CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HAMPTON
“HI, AND THANKS FOR CALLING The Perfect Fit! Nobody’s available to take your call right now. If you are calling to inquire about an in-progress alteration job and don’t need to speak to a human, enter the six-digit order number on your receipt for an update. If you need personal assistance or would like to speak with Stacy, please leave your message after the tone. Thanks for calling The Perfect Fit and have a wonderful day.”
I hang up. I know she has caller ID on her shop’s landline, and I know she’s letting my calls go to voicemail. When she refused to pick up on her cell, I started calling this number. She answered once, shut me down, and hasn’t answered since. No tailor is closed or unavailable this often, during these rather typical business hours.
The conference room door opens. Nicholas sticks his head out, surprised to see me in the foyer. “I thought you’d run for coffee.”
“Just needed to make a call.”
“Well, whenever you’re ready. We can’t do much without you.”
He ducks back in. I look at my phone. I consider many methods of evasion and subterfuge. I could borrow someone else’s phone to call her, so she’ll pick up. I could go there in person. Hell, I could call her parents and ask them to put her on the phone if I wanted to. There are a million ways to hear her voice live, but they all seem so pointless. I’ve left message after message, from long and explanatory to short. She doesn’t want to talk. I could try to force myself, but I’ll only get the same result.
I remember the way Stacy looked at my torn blazer before she knew I was a bastard. I remember the slight smile and sympathetic tone that annoyed me so much. A big city tailor wouldn’t look at a rip in that way. He’d tsk and shake his head, probably chide me for being so careless. Then he’d fix the rip and charge me a ton.
But Stacy hadn’t done that. She’d eyed my blazer with something like sympathy. Like she felt sorry for the garment, and maybe for me. Her eyes had said, I’m a nice person; I promise to take good care of it for you; everything will be fine. I’d been so annoyed— by Carlo and his folksy manner, by the languid pace of Williamsville — that I’d found her sympathy obnoxious. I didn’t want some air-headed tailor in a backward town feeling sorry for me at all.
I hear that energy now, in the voice Stacy uses to greet her customers.
Thanks for calling The Perfect Fit and have a wonderful day.
Nobody talks like that and means it. Not in my world. Only in places like Williamsville, where progress moves backward, and Norman Rockwell would feel perfectly at home.
I raise the phone again. My finger is hovering when Gloria peeks out.
“Hampton, you coming?”
I sigh. “Yes. Sorry.”
Inside the room is my usual board, minus Mateo. He’s in Colorado again, still banging his head against his mountain deal. I guess he’s having trouble getting the old guy to sell, now that the daughter is sticking her face into the whole affair. I don’t want to know this, and don’t care. But I know because Mateo is flying me out there on Friday. Again.
“Hampton?” Gloria asks.
“I’m coming.”
“You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t believe me. Gloria glances back into the room, then again at me. I know what she’s about to propose. She’s going to suggest we reschedule the Pillar meeting because I look like shit — something I inadvertently verified when I ran to the restroom and saw the hollow-eyed ghoul staring back at me.
But I don’t want to reschedule. I just bought a giant building that’s not going to renovate itself, and until it’s cleared out and spiffed up, we can’t build out the Pillar Collection. Which I am, honestly, no longer interested in. I just want to make cheap, stupid, night-out clothes for teens and twenty-somethings. I want to pollute and choke landfills with rayon. I want to create trivial things of fleeting value. The last thing I want is to find care to put into sturdy stitches, to have a quality assurance team that actually cares about quality.
I’m not built for this business, and I no longer know anyone who is. Without Stacy to run the Pillar Collection, I’m lost. More than once, I’ve thought about burning it all. Letting the idea lie fallow, never bothering to so much as hammer a nail at the Williamsville plant. It’s not that the idea doesn’t have potential. It has a ton. It’s that every time I think about the Pillar Collection these days, I immediately want to think about something else. Anything else.
“Seriously, Hampton. Are you feeling all right?”
I mean to nod, but my head shakes instead.
“No,” I say. “But let’s get this over with anyway.”