had always claimed that was what made them safer--all those eyes.
But Idalie knew her neighbors would wave or say hello. Was there someone new to the block who stood back from the glass above and was watching her? She shook off her uneasiness and went inside, walked up a few more stairs to the small kitchen, where she kept the stove lit when she wasn't at work to help with drying the fabric. This was December.
Her trims and ribbons and braid were laying out on the tabletop next a small scrub brush and a tin of cleaning fluid. She examined them all closely for even the smallest fleck of dirt. All of them were clean, and it only took her three days of washings, two days of drying, and a few evenings of scrubbing the trim pieces with cleaning fluid, and a day to air out. Even the precious curly beaver was no longer crusted with dirt--dirt in the form of a large shoe imprint.
She moved all those precious pieces aside and pulled out her sewing basket and a newspaper, theTribune, from three days before. The Trib was where she had read about Edward Lowell-- speaking of shoe imprints--the youngest Man of the Year in the history of the award. His handsome face had caught her attention and stared back at her from the newspaper page, a Wunderkind, her mother would have called him. Silly girl, she had dreamed of him that night after she read the newspaper article.
Then just a few weeks later find herself laying on top of him in a dirt construction lot was even more startling. He had haunted her thoughts these past days, annoyingly, she thought as she slipped her pincushion onto her wrist and jabbed a few pins into it. She wasn't happy that she couldn't shake off the image of the man who had tackled her like one of her ruffian cousins. She knew what a tackle was.
Both she and Jo had taken the brunt of an array of childhood exuberance favored by their Everdeane and Bloedel male counterparts. All that strong German blood went a little wild when out of doors or worse, when playing a game or sport. There were seventeen cousins in all, with only a six year total age span separating them, and many of them were still living upstate. Jo had given Bertie, the eldest Bloedel, a black eye three times in one summer, once--the best one--with a baseball she'd batted square into his eye. The Everdeane girls had held their own.
Idalie smiled, but her throat felt tight. Not a day went by that she didn't miss her beautiful sister terribly. Jo, who could make her so angry and so happy, who knew what she was thinking by the look in her eye, knew Idalie's dreams as well as her own, and because she was older, Jo had been Idalie's courage--the one to lead her younger sister right where she knew she wanted to--or perhaps needed to--be.
Yes, it had been Jo who had given her the courage to come to New York, challenging her when her fears threatened her dreams, then dragged her about the bustling city, making the crowds and traffic seem natural, the energy in the air exciting, and showing her the possibilities that were as vast as the city itself. Jo had ultimately lead her to this little place she'd found by "sheer luck"--a tiny house on a lot merely fifteen feet wide, squished in between four-story brick buildings of apartments, each with a new electrical lighting and an unheard of five hundred square feet of living space. The woman who owned the house, Mrs. Haseloff, had eight hundred square feet, by golly, and had stubbornly refused to sell or to be bested by new the apartments whose existence she despised. However, not to be outdone, she had added her own electrical wires, a new-fangled tangle of black lines on stick poles above the small rear patch of dirt, so her little house with its narrow lot and no elbow room would shine from within like those hideous apartments, with their ugly windows and painted doors, trying to shoulder her out of the neighborhood.
Jo had eventually bought the house. That was Jo. She had convinced the woman to sell, fast becoming a trusted friend after Mrs. Haseloff discovered the Everdeane girls' mother was a Bloedel from Dresden. So when none of the developer scions of the city with their huge offers and slick manners could