Will made a big show of locking the bathroom door. As if.
I put my suit jacket on again—buttoning it all the way to the top. Then I looked around the room for a place to dump the pile of bras. His suitcase was the perfect place. Once Will’s desktop was reasonably clear, I spread out the floor plans and the sample boards as artistically as possible.
When he emerged from the bathroom again, Will was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a blue oxford cloth dress shirt. A wad of toilet tissue was gummed onto his neck.
“How was the trip?” I asked, resolved to get things back on a businesslike footing.
“Long,” he said, sitting down at the desk. “My flight was delayed leaving Miami last night, so I didn’t get back here until two this morning.”
He picked up the boards and shuffled through them. “Looks like you’ve been pretty busy yourself,” he said, running his fingers over the fabric samples. He held up a swatch of damask to the light. “This is nice. What’s it for?”
“It’s for the sofas in the east parlor,” I explained, pointing to a board with a photograph of the sofa style I’d picked out.
“Is this something a woman would like?” he asked, frowning.
“I like it,” I offered. “And I think Stephanie Scofield would love it.”
He looked up quickly. “What makes you think so?”
“I’ve seen her home,” I said. “And how she dresses. I even know her dog’s name.”
“Really?” For the first time he looked impressed. “She likes dogs?”
“Loves ’em,” I said.
“What else did you find out about her?” he asked, shoving aside all my hard work. “How tall is she? Is she just as beautiful in person?”
I resisted the urge to gag. He really was totally and hopelessly smitten with this woman.
“She’s very attractive,” I said. “Probably about five-foot-four.” And then I couldn’t resist. “Although I doubt that’s her natural hair color.”
“Who cares?” he muttered. “Tell me more.”
I racked my brains for details that would be meaningful to him. “Decent figure.” It was a gross underexaggeration, which he would soon find out for himself.
“I think the boobs are man-made. But she does have great legs.”
He smiled. “I’m a leg man myself.”
I thought ruefully of my own God-given C-cups.
“She’s a runner,” I added. “And I happen to know she spends a lot of time at the gym.”
“Great.”
“And at the mall,” I added spitefully. “Whoever marries Stephanie Scofield is getting a world-class shopper.”
“What does she like?” he asked, stroking the striped silk fabric I’d picked out for the dining room drapes.
“Money.”
He pushed his chair away from the desk and went back over to the pile of bras on his suitcase. “So she’s ambitious. I like that in a woman. I bought this company because I want to build something here in Madison. And I want a partner, somebody who’ll be in it with me all the way. I’m not looking for Betty Crocker, you know.”
He picked up the underwire bra I’d so recently discarded and handed it back to me. I felt myself blushing again.
“You saw it for yourself, right, Keeley? This bra is the answer. It’s the first new thing to happen in the industry since Victoria’s Secret brought out the Miracle Bra in the nineties. I think this little number could be what keeps Loving Cup Intimates afloat. You get it, don’t you? This bra is something totally new, revolutionary, really. And we’re the only one who has it.”
Determined to hide my embarrassment, I ran my finger over the lacy cup of the bra. “What the heck is this, anyway? I mean, it’s like an underwire, but different—right? It looks and feels like lace, yet it’s pliant and strong at the same time.”
He nodded enthusiastically. “You got it. Exactly. I’ve been researching this since before I bought the company. I hired a marketing company, and they organized focus groups. Think of it. Five hundred women, from all over the country, from all walks of life. And they all told us the same thing. The thing they hate most about being a woman is having to wear bras.”
“And panty hose,” I said. And Kotex, I thought, but that was a discussion for another day.
“Women said they love having breasts,” Will continued, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “But they hate accommodating them. They hate how most bras fit. They hate how the straps slip or dig into their shoulders. They hate how they fasten. I mean, can you imagine men wearing pants with a fly that zips in back? That would never happen.”
“No, because men wouldn’t put up with the kind of crap they subject women to,” I said. But he wasn’t really listening. He was on a roll.
