BESS CAME INTO THE KITCHEN but politely refused to sit down. Hanna stood facing her.
“It’s pretty clear that folks have heard about what happened Saturday. But they haven’t heard the truth. They think that I misbehaved. Badly. So badly that they’re not going to come to the opening. Or buy from our shop. It’s just not right that my family’s whole livelihood is about to be ruined. Because of lies.”
“I’m sorry,” Bess whispered for a second time.
“How sorry?”
Bess blinked.
“You say you’re sorry that this is happening to us. Are you sorry enough to help?”
“But what could I do?”
A faint hope rippled through Hanna.
“I need the women in town to know the truth—that those men attacked me, and I wasn’t misbehaving in any way. But I don’t want the law involved, because then my father would have to be told.”
She stared into Bess’s wide blue eyes. “If I tried to convince the ladies, they wouldn’t believe me. No, it’s worse than that—they wouldn’t even let me in the door to speak to them. But you could do it. They’d invite you right in. They’d listen to you, even the ones who would never give me the time of day.”
“I’m not good at talking to strangers,” Bess said.
“I didn’t say it would be easy.”
Silence.
“I want to help—really I do,” Bess said, her eyes filling with tears. “I just don’t think I can. What would I say to Ma?”
The ripple of hope was dissipating. It’s a hard thing, what I’m asking her to do. But somehow I have to get her to see that it’s not nearly as hard as being ignored and spited and attacked and hated, and losing your business and your home . . . and the only real friend you’ve had in years.
For if the shop proved unsuccessful, Papa would have to sell up and they would move on yet again.
She wondered what she would remember about their time in LaForge—the good things, she hoped. Those weeks at school, when it had been just her and Bess and Sadie studying with Miss Walters . . .
“Miss Walters.” Hanna’s own voice surprised her. “She could go with you.”
Bess raised her head. “Do you think she would?”
“I don’t know. I went to see her yesterday. She told me not to do anything—‘least said, soonest mended.’ But it took her a while to say that . . . Anyway, you could start by talking to her.”
Bess seemed to stand up a little taller. “That much I can do.”
All morning Hanna hoped that Bess would return during the noon hour to tell her how things had gone. Dinner came and went with no visit from Bess, and then the afternoon seemed to lengthen without end.
Hanna spent most of the day working on the dress: the last stretch of hemming, the piping on the sleeves, and twelve vexatious buttonholes. The only good thing about Bess’s absence was that Hanna had more than enough to keep her busy. And, while she wasn’t proud of it, she couldn’t help the petty, spiteful thought that Bess had left her to do all the buttonholes herself.
When she had at last finished the hundreds of tiny knotted buttonhole stitches, she sewed on each of the twelve glass buttons, good and firm. Then she stood and stretched, rolling her shoulders. She reached up with one hand to rub her cramped neck muscles, but then remembered the bruises and lowered her hand slowly.
Don’t think about it. Keep moving.
After she put the flatiron on the stove to heat, she worked on covering the lard cans. The blue cans were lettered with the words PURE LARD in white; their tin edges were rusty and the paint chipped.
She picked out a pretty but inexpensive pink-striped calico and cut from it six carefully measured rectangles. Once she had sewn a quick rough seam to join the ends of a rectangle, she could open out the fabric to form a cylinder about six inches tall. She slipped a cylinder over each can, then tied on a length of cream-colored ribbon.
The plants had done their part to perfection, blooming right on schedule. Hanna rearranged the window display. She moved the rack of fabric off-center to the left and placed the six rosebushes in their disguised cans here and there on the sill. Papa had screwed a metal hook into the ceiling of the window well, on the right-hand side. That was where she would hang the finished dress.
The lawn ironed up beautifully, the fabric smooth and soft. Hanna hung the dress on a hanger, and the hanger on the hook. Then she stepped back to look at the entire display. It was facing into the shop, as the window itself was still covered over with brown paper. She would turn everything to face outward in the morning.
The blue “sky” above, the lovely fabrics on the rack, the prairie roses in full bloom, and especially the green sprigged lawn dress . . . Hanna was so proud of how the window looked that she wanted to clap her hands like a child. Mama would have loved it.
But in the next moment, tears were wetting her eyelashes. What if no one came to the opening? What if she and Papa were the only people in town who ever saw the display?
At least a dozen times, Hanna paced the length of the building, between the window at the front and the lean-to at the back, hoping to see Bess return. She waited for her friend until the sun had disappeared below the edge of the prairie.
Bess did not come.
If she had good news, she’d have been here by now.
“Good night, Papa,” she said, the words stilted by the lump in her throat. Her insides felt hollow. If someone were to nudge her shoulder, she thought, she would collapse to the floor, crumpled like a threadbare rag.
Papa was still in the shop, sweeping, dusting, polishing, by the light of a lantern. He had already cleaned the whole place but was doing it again, as if buffing the woodwork until it gleamed would bring in the customers. She sensed that he, too, needed to keep moving.
He looked up and nodded at her, but did not stop working. “Good night, Hanna.”
Hanna got into bed and turned on her side. She thought she might cry, but her eyes remained dry. She lay awake for a long time, bone-weary and heartsore. Eventually she heard Papa’s tread on the stairs and the creak of the floorboards as he went to bed.
In the darkest part of the night, she thought of something she had forgotten to do. She rose, lit the lantern, and tiptoed downstairs. She found what she needed in the workroom, then fetched the dress from the window display.
Hanna unbuttoned the dress’s collar. On the underside of the collar near the right shoulder seam, she embroidered a tiny five-petaled lotus in pale pink thread. Then she rebuttoned the collar and smoothed it down.
There, Mama. Now it’s finished.
She hung the dress in the window again and crept back upstairs. The night sky had lightened to gray by the time she finally fell asleep.
“Hanna! What’s the matter—are you poorly again?”
Yanked from sleep by Papa’s voice calling from downstairs, Hanna sat up so quickly that for a moment the room reeled around her.
“I’m fine, Papa,” she called back. “What—”
“Then hurry yourself and get down here.”
Mystified, Hanna dressed hastily. She rushed into Papa’s room to look at the clock; it was a few minutes before nine. She couldn’t remember ever sleeping this late before.
Then she heard an unfamiliar sound from outside. The window in Papa’s room was at the front of the building, above the shop. She looked out the window and choked back a cry of astonishment.
On the sidewalk, there was a long line of people—a line that crossed the alley and went halfway up the next block. Mostly women and girls, a few men. They were chatting cheerily, and those standing by the window were gazing at the display, pointing, nodding, smiling. Which meant that Papa must have taken down the brown paper and turned everything in the window well to face the street.
“Hey, Edmunds!” one of the men called out. “It’s nine by my watch! You opening today or not?”
“That’s right—it’s nine o’clock!” someone else said.
As Hanna watched, Papa opened the door and went outside. “Yes, we’re open,” he said. “Come on in, everyone, and welcome.”
Hanna drew back from the window, dizzy with disbelief.
Bess had done it. Somehow, she had gotten what looked like half the town to come to the opening.