Hanging by a Thread (3 page)

Which was
cool
. We wanted people to think restyled vintage clothes and accessories were cool. It didn’t hurt that Rachel was a trendsetter at Winston High; if she put her seal of approval on something, everyone else liked it too. I’d been skeptical at first, but when some of her friends stopped by our stand last week and bought things, I had to admit that Rachel’s idea had been brilliant.

“Hey hey, Cee-Cee girl!” Rachel yelled as she swerved in next to the curb, the stand bobbing dangerously in the passenger seat. I ran to steady it, grimacing at Rachel’s nickname for me.

I really wanted to be known by the name I’d had since I was born sixteen years and three months ago. But Rachel’s whims were as contagious as they were unpredictable. Already, half the kids I knew had started calling me Cee-Cee
too, and since I’d met them all through Rachel, odds were they’d keep doing it as long as she did.

“You’re only ten minutes late this time,” I said as we got the stand out of the car. “That’s some kind of record.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I had to take Adrienne to camp. Mom said if I was late again she was going to make me volunteer there. God, can you imagine—twenty fifth-grade girls doing
crafts
?”

She made a face, thoroughly disgusted by the idea, so I didn’t bother to point out that what I did was just a more sophisticated version of the loopy potholders and dishtowel pillows the girls made. When I was their age, I loved those crafts; anything that involved a needle and thread had captivated me as far back as I could remember, ever since Nana started letting me play with her boxes of scraps and buttons and bits of ribbon and lace.

I hauled the stand out of the car, and the big plastic storage tub out of the trunk, and started setting it all up. First I hung all the things that hadn’t sold last Saturday, using the curved safety pins I got at a quilt shop. They were thin enough not to damage any of the fabrics, and the shape made it easy to attach them to the canvas or hook over nails. I hung hats and bags along one side, tops and skirts along the other, the fabrics overlapping to make a crazy rainbow that flapped gently in the breeze.

Once all the older pieces were displayed, I dug into my backpack for the three new pieces I’d made this week, hanging these along the top crossbar of the stand.

Rachel was watching me, hands on hips.

“So, what do you think?” I said, stepping aside to give her an unobstructed view.

“We’ll sell those jeans by ten-thirty,” Rachel said without hesitation. “The jacket’s going to take longer, but we’ll get some lady from the suburbs down here for the weekend. But that bag? It’s like someone was smoking crack at the quilting bee, Cee-Cee, are you
serious
?”

I touched the soft, worn patchwork of the bag. So maybe the plastic elephant head I’d used for a closure—I found it at a garage sale and drilled a hole in it so I could sew it on—was a little over the top.

But over the top was what I did. It was who I
was
.

“I’ll bet you a Hoff run,” I said, straightening the bag. “Someone’s going to love this.”

Rachel snorted. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“If you’re so sure …” She dug into her purse for a Sharpie and wrote on one of the pink cardboard tags we’d made one night while watching
Princess Bride
for the millionth time. Rachel did the tags because she had prettier handwriting.

When she held it up she looked smug. She had written
$55
, and I shook my head as she carefully attached the tag to the bag’s strap and then curled the tag’s silvery ribbon with a pair of safety scissors.

“If I can get fifty-five bucks for it by noon, the Hoff run’s on you.”

“Just because I said someone is bound to love that bag doesn’t mean you can price us out of the market,” I complained.

“You said you were sure,” Rachel reminded me. “Besides, someday you’re going to be famous, and this’ll be worth a fortune.”

The jeans sold first, just as Rachel predicted—a woman with giant sunglasses bought them for one of her two cranky daughters, bargaining us down from thirty to twenty-six dollars. But the crazy quilted bag wasn’t far behind. At eleven-forty-five, after we’d been in business for less than two hours, an older lady with short white hair walked by the booth with a small brown fluffy dog on a leash—and did a double take.

“Monkey puzzle!” she exclaimed.

“Um … excuse me?” I had been reading an article titled “What He’s Thinking When He Gets Dressed” in the June issue of
Glamour
. Mom brought old magazines home from the office whenever new issues arrived. Her accounting business was located in a bungalow that also housed a dental practice, and I guess none of the staff wanted the old magazines.

“This quilt block—its name is Monkey Puzzle. My grandmother made a quilt like this—well, not like this, exactly.” The white-haired woman laughed, her raspy voice warm and friendly. “My grandmother probably never would have thought of using an elephant.”

I blushed. Okay, so maybe the elephant head hadn’t been my best idea ever.

“Uh, well, we have some really sweet little zipper cases that are also made from salvaged quilts,” I mumbled, sorting through the rack. “Perfect for holding makeup, or eyeglasses—”

“Oh, no, honey, I like this one.” She laughed again as she handed the bag to Rachel to wrap up. “You’ve got quite an eye. May I ask where you find your merchandise, girls?”

“Clare sews each piece herself,” Rachel said proudly. She called me by my real name in front of adults, for which I was grateful. “Everything’s made right here in Winston.”

The lady raised a silver eyebrow. “Clare
Raley
?” she asked. “Lila’s granddaughter?”

I smiled uncomfortably. “Clare Knight, ma’am, actually. But yes, Lila Raley is my grandmother.”

“Oh, of course you wouldn’t be a Raley, what was I thinking? Your mother married that boy she met in college.”

“Joe Knight,” I said, blushing harder as I got ready to tell my usual lie. “Although my mother and father are amicably separated.”

“Yes. Yes. Well.” She didn’t stop smiling, even as her expression slipped just a bit. Rachel counted out change and handed it over. “I should have known your creativity runs in the family. Lila’s quite a character, isn’t she.”

