The Complete Where Dreams - Volume 2 of 2

Chapter 15-1

Chapter 15

Perrin felt as if she were floating when she arrived at Cutters Crabhouse. It was Friday evening, a week since her dinner with Bill and the kids. The place was hopping with Seattle’s finest, well-dressed for after work mingling, ready to see and be seen.

Perrin even saw two of her own designs, but didn’t know the women. That felt odd. Even though Raquel and Kristin were doing a great job of running the store, it still felt odd to be disconnected from the day-to-day contact with customers. Not that she’d have had time even if she had the desire to work the front of store again.

Her life had become a complete blur. She was in a hundred places at once, and needed to be in a thousand. Her emotions were all over the map as well.

Jerimy had insisted on her approval of his and Patsy’s teams’ renditions of her designs. Those had turned into wonderful discussions of what they’d each seen and liked.

Jerimy had a Masters degree from NYU in Visual Culture: Costume Studies. Who even knew there was such a thing. His deep focus on Western Europe had contrasted nicely with Perrin’s lighter-depth self-education across dozens of global clothing design traditions. They discussed the rise of the pleat, the exposed midriff of the historic belly dancer, the urban Japanese woman, and the modern American teen.

Patsy, the queen of modern clothing, often jumped in with surprising variations that she’d seen. Perrin departed each meeting with so many ideas for new designs clogging her brain that she could hardly think.

Patsy tried to keep her up-to-date on the wild success of the yarn bombing. One evening she’d borrowed Tamara and the three of them had gone out with the S#1K g**g. They’d bombed three seats in every Capitol Hill hospital waiting room, covering them with premade slipcovers in the palettes of the Empress, the Prince, and the True Love. It only took a minute for them to crochet the side seams to hold the premade knitting in place.

They’d all worn masks that Patsy had made, modeled on the opera’s characters. Security guards had been alerted, nurses had applauded, and people stuck in drab waiting rooms for hours on end had been cheered up.

Afterward, they’d all sat around together and eaten tiny scoops of gelato in a brightly lit little shop. Tammy’s eyes had been so wide as she did her best to behave as if she did this every day. Clearly, sitting with six grown women from Patsy’s twenty-three to Cornelia’s sixty-seven, ranked as one of the coolest things she’d ever done.

“I didn’t get that grown-ups could be so much fun!” she’d bubbled as Perrin had driven her home afterward. “I want to grow up to be just like them.”

Perrin had laughed, “Which one?”

“All of them at once, but especially you.”

That had sobered Perrin instantly. Tamara had made it a simple statement of fact. Perrin could see how the others could be role models, but didn’t quite understand how it could apply to her.

She’d talked about it in the kitchen with Bill over more blueberry tea while Tamara took a shower to get ready for bed. Jaspar had apparently sacked out early. They were careful to sit on opposite sides of the dining table in case one of the kids came in.

“Guess he was tired,” Bill apologized on his son’s behalf, but she missed saying hi to him. She actually hadn’t seen much of Jaspar at all since the dinner she’d so enjoyed.

Bill continued, “Don’t see how you could miss the role you’re already playing in Tammy’s life, makes perfect sense to me that she’d respect you.”

At her blank look, he’d laughed.

“The girl never stops talking about you. She’s actually doing better in school, which she was always good at anyway, because she’s staying up late to get ahead the night before. She wants as much time working with you as she can get. She’s begging me for a sewing machine for her birthday in a couple months. She’s even convinced us all to watch one of those clothing design shows on television. It’s a good thing that it’s only one night a week, or Jaspar would be having a meltdown. As it is, he does his best to moan and complain whenever they get to a part she really wants to hear. Took him a while to figure out that she’d just rewind to listen again until he shut up.”

“He’s such a boy, isn’t he? So much like you.”

“Huh,” had been Bill’s grunted reply. Even after she’d explained it to him. “Well, we’re moving into the Opera House this week, the kid always seems to enjoy that. Wilson even signed up for a special rider on our insurance now to let Jaspar hang out with the crews, as long as there is always a responsible person about. The team leaders have been more than willing to have him as a junior apprentice and gofer.”

Perrin wished she could see more of Jaspar, but along with the Opera’s growing popularity, Perrin’s Glorious Garb was receiving more attention. She and Raquel were already interviewing seamstresses to build the copies of Perrin’s designs because she could no longer keep up with the orders. She’d never much liked making the same thing over and over anyway. Yet another small piece of the business to let go of.

One day she’d been going so crazy that she’d actually shown Tamara how to scale a pattern to different measurements for one of her simpler designs. Perrin hadn’t been able to find a single fault with her work.

“I’d like to offer Tamara a part-time job,” she’d told Bill during one of their nightly phone chats.

When he was done spluttering in surprise she’d explained.

“Minimum wage, maximum ten hours per week. Any time she spends on her own clothes are on her own, but when she’d helping me, I have to pay her. It’s only fair.”

“What about your time? Twenty seconds ago you were telling me how frantically busy you were.”

And she was. “I wouldn’t mind. I’ll just… ”

“You’ll just charge my twerp daughter three dollars an hour for any time you spend helping her on her own projects. Any time you spend training her for your projects is your own cost, and no fudging on her behalf, Williams. She keeps a timecard, you make sure it’s correct every week. If she learns something about business while she’s doing this, it will make it more digestible for me. And she pays for her own materials—”

“No.”

“Yes. At cost. Retail.”

“Wholesale,” she’d countered, caving that far because she knew Bill was the better businessperson of the two of them. All she really cared about was the design, which is why Cassidy and Jo had made her hire Raquel to run the store.

And they’d worked it out. Raquel had drawn up a contract. Tamara and Bill had reviewed it together until Perrin was sure Tamara understood every clause and then she’d executed it, with her dad signing beneath.