“And the women in these focus groups hated, I mean, DETESTED, underwire bras. That’s when I knew what we had to do to save Loving Cup. We had to invent a better, er, mousetrap.”
“Just how much money did you spend on this research?” I asked.
He did some scratching around with a pencil and a notepad. “Five target cities, telephone polling, in-depth interviews, follow-ups…maybe two hundred thousand dollars, ballpark,” Will said.
“I’d’ve told you the same thing for free,” I said, wincing as I felt my own underwire dig into the flesh of my rib cage. “Underwires are the scourge of modern American women.”
“Were,” Will said, taking the bra and turning it over lovingly in his hands. “But all of that is fixing to change.”
He took the bra and snapped it playfully at my knees. “And this little baby is going to do it.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked. “Sri Lanka? Is that what you were doing there?”
“You’re not going to believe it,” Will said, crossing his arms over his chest and looking unbearably smug.
“Try me.”
“Not Sri Lanka. Not Hong Kong. Not New York. Not even Atlanta. This bra came from right here in little old Madison, Georgia.”
I snatched the bra away from him. “You’re right. I don’t believe you. What? The bra fairy just left it out in your cabbage patch last night?”
“I wouldn’t call Dr. Soo the bra fairy,” Will said. “Maybe a bra genius, though.”
“Dr. Sue?”
“Not like Sue the girl. Although technically, she is a girl. It’s spelled S-O-O. Like soo, pig. Her full name is Dr. Alberta Soo. She’s a Ph.D. kind of doctor. And she lives right here in Madison.”
“Never heard of her, and I’ve lived here all my life,” I said.
“Dr. Soo only retired here about a year ago,” Will said. “She and her husband live pretty quietly, not too far from here, actually. They have sort of a farmette. Keep a few chickens, some sheep, and they raise a little cotton, of course.”
“Of course?”
“Dr. Soo is a retired textile engineering professor. From Georgia Tech. She’s the one who designed this new underwire. Been tinkering with it ever since she retired. Once she had a lightweight, ultra-thin wire with the proper tensile strength, she sent it to one of her colleagues over at Tech, and they put some grad students to work on it, figuring out possible applications for it. One of the women suggested they try using it in the design of a new kind of bra. And that’s where I come in.”
I smoothed the bra out over my kneecaps, bent over to look closely at the fabric. “How on earth did you find out about all this?”
“Same way a blind pig finds an acorn,” Will said. “Right after I first bought the plant, I was over here one Sunday, moving stuff into my office. She was driving by, saw me standing in the parking lot, and stopped to say howdy.”
“And she just happened to mention that she’d invented this wonder wire,” I said.
“Yeah, basically,” he said, missing my sarcasm. “I mean, here’s this old Oriental-looking lady, dressed in baggy khaki shorts with a bandana on her head,” Will said. “At first I thought maybe she was looking for a job on the sewing line. Next thing I know, she’s telling me she’s a retired professor and she’s asking if I was gonna shut the place down. Said one of her neighbors used to work here, and he’d told her we were having hard times. She hated to hear it, because it turned out she’d gotten a little research grant from Loving Cup, back when the Gurwitzes owned it, when she was a grad student at Tech.”
“And that’s when she sold you the magic bra—in return for a bag of gold coins,” I said.
“She’d been thinking about approaching somebody in the apparel business. Used to be there were more than a dozen clothing assembly plants in this area alone,” Will said. “We’re the last ones left. And it just happens that our plant is down the road from her farmette.”
“And she hates underwire bras,” I said.
“I wouldn’t swear to this,” Will said, “but from the look of her, I don’t believe Dr. Soo wears foundation garments. She probably only weighs eighty pounds soaking wet.”
“So where’d you get the bra?” I repeated.
“I signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Tech,” Will said. “Then I found a plant in South Carolina that could spin the wire, and another one in Dothan, Alabama, that could weave the actual lace fabric. That bra you’re holding is the first one stitched in the plant in Sri Lanka.”
