Free Dead is the New Black by Christine DeMaio-Rice Page B

and spend her days in front of the building keeping R.J. Reynolds in business. She seemed to have zero territorial instinct, yet Laura didn’t want to take that as permission to use her contact with Jeremy as a reason to make the designer feel as though a patternmaker was co-opting her department. She had to assume it could all backfire, and Jeremy could return to the office to find Laura sitting at her table in a chicken suit.
    That wouldn’t do. It didn’t matter that Jeremy was out of her league on the one hand, and homosexual on the other. She would not be humiliated. Period.
    Laura met her mother out front at nine fifteen and took her into the elevator.
    Mom carried a burlap bag full of crochet needles. “I didn’t know what size needle you needed, so I brought all of them.” She opened her bag, revealing needles as thin as wires and as thick as Sharpies, and everything in between.
    “You’ll need a few. We’re going multi-gauge.”
    As soon as the elevator doors opened, she felt something different in the office. Renee’s smile didn’t glow. The halls were empty. The music that usually drifted in from the showroom was silent. As she approached her table, the prep for the fitting was in full swing. Seventeen models were coming to have their garments pinned, tucked, and re-sewn so they flowed like magic on the runway. Usually, Jeremy and Carmella would redesign, add, drop, and change until everything looked perfect. They would accessorize and coordinate into the night. The prep, which included measuring the garments, sewing up the last of them, organizing outfits by model, and sundry yelling and screaming, was usually loud and vibrant. Today, it seemed as though the air had gone from the balloon. It was going to be a disaster.
    No one said hello. No one noticed she was about two hours later than usual. No one mentioned the matte jersey group. They just hunched like monks over an illuminated manuscript. Laura checked to make sure she wasn’t wearing a chicken suit. She led Mom to a chair and showed her the crochet graphs, keeping her voice lower than usual for reasons she only intuited. She nodded and asked questions. Anyone else would have panicked. Their freelance sweater technician had drawn a graph so complex it required four different sizes of grid paper and more stitches than most people had learned in a lifetime. Mom, though in her sixties, still had a nimble mind and fingers. Each box in the grid had an “X,” a slash or a dot, which denoted the direction of the yarn and the needle. She knew where to interpret the graph literally, and where to let complexity go. She got the idea , and Laura knew she could hand her the yarns and the beads and get to work without worrying that she would have nothing to show Jeremy the next day.
    Then, she heard it. A bellow. A raging roar like a cornered lion.
    “Why is this on a scrap of paper?!”
    Laura looked up. No one else moved except to put their noses further into their work. Carmella measured a pocket as if she were splitting an atom. Laura threw an eraser at her.
    The initial roar was followed by another. “Who keeps books like this? God damn it .”
    Carmella glanced up, and Laura put her palms up in a gesture that said, Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?
    Carmella grabbed a sample and draped it over Laura’s dress form. They pinned it together, and unpinned and repinned as they talked.
    “It’s her husband, Sheldon Pomerantz. There are seven people in the office, and they’re going through all the business papers.” Carmella looked over the mannequin’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “He’s quite pissed off. I saw some jobs for you in the paper this morning. Nothing for me.”
    “I don’t want another job. I want to do the show, and I want Jeremy to come back.”
    As if in answer, Sheldon burst in—fuzzy hair, skin starting to give in to gravity, two-piece, double-vented suit held up by pure, white-hot, lawyerly rage. Nine years