Chapter 5 - The Price My Mother Put on the Table
Nobody shouted at my mother. I think she would have preferred shouting. Instead, Ruth pushed back her chair and asked a question that made the entire room feel colder.
“How much did you receive for my signature?”
“Nothing for yours,” my mother said. “The advance went to the shop.”
“That's not what I asked.”
My mother looked at the floor. “Two hundred and forty thousand dollars was transferred in the first payment.”
Someone drew in a breath. Someone else said, “Good Lord.”
The family bridal shop had never seen that much money at once. Our father opened it thirty-eight years ago as a shoe-repair counter with a sewing machine in the back. Over time, Mom began alterations; I apprenticed under her; and Sloane learned how to make customers feel as if an appointment with her was an invitation into a better life. She was brilliant at marketing. She was also increasingly willing to sell a promise before anyone had worked out whether we could keep it.
When Dad died two years earlier, he left the shop's lease and a line of credit he had used to cover payroll through slow months. Mom insisted she could manage it. I believed her because I needed to.
“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked.
“You were paying your own rent. I wasn't going to make you carry the shop as well.”
“So you carried it with their work.”
She nodded. “That's what I did.”
Maya sorted the papers into separate piles. “The shop received an advance. What else?”
“Eighty thousand went directly to back rent and the landlord's legal fees. Forty-six thousand cleared overdue wages and vendor bills. The rest is supposed to be in a reserve account.”
“Supposed to be?” Odessa asked.
“Sloane handles that account.”
My mother produced bank statements showing the first two payments. She had signed as the workshop's agent because Sloane told her the women had agreed to the license and Blue Thread was still a program of the family shop. It had been a program there once. Three years ago, Odessa and I had moved it to the community college and formed an independent nonprofit. The shop continued lending us a cutting table and printer. Mom had confused cooperation with ownership—or, worse, used the confusion because it was convenient.
“You knew we moved,” I said.
“I knew. I told myself the papers hadn't caught up.”
“They had.”
“I know.”
The landlord's letter explained the urgency. The shop was twelve days from a lockout when Sloane secured the advance. I could see why Mom had been frightened. I could also see the women who had worked there late into the evenings, leaving home to repair dresses for people whose celebrations cost more than their annual rent.
Celia Grant stood and put on her coat. “I don't want your apology today. I want my pattern back.”
“I'll help,” Mom said.
“You've already helped somebody.” Celia left before anyone could answer.
I followed her into the corridor. The building smelled of floor wax and cafeteria coffee. She was wiping her eyes angrily with a tissue.
“I wasn't trying to make your wedding about me,” she said.
“You didn't.”
“I was going to use the pictures of that border to get commissions. I showed my sister the sketch, told her maybe I could start earning something on the side. Now I'm supposed to compete with a chain that thinks it owns it.”
I leaned against the wall. “I keep thinking if I'd never asked everyone to make the dress—”
“Don't do that. We made it because we wanted to. The wrong thing happened after.” She put the tissue in her pocket. “You don't get to take the blame just because you're easier to be angry at.”
Back inside, Maya was explaining that a copyright claim over lace could involve the original drawings, separable surface designs, who created which portions, and the terms of any genuine agreement. There was no magic sentence that would fix the damage. We had good records; we didn't yet have every record.
Odessa made coffee. I helped, partly because my hands needed something useful to do. She handed me a mug and asked whether I remembered the first blouse I'd altered without supervision.
“The one I shortened crooked?”
“The one you shortened twice because you were embarrassed to tell the customer you got it wrong. You spent six hours on a job that should've taken one.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Being ashamed doesn't turn a mistake into an obligation to keep making it. Your mother needs to hear that. So does your sister. Maybe so do you.”
At three, Maya called Wynn Retail's counsel. She requested that the design launch and any further production be paused while the provenance was reviewed. The lawyer wouldn't agree on the phone, but he did agree to receive copies of the conflicting releases and respond in writing.
Mom waited until everybody else had gone before asking to speak with me. We sat on opposite sides of the cutting table, the way we had when she taught me how to set sleeves.
“Sloane said she could make the brand big enough to take care of us,” she said. “I thought if I questioned her, it meant I didn't believe in her.”
“Believing in somebody doesn't mean signing whatever they put in front of you.”
“I see that now.”
“What else haven't you told me?”
She took an envelope from the bottom of the box. Inside was the signed authorization she'd given Sloane to use our shop's digital pattern archive. At the bottom, next to her signature, someone had added a handwritten note: INCLUDE MARA'S BRIDAL FILE—ORIGINALS AND REVISIONS.
“That isn't my handwriting,” Mom said.
I knew whose it was. Sloane wrote her capital M like two sharp mountain peaks, a flourish I'd seen on every birthday card she'd ever sent me.
May you like
The bridal file had been scanned at the family shop eleven weeks before the wedding. It contained Odessa's border, Kiki's new curve, and my final revisions.
My mother hadn't just signed away work that wasn't hers. She had given my sister the key to the room where all of it was stored.