That was code for “eccentric.” People had a lot of different ways of saying it, but I knew what they meant—my grandmother was weird. I sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And so
active
locally, with all her causes. Now if we could just get her to put some of her energy into restoring that lovely historic home of hers, hmm?” She gave me a
smile to mask the fact that she’d just insulted Nana’s house. Many Winston residents thought Nana had turned the old Raley mansion into an eyesore. “You be sure to give her my regards, all right? And your parents, too.”

As I watched the woman walk away with her new tote bag tucked under her arm, I wondered what she would think if she knew that I hadn’t seen my father, Joe Knight, in almost a year, despite the fact that he lived only three hours away. Or that Nana was planning to paint her front door purple.

Or that while I was cutting up the corduroy jeans that became the handle of her new bag, my mind had filled with visions of the man who’d worn them the night he’d robbed a convenience store.

C
LOTHES SPEAK TO ME
.

Not all clothes. And not all the time. It’s been happening since before I was old enough to understand what my visions meant. No, strike that—I
still
didn’t always understand what I saw, even after Nana shared what she knew about the gift she had passed down to me. She believed that what happened long ago on the night when Alma died was the direct result of a terrible kind of justice. Or rather,
the physical manifestation of a lack of balance created when there is an injustice
.

Those were her words, and I can still hear her saying them all these years later. I was twelve when she told me. I’d just started seventh grade and had my first vision, a silver-sparkled, hazy episode, when I borrowed my friend Gayle’s sweater and, slipping it over my school uniform in the coatroom, got so dizzy I had to sit down. In the blurry moments that followed, feeling like I was watching a grainy television in my mind, I discovered that Gayle had dropped
her mother’s favorite vase out of a second-story window after she was grounded.

That night, I tried to talk to my mom about what had happened, and she lost it. She started yelling, and then she apologized, making me promise to forget what had happened and to tell no one about it, ever. She said it was like a disease, but if I ignored it, it would go away.

So when we drove down to Winston for Thanksgiving a few weeks later, I waited until my mom was busy with her laptop in the den, and whispered my forbidden questions to Nana. She took me into the kitchen with a worried look and, after cutting me a slice of pumpkin bread, told me that she’d always known I was special. That was when I found out what really happened to Alma.

“The baby who was born the night Alma died was my mother, Josie,” Nana said after telling me the story of Alma’s murder.

“Did she have it? The … 
gift
?” I wasn’t sure what I thought of Nana’s term for it yet, especially since Mom’s reaction had convinced me it was something terrible.

“I’m almost certain she did, though my memories from that time aren’t very reliable. She died when I was still in my teens. But Mama always seemed to know things about people in town. And why wouldn’t she? People brought clothes to the shop all the time. She’d take up a hem or alter a neckline or a sleeve, and once in a while she’d learn something about the person who wore it. I remember there were some families she wouldn’t sit close to in church … a few kids whose houses she wouldn’t let us go over to.”

“Didn’t you wonder why?”

“Well, I had bigger things to worry about. People said that our family was cursed. They started up all that nonsense about the shop being haunted. Kids at school used to tease me and Mary and Agnes; they said they could see Alma’s ghost following us around, that kind of thing. I thought Mama was just trying to spare our feelings. After all, she grew up an orphan—she was raised by one of her aunts—and she was determined to give us a loving childhood.” She smiled sadly. “I still miss her sometimes. Lord, but it’s been a lot of years.”

“But what did she say when you started doing it? When you had your first vision?”

“Well, I didn’t call it that, of course. What happened was, we had a neighbor boy who was nothing but trouble. We lived a couple of miles out of town back then, next to a sheep ranch. Out where Via Loma cuts through now. Anyway, someone was leaving the gate open and the rancher had lost half a dozen sheep. That boy left his jacket over at our house one day, and when I touched it, I saw he was the one who’d been doing it—out of plain old meanness. I got a look inside his head that … Well, it’s no surprise he ended up being nothing but trouble. Moved away a few years later, and I can’t say anyone missed him.”

“Did you tell your mom what you saw?”

“I did, and I’ll never forget what she told me. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world to see things in clothes, but said it was my choice whether to do anything with what I saw. She made it very clear that if
something like that happened again, it wasn’t my job to fix other people’s mistakes, or to get involved at all.”

“So did you? Get involved?”

“Sometimes I did. I learned that the greater the wrong, the stronger the vision could be. If someone had hurt someone else—if I thought there was danger of it happening again—then I’d try to help make it right. And years later, when I tried to stop, I learned that it was possible … just very difficult.”

“What do you mean? How do you quit?”

“If you never do anything about what you see, if you make sure that you never get involved, never alter your behavior because of a vision, they’ll slowly fade away and you won’t get them anymore. And that’s just fine,” she added, in a voice that seemed tinged with sadness.

“Is that what happened to you?” I knew without asking that Nana didn’t have the visions anymore. She was a lot of things—an artist, a gardener, a cook, a planet-saver—but I’d never known her to get involved in other people’s business.

“Yes,” she said, and stared out the window, her eyes filled with regret.

“What?” I demanded. “What happened?”

“That’s not a story for today,” Nana said, suddenly sounding tired. “Actually, that’s not a story for me to tell at all.”

R
ACHEL WAITED UNTIL THE WOMAN
who had bought the tote bag was out of earshot before holding her hands up above her head and making the victory sign.

“Hoff run,” she said in a singsong voice. I grimaced, but there would be no getting out of it. I’d lost the bet, fair and square.

“Hoff run” was short for “Hasselhoff run,” which in turn was our nickname for the cost of doing business here in front of the Shuckster. The casual seafood restaurant and bar hadn’t been our first choice as a location to set up shop. It hadn’t been our second, either, or our third, fourth, tenth, or twenty-second. No. The Shuckster was dead last on our list of the twenty-three merchants on either Beach Road or Shore Street, which made up the entire downtown business district of Winston, California.