The True Love Quilting Club (2 page)

New York, New York, present day

Inside a cramped, dusty pawnshop on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, Emma Parks lined up behind a muscle-bound bald guy wearing Mr. Clean earrings, a stained peacoat, gray Dickies workpants, and scuffed Doc Martens boots. He smelled of powdered eggs, cod liver oil, and eucalyptus. He snarled at the woman behind the cage, demanding more than she wanted to give for the toothy orange chain saw he had slung over his shoulder.

A chain saw? In Manhattan?

From the forbidding look of the guy, Emma figured it was better not to ask, and closed her fingers around her most valuable possession. This was all she had left.
Over the years, she’d sold off her memories one by one—her grandmother’s collection of Imperial Glass, her high school class ring, the Prada handbag she’d bought herself for graduation with money she earned playing summer stock at Six Flags.

The man slammed the chain saw down on the counter and turned away from the cage, a fistful of dollars crumpled between his hammy fingers. He glowered darkly. Emma took a step backward. He brushed past her mumbling, “Watch out, girlie,” and stormed from the shop.

“Next,” growled the woman behind the cage in a two-packs-a-day-Camels voice.

Emma stepped up to the counter.

“Whatcha got?” The woman had an oversized head on a near-anorexic body, a casaba melon face, and long, scraggly gray hair that tangled down her shoulders. Central casting would have been all over her for a cauldron role in
Macbeth
. On the other side of the bulletproof glass, she perched atop a hydraulic stool jacked up high. “Well? I ain’t got all day. Show it or step off.”

With a tug of wistful regret, Emma opened her hand, revealing the diamond-encrusted, star-shaped brooch resting in her palm.

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and they took on a shiny yellow cast like a hungry feral cat who’d spotted a baby rabbit. “Stick it through the opening.”

Reluctantly, Emma slid the brooch through the small opening cut into the barricade.

The woman pounced, snatching up the brooch, holding it up to the light. Then she opened the drawer in front of her and took out a jeweler’s loupe. She studied it for a long moment. “I’ll give you two hundred dollars.”

Shock dropped Emma’s mouth. “It's worth at least ten times that amount. It’s white gold and there’s a diamond on each point of the star.”

“They’re diamond chips of questionable quality.”

“It was appraised at twenty-five hundred dollars over ten years ago,” Emma argued past the nausea gathering in her stomach.

Two hundred dollars wouldn’t begin to cover the thousand dollars she needed for the exclusive Master X’s tutoring sessions. Master X was her last hope.

She’d tried everything she knew to make it big, and after twelve years in the trenches, she’d hardly made a dent. So far, the most successful thing she’d done was a speaking role as the big toe in an antifungal ointment commercial. The residuals helped pay the bills, but every time that commercial aired, something inside her died a little. This was not great art. This was not what she suffered for.

Master X had grudgingly agreed to accept her as a student,
if
she came up with a thousand bucks by the end of the week. It was almost impossible to get accepted by Master X. He didn’t advertise, didn’t even have a Web site. You had to know somebody who knew somebody to get you into one of his classes. Jill Freeman, one of her old roommates, had taken his course last year, and a week later, she was cast as second understudy to Julia Roberts—who was, at her age, now playing M’Lynn—in a stage revival of
Steel Magnolias
.

After that, Jill’s career had taken off. She’d moved to L.A. and snagged an ensemble role in a popular sitcom. Jill wouldn’t tell her what she learned in the class. Master X swore his pupils to secrecy with a confidentiality clause. But she did put in a good word for
Emma. If Emma could just scrape up the money for his class, she believed Master X’s techniques were the missing pieces of the puzzle that could shoot her over the top.

“Hey, times are tough all over. You shoulda sold it ten years ago.” The caged woman glowered.

“I didn’t need the money ten years ago.”

“Two hundred dollars. Take it or leave it.”

Sorrow-tinged disappointment swept through her. She bit down on her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. “Please,” she whispered. “The brooch was the last thing my mother ever gave me.”

The day stood out in her memory, clear and sharp. She’d come home from first grade to find her mother sitting on the couch, her secondhand, navy blue American Tourister rolling luggage at her feet with a dog-eared copy of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
resting atop it. Her mother had been smoking, a snubbed-out Virginia Slims lay in a saucer, her eyes red-rimmed and her face blotchy as if she’d been crying. She’d smelled of wine and the Wind Song cologne Trixie Lynn and her dad had bought her for Mother’s Day.

