."
    Mama said nothing for a spell, maybe thinking about how well people can know each other, maybe thinking about Earl's wife's sorry-looking pillowcases lolling dingily on the line. Mama would never let linens so gray be set out where people could see. "There's enough cloth for a dress?" she said.
    "I think so," I said.
    Jack came to call three days later, wearing the suit again. Viola giggled. "Hush," Mama said. "That's respect." She was right, but his respectful suit could have used a good brushing.
    While Mama sat on one end of the porch, dreamily sorting beans from stones, Jack and I sat on the other, looking at the wheat fields bleed to nothing in the distance. His fingers crawled restlessly over the slats of the bench. Only when he told me that my shiny hair caught the sunlight did I let one hand fall into the space between us. He brushed it but did not clasp it, which was more respect. When he asked if he could come to see me again, I said yes.
    That night over my crunchy mashed potatoes, Pa broke the silence between us. "So. Jack Plat?"
    "Maybe."
    "He's got a temper."
    "I'm used to that. He's adding eighty acres."
    Pa snorted. "Count on ten."
    "He's got gumption," I said. Everyone in Mercer County knew that Jack had waited for me in his suit. It was as good as reading banns.
    Pa said, "Don't know that cattle much care for gumption. Hard to digest."
    "I should have known you wouldn't hold with getting ahead," I said. "Now, if he came to you asking about whiskey, you'd be able to tell him a thing or two."
    "You don't mean that," Mama broke in, her frightened voice watery. "You're just talking."
    I smiled at Pa, and he smiled back. Twenty years married to the man, Mama still hadn't figured out that he never drank two days running, and he never raised his hand if he hadn't been drinking. After Jack called three more times, I waited until a day Pa woke up thick-headed and penitent, then left the two of them indoors. When they called me off the porch, Pa's face was cheerful enough. He put our hands together and said, "I always knew my girl would find a man with gumption." Jack smiled.
    The reverend joined us four weeks later, which gave me time to make two new dresses—navy blue wool for the wedding and every nice occasion thereafter, and a quick brown calico to start my wifely life. The cotton was cheap, and I made skirts for Mama and Mae and Viola, too, and a shirt for Pa. With all its seams, it took longer than the dresses put together. He wore it to the ceremony and the gathering at the Plats' afterward. Nussine brought a layer cake, made in the new oven Ernold had ordered for her. It had nickel, she told me, on all the handles. Jack had two pieces of her cake while Pa stepped out onto the porch. I followed him, and we had a short conversation about nickel plating. I suggested he try it on his plow, and he said he planned to tell Ernold to nickel-plate the bed, the kind of joke he could now make with me, a married gal. I stayed on the porch and waved while he and Mama left. So far as I ever saw, Pa didn't wear the shirt again.
    From the start, I liked being Nell Plat instead of Nell Presser. Even with its window, my new house was dark, the soddie Mr. Plat's granddad had dug out when he came to Kansas for his hundred-sixty acres, but it was bigger than the house I grew up in. Jack and I had our