A Thread of Truth: 2 - Brossura

Bostwick, Marie

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0758232152 ISBN 13: 9780758232151

Casa editrice: Kensington, 2009

Riassunto

Come home to Marie Bostwick's poignant novel of new beginnings, old friends, and the rich, varied tapestry of lives fully lived. . .

At twenty-seven, having fled an abusive marriage with little more than her kids and the clothes on her back, Ivy Peterman figures she has nowhere to go but up. Quaint, historic New Bern, Connecticut, seems as good a place as any to start fresh. With a part-time job at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop and budding friendships, Ivy feels hopeful for the first time in ages.

But when a popular quilting TV show is taped at the quilt shop, Ivy's unwitting appearance in an on-air promo alerts her ex-husband to her whereabouts. Suddenly, Ivy is facing the fight of her life--one that forces her to face her deepest fears as a woman and a mother. This time, however, she's got a sisterhood behind her: companions as complex, strong, and lasting as the quilts they stitch. . .

Praise for Marie Bostwick's A Single Thread

"Enjoy this big-hearted novel, then pass it along to your best friend."
--Susan Wiggs

"By the time you finish this book, the women in A Single Thread will feel like your own girlfriends--emotional, funny, creative and deeply caring. It's a story filled with wit and wisdom. Sit back and enjoy this big-hearted novel, and then pass it on to your best friend."
--Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author

"Marie Bostwick beautifully captures the very essence of women's friendships--the love, the pain, the trust, the forgiveness--and crafts a seamless and heartfelt novel from them. Evelyn, Abigail, Margot, and Liza are as real and endearing as my own closest friends, and as I turned the last page I felt that sweet, satisfying sorrow in having to say goodbye that marks the work of a writer at the top of her game." --Kristy Kiernan, author of Catching Genius and Matters of Faith

"Bostwick makes a seamless transition from historical fiction to the contemporary scene in this buoyant novel about the value of friendship among women. . ..Bostwick's polished style and command of plot make this story of bonding and sisterhood a tantalizing book club contender." --Publishers Weekly

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Marie Bostwick was born and raised in the northwest. In the three decades since her marriage, Marie and her family have moved frequently, living in eight different states at eighteen different addresses. These experiences have given Marie a unique perspective that enables her to write about people from all walks of life and corners of the country with insight and authenticity. Marie currently resides in Portland, where she enjoys writing, spending time with family, gardening, collecting fabric, and stitching quilts. Visit her at www.mariebostwick.com.

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A Thread of Truth

By MARIE BOSTWICK

KENSINGTON BOOKS

Copyright © 2009 Marie Bostwick Skinner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-3215-1

Chapter One

Ivy Peterman

Eighteen months later

Fight or flight? Until recently, it's never been a question. Not for me.

Whenever I feel frightened or threatened, my first instinct has always been flight. I do it pretty regularly.

I was six years old when my father had a heart attack and died. The news sent me running into the woods in the back of our house. I could hear my mother calling for me, her voice raspy with tears and shock and anger, but wouldn't budge from my hiding place in the branches of a half-dead oak. Finally, she sent our neighbor, Pete, out to find me.

Just after my sixteenth birthday, Mom was killed in a head-on collision and Pete, who was by then my stepfather, also became my legal guardian. He and I had never gotten along, but then again neither had he and Mom, not since about ten minutes after their wedding. After Mom died, Pete started to drink even more than before, so I ran away again. Farther this time, buying a one-way train ticket to the city. So far that Pete would never be able to find me, though now I realize he probably never tried.

And, of course, when I was twenty-four, I ran away from my husband. This time I took my two babies with me.

My escape wasn't exactly well-planned.

The day began normally enough, with a trip to the department store and a new tube of lipstick, but by that night I was running. I had to. I was afraid, not just for my life but for the lives of my children. All I took were some clothes, a file with some personal papers, the kids' baby books, some jewelry I sold later, and about $288 in cash, fifty-six of it from the spare change jar we kept on the kitchen counter. That's all. I had credit cards, but I didn't take them. I was worried that Hodge would be able to track us down if I used them.

