“Well, I’ve signed up to take a class in ribbon embroidery there, and I’ve decided that you should come with me. The class is for adults, but I’m sure the people who run the store wouldn’t mind if you came along as well. I saw other little girls there today. One of them seemed to be quite an accomplished seamstress, which is a wonderful thing for a girl. Now, I know you like to draw, so I thought you’d like sewing as well.”
Nikki didn’t see the connection. She did like to draw. And she liked animals. She wanted to become a wildlife artist one day. What did that have to do with sewing?
“You’re a very creative person,” Mrs. DuVane continued. “We must nurture that. It will stand you in good stead in the future.” Mrs. DuVane paused. “Is your phone working, dear?”
“Yes. We paid the bill yesterday.”
“All right. Tell your mother I’ll call her tonight. And I’ll be picking you up in three weeks to go to Needle and Thread. In the meantime, brush up on your sewing skills. À demain! That’s French for ‘good-bye.’”
Actually, thought Nikki as Mrs. DuVane climbed back into her car, that’s French for “good-bye until tomorrow.”
On a sultry July afternoon, Olivia Walter looked up from the book she was reading on one of the couches in her grandmother’s store. The hot weather had kept some people at home but had driven others to Needle and Thread for a chat-and-stitch in the air-conditioning. Olivia listened to their conversation, catching phrases here and there: mini piping, pin-tuck foot, lace insert. She watched Min show a woman how to make a bullion knot.
At the back of the store, Flora was finishing up a vest and skirt set. Ruby sat beside her, wearing headphones and singing along to The Music Man. “Oh, oh, the Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin’ down the street. Oh, please let it be for meeeeeee!”
Olivia yawned. She liked having Flora and Ruby at the store all day, but sometimes — today, for instance — they weren’t much fun. Here Olivia finally had friends with whom she could hang out, but often Flora and Ruby seemed lost in worlds of their own. It was a shame, really. Olivia, younger than her classmates but fascinated by things that held little interest for Lacey Morris or other neighborhood kids her age, had no close friends. Then along had come Ruby and Flora, and Olivia suddenly had high hopes for two built-in best friends. After all, they lived right next door. Olivia now spent hours, days, with them, but the best friendships seemed to be taking a while.
“Give it time,” her mother had said. “Ruby and Flora have a lot on their minds.”
Olivia closed her book and walked to the back of the store.
“You guys?” she said. “Want to take a walk or something?”
Flora turned off the sewing machine and stretched. Ruby took off the headphones.
“Okay,” said Flora.
“Goody.” Olivia grinned. “Going for a walk!” she called to Gigi as the girls let themselves outside. They squinted as they emerged into the sunlight. The first thing Olivia saw was Sonny Sutphin wheeling himself lazily along Main Street.
“Hi, Sonny,” said Olivia.
“What’s up?” asked Sonny.
“I’m reading about stalactites,” said Olivia.
“My,” said Sonny.
“I went to the post office twice today,” said Ruby.
“And I’m sewing for Min,” said Flora.
“Well, that’s just fine,” replied Sonny. He was peering down the street in the direction of College Pizza. “Got to go,” he said suddenly. He spun his chair around and disappeared through the open door of Zack’s hardware store.
Olivia and Flora and Ruby frowned at one another. Then they peered toward College Pizza.
“I wonder what …” Olivia’s voice trailed off.
She jumped when someone touched her on the shoulder.
“My goodness! I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh, Mr. Pennington,” said Olivia. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you. I was watching Lydia....” She looked at Flora and Ruby and shrugged. “Oh, well.”
“Hi, Mr. Pennington,” said Ruby and Flora.
“’Afternoon, ladies,” replied Mr. Pennington. “Are you girls working today?”
“Sort of,” said Flora.
“Do you need help with something?” asked Olivia.
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Mr. Pennington reached into his pocket for a small paper bag. He opened the bag and shook out a button. “Two of these came off my good jacket,” he said. “And I lost the other one, so I need to replace it. Do you have any buttons that look just like this one?”
“I think so,” said Olivia. “Let’s go look.”