She’d never seen her mother smoke. Instantly, the hairs on her arms had lifted. “Mama? What’s wrong?”

Mama had forced a smile, patted the sofa beside her. “Come, have a seat, Trixie Lynn.”

She’d edged over, knowing something awful was about to happen. “Mama?”

“I gotta go, Trixie Lynn.”

“Go?” she asked in a voice so small and tight it hurt her chest. Even now, just thinking about it, she felt that old pain, dead center of her heart. “Where are you going?”

“To follow my bliss.”

She hadn’t understood what that meant, but it didn’t sound blissful to her.

“Listen.” Her mother had taken both Trixie’s hands in hers. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Stay here in Podunk, USA. Stay married to your father. I got sidetracked, derailed when I got pregnant with you. I’m almost thirty, Trixie Lynn. If I don’t do it now, I never will.”

She heard the whooshing of her own blood pounding in her ears. “Will what?”

“Make it big in Hollywood. I’m special. I’m destined to be a star. I can’t keep living a lie.”

“Can I go with you?”

“No honey. You gotta stay here. Stay in school. Take care of your daddy. He’ll need you.”

“Mama, please, please don’t go.”

“I gotta. You’ll understand one day. Here. Put out your hand. I got a present for you.”

Trixie Lynn had put out her hand, and her mother settled the brooch in it.

“It’s worth a lot of money. A nice man bought it for me a long time ago, but more important than that, it’s a symbol. You know what a symbol is?”

Trixie Lynn wasn’t sure, but she nodded anyway.

“A star for a star. The man who gave it to me said, ‘You’re gonna be a star someday. You’re destined for greatness.’ So, Trixie Lynn, if you get to feeling lonely for me, you pull out that star and you hold it tight and you remember who your mother is.”

“Okay.” She ducked her head.

Her mother hooked two fingers under Trixie Lynn’s chin and forced her face upward. “What does this brooch represent?”

“Stardom.”

Her mother had beamed. “Good girl. Now give me a hug.” She hugged Trixie Lynn so tight she couldn’t breathe. Rocked her quietly in her lap. Rocked her and whispered, “You’re gonna be a star, you’re gonna be a star, you’re gonna be a star.”

Then a car horn had honked outside.

“That’s my ride. I gotta go.” Mama set her aside and stood up. Then she had walked out the door, strolled down the cracked sidewalk, and climbed into a shiny white Cadillac with a man Trixie Lynn didn’t know sitting behind the wheel. They drove away, and Trixie Lynn never saw her mother again.

Following her mother’s departure, Trixie Lynn had immediately gone in search of the perfect vehicle that would fly her to celebrity—ballet classes and soccer practice and art. But she was graceful as an egg, bruised like a week-old banana, and quickly discovered she had the artistic ability of a chimpanzee.

Finally, at fourteen, she found what she’d been searching for.

The minute she stepped onstage in the lead role in Twilight High School’s production of
Annie
, she felt for the first time as if she’d finally found her way home. She’d been born for this, singing her heart out, sliding under the skin of a fictional character, letting her imagination flow, running away from the sad, empty life of Trixie Lynn Parks.

Once she embraced the stage, there was no turning back, never mind that her looks conspired against her ambitions. For one thing, she was skinny—all sharp elbows and knees, flat butt, even flatter chest. Not to mention her height (or lack thereof). She barely passed the five-foot mark. And then there was the matter of
her copper-colored hair and the freckle-faced complexion that went with it.

No beauty, Trixie Lynn, no sirree. But she was whip-smart and possessed an iron will. When she made up her mind about something, it was a done deal, no matter how long it took. No matter what she had to endure.

She’d left home at eighteen. Not that there was much of a home to leave; she and her father had long since moved away from Twilight, the one place where she’d ever felt like she belonged. She legally changed her name to Emma and took off for New York City. For twelve years she waited tables, went to auditions, lived in cramped, cockroach-infested loft apartments with numerous roommates, and she never, ever stopped wishing and hoping and dreaming of her big break. She was going to be a star. Her mother had deemed it so.

She dated rarely and always casually. Love, she knew, could derail plans for fame faster than a stalled car on an Amtrak rail, and heaven forbid if she ever got pregnant. Unplanned pregnancies had ruined the careers of many an aspiring actress.