When we could find an opening, we lived in emergency shelters. When we couldn't, we lived in the car. That was the hardest time. The kids were cranky, and so was I. The things I'd taken for granted while living in a nice house in the suburbs, like being able to keep clean and warm, using a toilet whenever we wanted to, or eating hot food, were concerns that occupied my every waking moment. I had no reserve of time or energy to consider how I was going to get us out of that mess, only enough to survive the day.

One night, I was asleep on the front seat and heard a noise. I woke up to see a figure, a man, pressed up against the passenger side window of the backseat, where my kids were sleeping, trying to slide a hanger wire into the space between the window and the door. I didn't think, just jumped out of the car and started screaming. "Get away from that door! Don't touch them! Get away!"

Somewhere along the line I must have grabbed the metal flashlight from the side storage compartment in the door. Still screaming, I flung it at the intruder and it hit him in the head. He swore and ran off into the alley. The kids woke up and started crying. A tall, scruffy man with a four-day growth of beard-the clerk from the twenty-four-hour mini-mart where I'd decided to park that night, stupidly thinking it was a safe spot-heard the commotion and came outside to investigate.

He took one look at me, tears in my eyes while I tried to quiet Bethany and Bobby's sobbing, and decided to call the police. Over my protests, he went inside the store to make the call. I got in the car and told the kids to buckle up. There was no way I was going to stick around and answer a bunch of questions from the police. If Hodge had filed a report saying I was a kidnapper, they'd lock me up and take the kids away from me forever. That's what Hodge said would happen if I ever even thought about leaving him. He didn't say that out of any kind of love, but just to make me believe that no matter what I did or where I went, he would still be in control. And I did believe it. I'd put hundreds miles of road between us, but even so I could feel his power, the menace of his presence, just like I always had. We had to get out of there.

My tires squealed as I peeled out of the parking lot, my mind racing. Did it made more sense for me to get on the freeway and go to another town? Or better to find a dark alley and park there until the coast was clear? I decided on the freeway.

In the backseat the kids were still crying. I swore under my breath, cursing traffic engineers who were too cheap or too stupid to put up any signs directing out-of-towners to the freeway entrance. Ten minutes later I was still lost. Bethany had stopped crying, but Bobby was still going strong.

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw his face, his chubby baby cheeks flushed and hot, his black lashes clumped and glistening with tears. "Bobby. Calm down, baby. Mommy is going to find a quiet place to park and then you can go back to sleep, all right?"

"Go home!" he wailed. "Go home!"

And for the first time, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. A few weeks before, my children had been living the relatively normal, scheduled lives of children in the suburbs; three meals a day, playing on the swing set in our fenced backyard, watching cartoons, baths at seven, bed at eight. Of course, when it was time for Hodge to come home, they'd get clingy and quiet, feeling my fear, perhaps, as I listened for the grind of gears as the automatic garage door opened and tuned my ears to assess the level of force Hodge used to slam the door of his BMW, a clue as to his mood and what the rest of the evening would bring.

But, I told myself as I drove through the darkness, he wasn't violent every night. Only when I'd done something, or not done something, that made him mad. After all, I was the one he took his anger out on. Not the kids. Maybe they'd be better off if we went back. At least they'd be safe.

But a voice in my head reminded me that it wasn't true anymore.

I remembered that last day, Hodge screaming and swearing and pounding on one side of the locked bathroom door, while we huddled on the other side. I remembered the swelling of my left eye, pain shooting through my bleeding hand, but worse, so much worse, was the memory of the angry red mark on Bethany's pale cheek.

Bethany was used to his rages, used to seeing me holding ice packs on my bruises, or trying to cover up the marks of his fury with extra makeup, but he'd never hit her before. That day, he considered her fair game and I realized that from then on, he always would.

In the backseat, Bethany tried to calm her baby brother. "Bobby, don't cry. We can't go home. Daddy's there."

She was right. I couldn't take them back. Not now. It wasn't safe to go back to Hodge. Not for me and not for my children. But we couldn't go on like this, either. We couldn't keep running. I was tired, and scared, and broke. Somehow or other I had to come up with another plan. But what?