Olivia led Mr. Pennington through the store to one particular rack of buttons and turned the rack to one particular section.
“There!” she said triumphantly. “Hold your button up, Mr. Pennington. Let’s compare it to some of these.”
In no time, a card of buttons had been selected and Mr. Pennington was standing in line at the counter. “You certainly do know your buttons, Olivia,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied. After a pause, she said, “Mr. Pennington? Do you know how to sew on buttons?”
“Well, I’m sure I do,” said Mr. Pennington, but he didn’t sound sure at all. “Usually, Miss Woolsey does my mending, but it seemed silly to ask her just to sew on a couple of buttons. How hard could it be?”
“It isn’t hard,” said Olivia. “But … do you have the right color thread? And scissors and a needle?”
“I think so.” Mr. Pennington was scratching his head.
“Why don’t I come home with you and help you?” said Olivia. She glanced at the back of the store and saw that Flora had returned to the sewing machine and Ruby was wearing the headphones again.
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” said Mr. Pennington.
“It’s okay. I want to help you.”
And so, several minutes later, when Min had rung up Mr. Pennington’s buttons, Olivia called to her grandmother, “Gigi, I’m going to go home now.” She took Mr. Pennington’s arm, and they left Needle and Thread and walked down Main Street.
As Olivia turned the corner onto Aiken Avenue, she felt the small rush of contentment she always felt when she caught sight of the Row Houses, this place where she belonged no matter what, even if she had skipped a grade and even if no one else her age cared what a stalactite was or how many kinds of sparrows inhabited North America.
“Okay, if you can find a needle —” Olivia was saying a few moments later as Mr. Pennington fumbled for his key and opened the door. But she didn’t finish her sentence. When she stepped inside, she was greeted by a strong odor, and the air was heavy and somehow oily.
“Mr. Pennington, I smell gas!” cried Olivia, and she felt herself begin to panic. She remembered a television show she had seen in which a gas leak had caused an entire apartment building to explode.
“The burner!” exclaimed Mr. Pennington.
He dashed into the kitchen and turned off a burner he’d left on. Olivia rushed from room to room, opening windows. The front door was wide open, and now she opened the back door, too.
“Come outside,” Olivia said with a gasp. “Mr. Pennington, come outside. Don’t go back in until the smell is gone.”
Olivia and Mr. Pennington sat on an iron bench in his backyard, so different from Olivia’s yard next door. Hers was awash with bicycles and basketballs, an old jungle gym, and even a tent in which Olivia and her brothers sometimes liked to sleep on the hottest summer nights. Mr. Pennington’s yard was tidy with rosebushes, and at the back a vegetable garden, of which Olivia was envious. Every summer, Mr. Pennington would bring bags of tomatoes and peppers and peas and beans next door to the Walters. Olivia, remembering this, realized that Mr. Pennington hadn’t brought them anything yet this summer. She stood up and peered across the yard.
“Didn’t you plant your vegetable garden?” she asked. She reached down to pat Jacques, who was dozing in the shade under the bench.
Mr. Pennin
gton sighed. “No. Not this summer.”
He didn’t offer a reason, and Olivia didn’t ask for one. Instead, she said carefully, “Mr. Pennington, did — I mean, how long do you think that burner was on?”
“Less than an hour, I’d say.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” replied Olivia.
“And as you noticed, several windows were already open, since it’s so hot today.”
Olivia nodded. Then she stood up. “I want to go see if the gas smell is gone,” she said. She left Mr. Pennington and Jacques in the yard and returned to the house. The smell was fading, so Olivia closed the doors, but she left the windows open. She realized that her hands were shaking. It’s all right, she told herself. Nothing really bad happened. Mr. Pennington is fine. His house is fine. Nothing blew up.
Olivia sat down hard on a kitchen chair. Nothing too bad had happened, and yet Olivia felt unsettled. She took a look around the kitchen and saw moldy fruit in a bowl on the counter. In the sink were what appeared to be several days’ worth of unwashed dishes. She opened the dishwasher. Empty. She looked at the floor and saw Jacques’s water dish, also empty. Olivia filled it and returned it to the floor, thinking as she did so that it was a good thing Jacques had been outside when the gas had been left on. And then it occurred to her that Jacques had been outside on his own. Mr. Pennington had left him to go to town. He hadn’t put him on his lead in the yard. Jacques wasn’t even wearing his collar. Olivia could see it hanging on the kitchen doorknob.