The only time she’d ever come close to losing her heart was at fourteen, back in Twilight. To the first boy she’d ever kissed, dark-eyed, black-haired, enigmatic Sam Cheek. His kiss had been a bottle rocket of sensation, and she’d never forgotten it. Mainly to remind herself of what she had to avoid. That kind of electric chemistry caused nothing but trouble for a girl with big plans.

Emma could still picture that beautiful boy. Once in a while she wondered what had become of Sam. Did he have a wife? Kids? What had he done with his life? He’d
talked of becoming a veterinarian. Had he achieved his goal? But for the most part, she kept her thoughts where they belonged, on her goal of stardom.

“Two twenty-five and that’s my final offer,” said the woman behind the glass, snapping Emma back to the present.

“It’s special,” she whispered.

“There’s no market for sentimentality.”

“Please.” Emma blinked. “I need at least three hundred.”

The woman eyed her. “Let me guess. You came to New York with stars in your eyes. You were gonna make it big on Broadway. Am I close?”

Numbly, she nodded.

“You been here awhile. You been knocking on doors and knocking on doors and knocking on doors, and nobody’s answering. Sure, you’ve landed a few parts, off, off, off Broadway that didn’t pay a plug nickel. Or maybe you were even crazy enough to pay to be in some slipshod production. You’ve waited tables and worked as a receptionist and passed out flyers in Times Square. Anything to make a buck.”

It was an Alice in Wonderland moment. How did the woman know this about her? Was she that obvious? That much of a cliché?

“Pipe dreams,” the woman intoned.

“Pardon me?”

“You’re never gonna make it. If you were, it would have happened by now. You’re not pretty enough. Too short, too redheaded, too fair-skinned. You ain’t connected.”

“How do you know?” Emma glared, getting pissed off now.

“If you had connections, you wouldn’t be here pawning sentimental crap.”

“I could have a drug addiction,” Emma argued.

“Do you?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Pipe dreamer.”

Her anger flared higher. “Stop saying that.”

“Dreamer of pipes,” the woman taunted.

Emma didn’t have to put up with this, even though deep inside she feared the woman’s estimate was far more than accurate. She stuck out her palm. “Just give me the brooch back.”

“Tell you what,” the crone said. “Because I feel sorry for you, I’ll give you two eighty—”

“I don’t need your pity, give me my damn brooch back, Hagzilla or I’m calling the cops.”

An amused smile played over her thin, dry lips. “Three hundred, but only if you promise to give up on this stupid dream and use the money for bus fare back home, Cindy Lou Hoo.”

“Why the hell do you care?” Emma snapped.

The woman’s tight, hard eyes grew murky with an unexpected softness. “Because once upon a time, I was you.”

Emma snorted.

“You think that’s funny? You don’t believe me?”

“No, not really.”

“Hold on, I can prove it.” Hagzilla dug around in a drawer, pulled out a yellowed, tattered playbill.
Death of a Salesman
, 1989. She flipped to the dog-eared page that listed the cast. “There.” She pointed a grubby finger at a name on the list. “I played Miss Forsythe.
On
Broadway, and look where I ended up.”

“Did you have a drug problem?” Emma asked hopefully.

The woman glared. “Three hundred
if
you give up this stupid dream and leave town.”

“Yeah, okay, fine,” she said. Three hundred bucks wasn’t even a third of the way to her goal, but it was better than nothing. Still, that meant she had only five days left to come up with seven hundred dollars. In her situation it might as well be seven thousand.
Don’t give up; you can’t give up.

“Say it.”

“I’ll give up this stupid dream and leave town,” Emma parroted, not meaning a word of it.

The woman slid the money through the slot. “Leave town.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Stuffing the three hundred dollars into the pocket of her faded jeans (that had of late grown baggy), Emma left the pawnshop, left her star brooch in the gnarled paw of the failed actress reduced to working behind a cage and trying to chase people out of Manhattan.

She hustled down the street, carried along on the energy of the herd surrounding her, passing a collection of small, grimy storefront windows that today somehow felt ominous. The summer heat was heavy, oppressive, burning the smell of car exhaust into her nostrils. The air hummed with sounds; the sharp honking of taxi horns, the steady marching of feet, the mad mumbling of cell phone conversations. Dark clouds hung above the skyscrapers, sautéing the city in humidity. People bumped into her, glowered, growled. Her stomach grumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything besides an apple and two Wasa crackers since the evening before.