Anything for Her(10)

“Oh, yeah. When I peel off my goggles, I look like a raccoon.” He paused. “Sean begs for the chance to sweep my workshop floor.”

“Because he wants to work in stone?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know yet. I suspect the big power tools are the appeal for a kid his age. Plus...” He thought better of what he’d been going to say.

Turned out he didn’t have to say it.

“He’s trying to please you,” Allie said, echoing his thought from yesterday, and he saw that her gaze had turned inward. “After my parents divorced and I realized Mom was all I had, I went through a phase like that. I was too old to let myself be clingy, but...” Her sigh sounded sad. “I suppose I tried to be as much like her as possible. If that makes sense.”

It did make sense, but disturbed him, too. Had her father completely abandoned his family? Nolan reminded himself this was an old hurt for her, but it didn’t feel that way to him. It spurred him to want to protect her from something he couldn’t.

“How old were you?”

Her eyes focused on his. “Seventeen.” She grimaced. “I should have been pulling away and instead I had this weird regression. Oh, well.” She gave herself a small shake. “It’s natural, I guess.”

“Maybe,” he said, but wasn’t convinced. Regression happened to kids when they underwent trauma, from what he’d read, not your average, everyday divorce.

“Your mom into quilting?”

Allie laughed. “Heavens, no! She doesn’t even sew, except for the most basic mending. It was my grandmother who originally taught me to sew. She didn’t quilt, but she tatted.”

“Tatted?” he echoed, mystified.

“It’s another fiber art, I guess you could say. Doilies are tatted. You know, those lacy white things old ladies used to like to put on the arms of sofas. Well, Nanna made snowflakes for the Christmas tree. When she was done, she’d starch them so they were stiff.” Allie’s voice had become softer and softer. “They were so delicate. So beautiful.”

There was an odd sort of hushed silence. Nolan pictured those snowflakes, a bit like the paper ones every school child cut out of paper but far prettier. He bet no two were alike. He hoped Allie had been able to keep some of those snowflakes for her Christmas trees, but he had a bad feeling she hadn’t. There was something in her voice that told him this memory was both precious and painful.

“Your grandmother gone?” he asked.

Oh, yes. There was definitely pain in her eyes. “Gone? Yes. A long time ago.” After a moment she said, “Anyway, when I was in high school, we were required to complete a volunteer project.”

He nodded. Lots of high schools did that now.

“I ended up making quilts—really comforters, because they were tied rather than quilted—for preemies in the hospital. I only did a couple of tied ones, though, because when I went to the fabric store to pick out materials, a quilting class was going on. The instructor was teaching about the almost unlimited variations on a nine-patch block.”

Greek to him, but he nodded. He liked to hear her talk about what she did.

“I fell in love,” she said simply, then laughed. “It was like having a crush on the geekiest guy in school, the one with zits and knock-knees. I did not tell my friends that instead of going to the mall with them, I was dying to rush home and sew a few blocks of my Churn Dash quilt. I discovered eventually that it wasn’t only an old-lady hobby, but at the time I was painfully self-conscious.”

“I didn’t tell the guys in high school that I liked to play with rocks, either.”

They smiled at each other, and it was like the first time he’d met her eyes. She’d grabbed him and wasn’t letting go. He couldn’t have looked away if someone had yelled, “Fire!” The gold in her eyes seemed to intensify, like sparks. Or real gold. The lines of her face were pure and clean and elegant. He couldn’t have sculpted anything more beautiful. But it wasn’t only about her looks anymore; it was as if he’d cut a piece of granite, expecting beauty and finding something inside that he knew he’d never find again in this lifetime.

“I’ve...really had a good time tonight,” she said softly, as though her thoughts had paralleled his.

“Yeah.” He had to clear the roughness from his throat. “Me, too.” Wait and call her tomorrow? The next day? That was probably the polite thing to do, but a sense of urgency wouldn’t let him be that patient. “Can we do this again? Soon?”