This wasn’t good.
Olivia was trying to figure out what she should say to Mr. Pennington when he opened the back door and joined her in the kitchen.
“Olivia,” he said, sounding very serious, “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay.” Olivia and Mr. Pennington sat down across from each other at the table.
Mr. Pennington’s fingers found a saltshaker and he tapped it on the table as he spoke. “I need,” he began, “I need — please don’t mention this to anyone, Olivia. I’m asking you to keep this a secret. Please.”
“But —”
Mr. Pennington set the shaker down and rested his hand on Olivia’s arm. “Please,” he said again. “No one must know about this. I’m eighty-two. If anyone finds out what happened, they’ll put me in an old people’s home. And I can’t bear the thought of that. This is my home. I’ve lived here for more than forty years. I can’t leave. Do you understand?”
Olivia thought of her own home. She had been born there. She loved her home. She loved the Row Houses. She wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. And she certainly didn’t want Mr. Pennington to move.
“Can we keep this a secret?” Mr. Pennington asked.
Olivia looked at his tough, wrinkled hands, at his snowy hair, into his watery brown eyes.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “It’s our secret.”
The hot weather that had arrived when June turned to July became steamier with each new day that passed. The air grew wetter, and the haze that Flora had noticed early in the month, hanging about on the horizon, whitening the edges of Camden Falls, eventually turned to clouds. The days were sultry, and Flora felt that everything she touched needed to be wrung out and tossed into a dryer. After two weeks, the overcast sky gave way to heavy dark clouds, and rain started to fall. Sometimes the sky rumbled with thunder. At night, Flora, gazing dreamily out her window, saw heat lightning in the distance.
One Sunday morning, Flora woke not only to rain but to mist. It crept past the windows on every floor of the house, as if the clouds had finally become so heavy with moisture that they dropped to the earth.
“What a gloomy day,” said Min as she and Flora and Ruby sat down to their breakfast.
A crash of thunder sounded then, and Daisy Dear dove under the table and tried to bury her head between Min’s knees.
“You can’t hide from thunder, poor Daisy,” said Min. She bent over and took Daisy’s startled face between her hands.
“King doesn’t mind thunder one bit,” commented Ruby cheerfully as she watched King Comma wander into the kitchen and jump onto the counter.
“Now, I wonder why that is,” said Min.
Ruby shook her head. “It’s a mystery. A cat’s mystery.”
“So. What’s everybody going to do today?” asked Min.
“I’m going over to the Morrises’,” said Ruby. “Me and Lacey —”
“Lacey and I,” Min corrected her.
“Lacey and I are going to invent a board game.”
“My land, that’s a wonderful idea,” said Min. “What about you, Flora? Are you going to go to Olivia’s?”
Flora shook her head. For reasons she didn’t understand herself, she wanted to be alone on this dreary, gloomy day. And she didn’t feel like answering Min’s questions, but when she saw that Min was looking at her, waiting for an answer, she finally said, “I might read.”
Min let her gaze linger on her granddaughter. She was used to Flora’s and Ruby’s moods, their quiet moments. Sometimes she asked if they wanted to talk; sometimes she said nothing. She was still deciding whether to give Flora a nudge when Ruby said, “Min, can I take tap lessons? Please? We’ve been here for such a long time already.” (Ruby and Flora had lived in Camden Falls for one month.) “And you said I could take lessons. At home I took tap and hip-hop, and I sang in the children’s chorus, and last year I got to be in two plays at the community theatre. Please can’t I do something here? Please?”
“Yes,” said Min. “You have a good point, Ruby. We will look into things. I’ll ask Mrs. Morris if she knows about dance schools and so forth.”
“Really? Really, Min?” cried Ruby, and she jumped up and threw her arms around Min, which startled Daisy Dear again, causing her to stand up and bang her head under Min’s chair. In all the commotion, no one noticed Flora creep out of the kitchen and upstairs to her room.