To say that I haven't had a lot of experience with praying in my life would be an understatement, but that night, driving around in the middle of the night without the least clue of where we should go or what we should do when we arrived, I prayed silently, asking God for a sign or at least a hint.

Lost in uncharted territory, I accidentally turned onto the northbound freeway entrance instead of the southbound. By the time I figured it out, I was crossing the state line into Connecticut. And that's how I ended up in New Bern.

After three weeks living in a tiny studio apartment in the emergency shelter, we moved into a much larger two-bedroom unit in the Stanton Center. The counselor talked to me about putting down roots, finding a job, and putting Bethany in school. I nodded, mutely assenting to everything she suggested, but in my heart, I knew we'd stay in New Bern only as long as it felt safe to do so. That was more than a year ago and, believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am that we're still here. If not for Evelyn Dixon and a log cabin quilt, I'd have put New Bern in my rearview mirror a long time ago.

Evelyn owns Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern. She runs a free quilting class for the women at the shelter. Initially, I didn't want to take the class and had suitcase full of good excuses for not doing so:

1) With two kids, I was too busy for hobbies.

2) I'd never liked crafts, anyway, and any spare time I had really should be spent looking for a job.

3) And wasn't quilting something people's grandmas did? Maybe I'd lived long and hard, but I'm not exactly ready for bifocals and a rocking chair, you know what I mean?

But, none of those were the real reason I didn't want to take Evelyn's class. The truth is; I just didn't want to find one more thing to fail at. There had been so many already.

But Abigail decided to change my mind for me. That's Abigail Burgess Wynne, a volunteer at the shelter as well as a big donor, the woman who insisted that they find room for us at the shelter. Abigail is something of an oddball. Beautiful, in a nineteen fifties movie-star kind of way, all long legs and perfect diction, but an oddball.

She comes off as a snob but, for some reason, she took a liking to Bethany. Out of the blue, Abigail made this gorgeous pinwheel quilt for Bethany and they've been fast friends ever since. She's become not quite an adopted grandmother to my kids, but more of an indulgent great aunt. And I have to say she's grown on me. Anybody who loves my kids is okay in my book and when she gave that quilt to Bethany, I was so grateful that I started to bawl. I couldn't help myself.

Anyway, Abigail is really very sweet deep down-way deep down-but she's also used to getting her own way. She wouldn't listen to any of my excuses about passing on the quilting class, just knocked them all down in that way she has, huffing and puffing out words like "Nonsense!" and "Rubbish!" like the big, bad wolf on a mission, not stopping until your little house of sticks is lying in a heap and there you stand with nothing left to hide behind. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with six other students, listening to Evelyn Dixon explain the techniques for constructing our first project, a log cabin quilt.

It's an easy pattern, just row after row of rectangular strips nesting round and round a center square, stacking one upon the other like those wooden log toys I used to play with when I was a little girl. A simple pattern, maybe the simplest of all. I never expected it to change my life.

Evelyn brought a selection of light and dark fabrics for us to use for the "shady" and "sunny" sides of the house, but for the center of each block, the "hearth," she told us to find our own fabric, to cut the center squares out of something that had a special meaning for us. I chose the outgrown clothes the kids had worn in their pictures with Santa the year before, a red cowboy shirt for Bobby and the red corduroy jumper for Bethany, and cut out little squares, making them as even and perfect as I could, to place in the center of each block.

And then, something strange happened. As I sewed that quilt, stitching strip after strip around those red squares that had lain next to my children's skin and hearts, I started imagining each sunny and shady strip as a piece of a protective wall that was guarding my little ones and somehow, in a way that all my counselor's repeated affirmations never could, the idea that I could keep us safe, that I could make a real home for all of us, started to sprout in my mind. As I sewed, the idea became a belief and the roots of that belief pushed their way through all my doubts and muck to take root in my heart.

I would keep my children safe, no matter what. And we would have a home, a real home, not sleeping in a car, or bouncing from shelter to shelter and town to town like a bad check, not continually looking over my shoulder, ready to pack up and run every time I had a bad dream or heard a grinding of gears that sounded like a garage door opening. We'd be a family. Everything would be all right. I would make it happen.

