The Seamstress and The Billionaire

Thread by Thread: The Car Engine

In the morning she called the repair man, a Mr. Gideon Pruitt who operated out of a shed behind his house on Lavender Lane and who answered the phone on the sixth ring with the energy of a man who had not yet decided if the day was worth engaging with.

"Machine's seized," Callie told him. "Singer, older model. Twenty two years old."

"Bring it in," he said. "I'll look at it Thursday."

"I need it back by Saturday at the latest."

A pause. "I'll look at it Thursday," he said again, and hung up.

Earl drove the machine over to Gideon Pruitt's shed on Thursday morning in the truck bed wrapped in a moving blanket. Callie stood in the driveway watching them go and then went inside and hand stitched for six hours straight. Her fingers ached by early afternoon but the work was good and she was surprised by how much ground she could cover with a needle, thread and enough stubbornness.

Gideon Pruitt called on Friday evening.

"It's the motor coupling," he said. "And the tension assembly's stripped. I can fix the coupling. The tension assembly I'd need to order a part for and that's going to be two weeks minimum."

Callie closed her eyes. "How much for just the coupling?"

"Thirty five dollars."

Thirty five dollars she did not have spare. "Can you have it ready Saturday morning?"

"I can have it ready Saturday afternoon."

"Morning would help me more."

A long pause. "Eleven o'clock."

"Thank you Mr. Pruitt."

She worked by hand every evening until the machine came back on Saturday at eleven fifteen and then she worked at the machine until her vision started to blur. The tension assembly issue meant she had to manually regulate the thread tension on every seam, which added time she did not have to every step. She adapted. She had no choice but to adapt.

What she did not know, and would not find out until later, was that across town Victoria Whitfield was working on her competition entry in a room that had been professionally converted into a design studio, with a commercial grade sewing machine that Margaret Whitfield had ordered from a specialty supplier in New Harlow. Victoria also had a design consultant, a woman named Diane who drove in from the next town over twice a week to advise and assist. Callie found this out from Arabella who found it out from a girl who cleaned for the Whitfields on the days Callie was not there.

She filed that information away and kept working.

The second phase deadline brought the first real gut punch.

The competition was structured in three phases. Phase One, due November thirtieth, was the completed garment submission. Phase Two, scheduled for December fourteenth, was a live presentation before a panel of judges in which participants had to speak to their design choices, demonstrate construction quality and answer technical questions. Phase Three, the final runway presentation, was set for December twenty first, the longest night of the year, at the Holt Farms main event barn which Beaumont Holt had apparently had renovated for the occasion.

Callie read the Phase Two requirements on the competition update sheet that had been mailed to all participants and felt the particular feeling of a challenge expanding in ways you had not anticipated.

She had never presented formally. She had never stood in front of a panel of judges and spoken about her work. She knew her design inside and out but knowing something and articulating it under pressure in front of people who were looking for reasons to eliminate you were two entirely different skills.

She started practicing in the bathroom mirror at night after her shower. She stood in front of the cracked mirror above the sink and talked through her design the way she imagined she would have to on December fourteenth. She explained the construction decisions. She explained the concept behind the leather closure at the back and the paneled skirt and the collar construction. She said it out loud until the words stopped feeling foreign in her mouth.

Elise caught her doing it one night and stood in the hallway listening for a full minute before Callie noticed her.

"You sounded good," Elise said seriously.

"Go to bed," Callie said.

"You did though."

It was the first week of November and nine days before the Phase One submission deadline when Callie came into work at the Whitfield house on a Monday morning and found Margaret and Gerald Whitfield having breakfast on the back patio with a guest. She was moving through the kitchen quietly with her cleaning caddy when she heard Gerald's voice carry through the open patio door with the particular carrying quality of a man who never lowered his voice because he had never needed to.

"Beaumont's been a friend of mine for thirty years," Gerald was saying. "The competition is a wonderful gesture. Very generous."

"Victoria has submitted a beautiful piece," Margaret said. "Diane has been extraordinary with her."

"I'm sure she'll do wonderfully," the guest said.

"She will," Gerald said. "Half these other entrants have no business being there if we're honest. A couple of them work the service circuit. You can imagine the quality of what they're presenting."

A pause. Then Margaret's voice, lighter and more careful but carrying the same weight underneath it: "One of them actually works for us. Our Monday girl."

A brief silence.

"Well," the guest said.

"Exactly," said Gerald, and then he laughed in the way that people laughed when something was not funny but was instead simply dismissive.

Callie stood in the kitchen with her hand on the counter and her cleaning caddy at her feet. She stood there for three full seconds. Then she picked up her caddy, moved to the far side of the kitchen and began wiping down the cabinet fronts in long slow strokes.

She did not make a sound.

She finished her shift at two in the afternoon, let herself out the front door and walked down the Whitfield driveway with the gravel crunching under her shoes and the oak trees standing on either side of her and the November sky pressing down flat and grey overhead. She walked to the end of the driveway and turned onto the road and kept walking for a little while before she stopped.

She pressed her fingers against her eyes.

Then she straightened up and started walking toward the bus stop.

She had work to do.

November thirtieth arrived the way deadlines always did, both slower and faster than expected. The morning of the submission day Callie was up before five. The garment was finished. She had completed the final hand stitching on the leather collar the night before at twelve twenty in the morning and held it up under the kitchen light and turned it slowly and looked at every seam and every edge and every detail and found nothing she would change. It was the best thing she had ever made. She knew that with a certainty that had nothing to do with arrogance and everything to do with the forty three days she had poured into it.

She dressed it carefully on the wire form Arabella had borrowed from the school drama department and covered it in a garment bag made from an old bedsheet she had sewn into shape. She set it by the front door the night before so it would be ready.

The submission window was ten in the morning until two in the afternoon at the Holt Farms event barn on Route 12.

At eight forty five in the morning Callie went to the kitchen, drank half a cup of coffee and ate a piece of toast standing up. At nine fifteen she went to the front door to carry the garment to the truck.

The truck would not start.

Earl turned the key three times. The engine coughed on the second attempt and then gave nothing on the third. He got out, lifted the hood, looked at the engine with the focused expression of a man trying to will a machine into cooperation, and then lowered the hood slowly.

"Battery," he said.

Callie looked at her phone. Nine twenty.

"How long to get it jumped?" she asked.

"I'd need to call Danny Reeves. He's probably out on his route until ten."

Ten o'clock. The submission window opened at ten. The Holt Farms event barn was four miles away. She did not have money for a cab and there was only one cab service in Clover Ridge and it was run by a man named Curtis who was reliable about forty percent of the time.

"Call Danny," she said. "I'm taking the bus."

Earl started to say something.

"Daddy," she said quietly. "Call Danny."