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the soft old sofas spread with crazy quilts and velvet throws; in the round Moroccan leather coffee table covered with the most interesting things, eight little boxes that fit inside each other, a silver dagger, a filigree vase full of peacock feathers. And always, swirls of smoke—for many of the ladies who came here did not smoke in public, or even at home—and always, music from Mama’s hi-fi. Though Alice Holding could glance at a dress and reproduce it exactly without a pattern, Harriet was sure that her ladies came to Mama as much for the atmosphere and the conversation as for her considerable dressmaking skills. Surely these ladies had needed a refuge, a little escape from the inexorable demands of their station.
    Stories floated back and forth through the magic air of the sewing shop like the dissolving ribbons of smoke, weaving in and out of themselves, until it was almost impossible to distinguish one from another.
Oh, he did not! Oh, she did not! Well, what in the world did you do then, honey?
Harriet loved to fall asleep wrapped in the mink coat on the love seat with the soft murmur of stories in her ear. She loved to sit on the Oriental rug in the corner playing Old Maid with Jill or reading to her from the Nancy Drew books they both adored.Harriet loved Nancy’s friends—boyish George Fayne, prissy Bess Marvin—and most of all Nancy herself, energetic and brash and smart, able to solve
any
mystery.
    For they lived with mystery there in the sewing shop—didn’t they have any grandparents, for instance? Children in books always had doting grandparents.
“Oh, please,”
Alice said when Harriet badgered her about it. And who was Harriet’s father anyway? Alice was maddeningly mum on this subject, too, though she once said under duress that he was a Yankee sailor she’d met at Virginia Beach. And where was he now? “Gone with the wind,” Alice said. “Ha!” Another time she called Harriet a “love child.” Harriet liked this phrase as much as “joy of my heart” and said it over and over in her mind: love child love child love child. I am a love child. Though, judging by the mirror, it did not seem likely. Could a love child be so thin and pale and earnest? Rose Red, for instance, in the Snow White and Rose Red book, looked more like a love child than Snow White.
    In contrast to Harriet, everybody knew who her sister Jill’s father was, for he had actually married Alice. Hal Ramsey blew into the sewing shop like a big wind, stirring things up, turning their lives upside down. Harriet adored him. Hal Ramsey was a rangy man with a gap-toothed grin and an engaging way of cocking his head when he was talking to you, listening hard, as if what you had to say was terribly important. Harriet was five years old when he first showed up to service Alice’s sewing machine. He knocked on the door in early September and didn’t leave until right before Christmas. That Christmas, Alice cried and cried and didn’t buy Harriet any presents, so some of her ladies pitched in and gave Harriet a drawing kit, a stationery set, some ugly new oxfords, and a beautiful Barbie bride doll.
    They brought Alice some nerve pills.
    Then in February, Hal Ramsey showed up in a brand-new red car, announcing to one and all that he’d come back to marry Mama. Twodays later, it was done. Alice’s ladies threw a big party for them at the country club. “Now,” they said, “she’ll settle down and that poor little girl will have a daddy.”
    This was the best part of Harriet’s early childhood, when her mama and Hal were married and he was not on the road. His route covered sixteen counties, but when he was home, Alice cooked pot roasts and Hal Ramsey played his guitar in the kitchen and they drank something called Long Island iced tea and laughed a lot. When he was gone, Alice stood looking out the shop door and smoking a