He held up the fabric, which I could now see was a long black dress. “My daughter has a band concert tomorrow night, and she just now told me that the dress has to be hemmed. I was wondering if any of you ladies knew how to sew.”
A beat passed, and then another. Rachel, Abi, and I locked eyes, thinking about the set of curtains we’d attempted to hem on Rachel’s mom’s sewing machine. Too bad A-line curtains with jumbles of thread weren’t in fashion. Rachel giggled first. Then Abi gave a hearty chuckle, and I could hold in my own laughter no longer.
“Okay, then,” he said stiffly. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”
He turned on his heel and walked off.
“Now we’ve done it,” Abi said. “Vivian, go after him.”
“Why Vivian?” asked Rachel.
“Because she’s the one who figures out how to do stuff for her videos,” Abi said. “She probably needs to earn her Help a Neighbor Badge or something.”
I stopped to preen for a minute. I was the one who figured things out. Yeah. I liked that description.
“Earth to Vivian! You’d better run after him, because you know we’ve hurt his feelings.”
I did as I was told.
“Parker, wait,” I said breathlessly as I ran to catch up with him and his tall, irritated man strides. “We didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then how exactly did you mean it?” His voice held annoyance but I could tell he was keeping it in check. Some men—like my husband, Mitch—probably would’ve yelled at us. I appreciated that Parker wasn’t that type.
“Last week, we accidentally messed up some curtains we were trying to sew,” I said. “We were really laughing at ourselves.”
He took a step backward. He didn’t quite believe me.
But he sure did look pretty facing a Georgia sunset, his whiskey-brown eyes crinkled in a squint and his skin aglow.
“Well, if that’s it, then I guess I’d better figure out a way to do this,” he said.
“Hem tape,” I blurted.
“What’s that?”
“I ended up using it to create a hem for those curtains once it was clear I couldn’t sew them. It could probably be used to hem a dress.”
Parker exhaled, his shoulders sagging with relief. “Where can I find some of that?”
“You’re in luck. I have plenty because it comes in a big roll. Do you have an iron?”
His shoulders inched up, and panic flashed in his eyes. “I think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well, we haven’t finished unpacking.”
How could he not at least remember whether he’d packed an iron?
“How about I loan you my iron and hem tape if you let me make a video of you while you hem the dress?”
“I don’t know,” he said, obviously not wanting to be recorded any more than Abi did.
“It’s just my own YouTube channel. I don’t even have that many viewers,” I said.
They were dedicated viewers, mind you, but I wasn’t lying. It wasn’t as though I had a million people watching my videos.
He smiled. “I guess I really don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