Flora lay on her bed and listened to the sounds of the house. She heard Min singing in the kitchen. She heard Ruby slam the front door behind her as she left for Lacey’s. She heard rain dripping, and a shade flapping in the breeze, and Daisy’s nails clicking along the hallway. Flora stood up. She stretched. And then, without knowing why, she climbed the stairs to the third floor and pulled down the steps to the attic.
Flora had been in the attic before, helping Min store boxes under the eaves, but she had never explored it, and now that was exactly what she felt like doing. Exploring. In private. Flora pulled the string that turned on the one bulb on the attic ceiling, and then she stood in the middle of the musty room with her hands on her hips.
She recalled something Olivia had recently told her: that the attics of the Row Houses were said to be connected; that hidden in each were doors leading to the houses on either side. If a person only knew where these doors were, he could enter any house in the row without going outside. This idea both fascinated and frightened Flora. How scary it would be, she thought, to waken one night and find someone standing over your bed, someone who had crept in through your attic from another house.
Still … she couldn’t help taking a look around for the doors. There should be one on the left (when she was facing the backyard) leading to the Malones’, and one on the right leading to Olivia’s. Flora pushed aside trunks and boxes and baskets and Christmas decorations. She felt along beams in the walls (pricking the palm of her hand on a splinter as she did so). She pushed at knotholes, hoping to find hidden buttons. She tried to remember all of Nancy Drew’s detecting tricks. But after half an hour, she had neither seen nor felt anything resembling a door, hidden or otherwise.
Flora sat down with a little plop on the rough wooden floor. Next to her was a carton labeled SWEATERS. Beside that was one labeled MOTHER’S DISHES.
“Boring,” said Flora aloud.
And then she noticed another carton, a smaller one. It appeared to be older than the others, and it wasn’t labeled. Flora got to her knees. She raised the flaps of the carton. Inside was a jumble of papers
and photos and albums. Some of the papers were so old they were crumbling.
Flora lifted the pile out of the box and carried it into the middle of the attic. She sat down directly under the lightbulb, the papers in her lap. On the top of the pile were three ancient postcards, all addressed to someone named Elisabeth Buestein, and all written in a foreign language that Flora guessed was German. One of the cards was dated 4.7.97, and Flora realized that 97 meant 1897.
“Wow,” she said softly.
The next piece of paper was a letter written in English and dated March 22, 1927. It was from the United States Veterans Bureau in Washington and was addressed to a Mrs. Dorothy Matthews. The letter informed Mrs. Matthews that as the dependent of a deceased veteran (of World War I, Flora thought) she was entitled to a claim of $469.75, which would NOT be paid in one lump sum, but in ten (10) installments.
“That’s it?” said Flora. “Her husband’s dead and she gets four hundred and seventy dollars? My stars.”
Flora set aside the letter and continued her search. She found a six-page typewritten document titled “A HISTORY OF RICHARD R. DAVIS, MAN OF ACTION, by his daughter, Adelaide Davis Rhinehart.” On the second page was a description of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: “About 6 AM on April 6th they were jarred by the terrible earthquake. He ran to the window to see the chimneys fall, cracks open in the streets, people running from the buildings. He called to Grace to come quickly. She ran to the window at the moment that the ceiling crashed onto their bed. It would have killed her if she hadn’t jumped out in the nick of time.”
“Wow,” said Flora again, and she read the entire account before turning back to the box. She came to a tattered blue album with fancy gold lettering reading “My School-Days Memory Book,” the first page inscribed “From Aunt Adelaide Davis to Sarah Matthews, Feb. 3, 1926.” Included in the memory book, among other things, were cheers (Hobble, gobble, razzle, dazzle, hokey, pokey, bah! A 9’s, A 9’s. Rah! Rah! Rah!), autographs (Dear Sarah, I call you “hinges” because you’re something to “adore.” As always, Frank), and a list of graduation gifts received by Sarah, which included a Parker pen and pencil set, a pair of tan stockings, a pair of white stockings, a white silk slip, a bunch of sweet peas, and the memory book itself.