I handed the bra back to him. “If it’s made in Sri Lanka, what happens to the plant here? How does this help good old American workers in Madison, Georgia?”
“It will,” he said stubbornly. “It’s going to save this company.”
“All by itself?” I asked, looking around at the timeworn office. “Will, I worked out here, years ago, when Loving Cup was in its heyday. Back then a Loving Cup bra was a status symbol. We were running three shifts a day, and we even had a smaller plant over in the south end of the county. A machine operator working here could make seven dollars an hour. That was big money. But things have changed. The company didn’t keep up. The bras you’re making now, they’re a joke. How are you going to turn all that around—and just like that—overnight?”
“We’re going to become a different company,” Will said, leaning forward, his eyes glowing with intensity. “Same name, but a whole different product. We’ll be smaller, leaner, meaner.”
“Smaller than now? How is that possible? This place is a ghost town.”
“That’s not how I mean small,” Will said. “We’re going to retool the plant. Completely. We’ve been making cotton garments all these years. Now we’ll switch to MMF.”
“MMF?”
“Man-made fabrics. We’ll produce and cut the fabric here, but mostly the bras will be stitched overseas.”
He saw the unhappy set of my face.
“It’s a fact of life, Keeley. We can’t compete in the marketplace with a garment made totally here in Madison. But what we can do is this—we can weave the lace here in the States, and we can do the cutting here. Most of the assembly is done in Sri Lanka—but the bras will be sent back here for packaging and shipping. We’ll do enough work here to earn a ‘Made in USA’ label, and we’ll get the plant back up and running—and we’ll be making a damn good product.”
“It sounds like you’ve got everything all figured out,” I admitted.
“Not everything,” he said. “Not by a long shot. I’ve gotta get the financing for the new machinery we’ll need, and I’m hoping we’ll get some tax incentives from the state to help with that. We’ll have to retrain folks for new jobs, and yeah, the ones who can’t or won’t adapt, those people will be out of luck. And then there’s you.”
“Me?”
“I need you,” Will said. “Need you to get the house rolling. I can’t keep sleeping here in the office. I’m getting a crick in my back from the sofa, and Miss Nancy looks at me funny when she comes in every morning. I don’t think she approves of me living here.”
“She doesn’t approve of you, period,” I informed him. “She thinks you’ve got some uppity ideas.”
“Uppity.” He laughed.
“But if you keep this place running, and her working, you’ll have her undying support. She’ll take a bullet for you, if she’s on your side.”
“What about you? Are you on my side? How soon can you get the house livable?”
“You said Christmas,” I pointed out.
“I need to be in there sooner,” he said. “The old pump house will be ready for me to move in by Friday, sort of as a guest house, you know? They’re putting the finishing touches on the roof today, and we’ll have wiring and a bathroom by then too. For furniture, I just need the basics. How soon can you get me a bed and a table and some chairs? And some lamps. And a television,” he added. “So I can watch the Braves games at night.”
“You don’t have any furniture of your own?” I asked. “Nothing? Have you been living in that car of yours?”
He sighed. “I had a lady friend. She got a promotion and moved to San Francisco, and that’s when we parted company—by mutual agreement. She kept all the furniture and stuff, since I was moving here anyway, and didn’t have a house lined up. I kept the Caddy. Now, is that enough information? How about it? How soon can I move in?”
“The end of the week? It won’t be anything fancy. I guess I can get a mattress and box spring and bedding delivered by Friday. And I can pull some odd chairs and a table and dresser from our storage locker, to fill in until the real stuff arrives.”
“Great,” he said. “You’re doing great.” He gestured at the drawings and fabric samples. “Stephanie’s gonna love this. I just know it.”
“We’ll see,” I said, gathering up my stuff. “The rest is up to you. Your big night is Wednesday, right?”
He yawned. “Right. If I can stay awake that long.”