As this ... this torrent of conviction flooded my heart, my eyes began to flood, too. I sat at the sewing machine, not sewing, scissors open in my hand, a silent baptism bathing my cheeks.

Across the room, Evelyn was bent over another student's machine, helping adjust a too-tight tension. She saw me but made no move toward me, just looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to see into my real meaning, questioning the reason for my tears but not my right to them.

Seeing her, I sat up a little straighter in my chair, and gave her one quick nod. She smiled, as if knowing and approving that there, among the soft, steady whir of needles passing through fabric and the silent concentration of other women crouched over their sewing machines, bent on making something beautiful and useful out of the discarded scraps of their lives, I had made my decision.

I was done running.

Chapter Two

Evelyn Dixon

Walking out my front door, down the porch steps, through the garden gate and onto the sidewalk on a perfect late spring day in New England, I was reminded again what a great commute I have. Just three blocks from the cozy, two-bedroom cape where I live at a very reasonable rent, to my shop, Cobbled Court Quilts.

My shop! I love saying that. In a week's time, it will have been my shop for two years, but sometimes I still have to pinch myself to believe it's true. Less than three years have passed since, in the wake of a painful divorce and a general upending of everything I'd thought was sure in my life, I got in my car and drove from Texas to Connecticut to see the fall colors.

On its face, there's nothing too remarkable about that, but anyone who knows me knows that spontaneous gestures are not my strong suit. I am a big fan of lists, not just to-do lists but the kind where you write down all the pros and cons of doing something and mull it over for days, weeks, or even months before taking action ... or not. If you don't believe me, ask Charlie Donnelly, the owner of New Bern's finest restaurant, The Grill on the Green, and my boyfriend.

Boyfriend. At fifty years of age, it feels silly to say I have a boyfriend, but what else can I call Charlie? He's more than my friend and less than my fianc, which is what he'd like to be, but I'm not ready yet and Charlie knows that.

Initially, when Charlie and I became "a couple" (are there any words for a romantic relationship between two mature people that don't sound so ridiculously precious?) right after my double mastectomy, I wasn't sure I was ready for a relationship. Now, I've worked through a lot of those issues in my mind, but ... how do I explain it? After a lifetime of being someone's daughter, wife, mother, of defining my existence in terms of who I belonged to, I'm enjoying being just me by myself for a while, steering my own ship. Charlie knows that and he's willing to be patient. In fact, I think he's kind of proud of what I've accomplished. And the truth is, so am I. Not that I got to this place alone, far from it, but none of it would have happened if I hadn't finally decided to tear up my list of lists and take a chance on life and on myself.

Did you ever know, just know, that you were supposed to do something, even though, on the face of it, that thing you wanted to do made no sense to anyone else? That's the way it was with me with the quilt shop.

Window-shopping at the end of an absolutely picture-perfect fall day in New Bern during my unplanned escape from Texas to New England, I happened upon an alley paved with old cobblestones that lead into a spacious, square courtyard and found a dilapidated storefront that had been empty for about twenty years. The windows were cracked, the wood casings were eaten away by termites and rot, and the roof was leaky, but, for reasons beyond understanding, I was absolutely sure that my destiny lay in renting this ramshackle ruin and opening it as a quilt shop. So, throwing caution to the winds twice in one week, that's what I did.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, said we wouldn't last six months. They were almost right. In a turn of cosmic irony, on the very night before I was to host Cobbled Court's first Quilt Pink event to benefit breast cancer research, my doctor informed me that I had breast cancer myself. I was sure it was all over, that the predictions of the naysayers would prove true: Cobbled Court Quilts would be forced to close its doors and the door to my dreams would close along with it.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Thread of Truthby MARIE BOSTWICK Copyright © 2009 by Marie Bostwick Skinner. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Kensington
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0758232152
• ISBN 13: 9780758232151
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 352
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: PSDTECH S.R.L.S; info@psdtech.it; ; CIRCONVALLAZIONE CLODIA 163/167; ROMA; RM; 195; Italia