Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [8]
“Huh, big spender,” she said, hanging up on my laughter.
Next I called Elvia at the bookstore and told her about Sam and Bliss.
“Did you take Gabe’s gun away before telling him?” she asked, not entirely kidding.
“Tell him what?” I heard my cousin Emory’s voice in the background.
“What’s that low-life journalist doing there so early in the morning?” I asked. She’d been dating my cousin, Emory, a writer for the San Celina Telegram-Tribune, for almost a year now. He’d moved to California last year from Sugartree, Arkansas, to wine and dine her, and apparently that’s all that has taken place. We’d certainly been counting on attending a wedding soon, but we’d hoped it would be Emory and Elvia’s. Emory was crazy in love with my best friend, and I was pretty sure she loved him, too. It was getting her to admit it that was the horsefly in the liniment.
“He’s trying to tempt me with almond scones,” she said.
“Is it working?” I asked hopefully.
“We’ll see. So, how about lunch?”
“Noon at Liddie’s. Bring the journalist if you want.”
“So he can pay?” Elvia asked, laughing.
“Of course, what else is he good for?”
Emory’s voice came on the line. “What’s going on, ladies ? My ears are positively flaming.”
“You fill him in, Elvia,” I said. “I’ll see you both at noon.”
I’d finally settled down to my paperwork and was composing yet another grant request when JJ Brown, one of the newest additions to our artists’ co-op, knocked on my door frame.
“Got a minute, Benni?”
I glanced up from my new laptop computer, grateful for the interruption. “Sure,” I said, gesturing to the black vinyl and metal visitor’s chair across from my desk. “I’ve been fiddling with the line spacing on this blasted thing for fifteen minutes and am about ready to toss it in the trash and sharpen a pencil. Any interesting diversion is definitely appreciated.”
She grimaced at the gray plastic machine on my desk. “I am the original technophobe. I’m determined to be the only person in my age group who never learns to use a computer.”
“Right now I know how you feel. So, what can I do for you?”
She settled back in the chair and gazed at me thoughtfully. JJ was a welcome, though sometimes controversial addition to the group of forty or so rotating artists who belonged to the co-op sponsored by the folk art museum. In the three months she’d belonged to the co-op, her hair color had changed no less than four times. She was fond of East Indian—style skirts, sixties’ bell-bottoms, and belted, rayon dresses that I vaguely remember my elementary schoolteachers wearing. Of course, on JJ they looked decidedly funkier when you added her spiky, fluctuating hair, her blue, green, or black nail polish, and the fake rhinestone beauty marks she placed in surprising spots on her body. Some of the more conservative co-op members found her off-putting at first, but her gentle sense of humor, her generosity and willingness to work, not to mention the beautiful and exacting details of her hand-sewn storytelling crazy quilts quickly changed people’s minds. Her true gratitude for being included as a co-op member touched me and immediately made me like her.
“Can I close the door?” she asked.
I nodded and settled back in my chair. This sounded serious. I hoped that someone hadn’t really hurt her feelings and she was going to leave the co-op. We needed our younger artists to keep the co-op from becoming too set in its ways. Her unusual crazy quilts had caused quite a controversy in craft circles. Rejecting the traditional silks and velveteens of most crazy quilts, she used a combination of vintage and modern fabrics, conversation prints, leather, bones, and antique buttons to create a modern crazy quilt that defied even the controversial pattern itself. Each of her creations carried a theme celebrating life’s most important moments—birth, first day of school, marriage, divorce, death—and were starting to get noticed by certain parts of professional craft circles. All it took for an artist was to be “discovered” by a respected, well-connected folk art collector,