A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) by Marie Bostwick Page B

you!”
    I could practically hear her grinning through the phone line. “Yeah, I’m pretty happy myself. In fact, if I was any happier I’d drop my harp plumb through the cloud!”
    “This is fabulous! You’re an author!”
    “Not yet, but soon. Sometime next year, so they tell me. ’Course,” she said modestly, “I don’t expect they’ll sell more than about forty copies—and me and Howard’ll probably buy thirty-eight of them.”
    “What are you talking about? I’m going to order some for the shop today, just so I make sure to get mine before they run out. And when you’re a big, famous quilting writer, you’ve got to promise to come teach a class at Cobbled Court. I’ll probably have to rent chairs just to make room for everybody.”
    Mary Dell laughed aloud at the audacity of my vision. “Sure thing, darlin’! If I’m ever a big, famous quilting writer, I’ll come teach at your shop. That’ll probably happen about the time that pigs fly, but if you look up in the clouds some morning and see porkers on parade, then go ahead and rent those chairs, Baby Girl; I’ll be there. In the meantime, I’ll be praying that your grand opening is a real big success!”
    And it was. On that first weekend, I was swamped with customers. Well, really there were more browsers than customers, but by the end of the first day I’d signed up four people for the Mariner’s Compass class, seven for the beginner’s class, added ninety-eight names to my mailing list, and rung up nearly two thousand dollars in sales. At the time, it seemed like a fortune. I went to bed that night exhausted but encouraged that I was off to a great start. Really, I was. And though I soon discovered that exhaustion is the permanent condition of a quilt-shop owner, I loved what I was doing.
    Not surprisingly, my favorite part of running the shop was the creative side: teaching classes, sewing samples, helping customers pick out fabrics, answering questions about difficult projects, and, of course, poring over catalogs and samples trying to decide which fabrics, books, and notions I should stock. I’d opened my doors with two thousand bolts of fabric, five hundred more than I’d planned on at first, but I knew that the bigger the fabric inventory, the more likely I’d be to attract quilters from places other than New Bern. If Cobbled Court Quilts was going to survive, it had to be a shop that quilters would drive out of their way to visit. There just weren’t enough quilters in New Bern to support it. I had to draw a regional audience.
    It was a surprise to discover that I also enjoyed the business side of the shop—not that doing accounting, keeping up with inventories, or managing invoices was exactly a thrill, but it worked a part of my brain that I’d let lie dormant for many years. Sure, I made plenty of mistakes, but I was managing the whole operation on my own. I couldn’t help but feel proud of my accomplishment, more confident than I had in years.
    You know, it’s so odd, but on the day when Rob walked into our kitchen—the kitchen we’d remodeled the year previously and with the granite counters Rob had said that I’d better make sure I liked because we were going to have to live with them until we died or moved into the old folks’ home—when he walked into the kitchen that day, stood next to the island where I was chopping green peppers, and said that he wanted a divorce, I felt so stupid.
    Yes, I also felt betrayed, bereft, heartbroken, abandoned, all those emotions I’d imagined women must feel when their husbands walked out on them—women whose number I was certain I would never, ever be among—but I’d never once thought to add stupidity to that list. But when the unthinkable happened, there it was.
    How could I have been so stupid? How could I have believed that buying granite countertops with a lifetime warranty meant that my marriage was similarly guaranteed against chips, scrapes, younger women, and midlife