For the first time, it fully hit Gia how much her lie would affect other people. She’d told it for a noble reason, but standing here, in the face of Anna’s overwhelming joy at her brother’s engagement, her lie smacked her like a sucker punch.
There were consequences to her falsehood. Consequences she hadn’t foreseen. It wasn’t just an innocent lie. Other people were going to get hurt.
Ashamed of herself, she met Mike’s eyes and his steadfast gaze of support was the only thing that kept her from coming clean.
Chapter Eleven
Shelley
SELF-BINDING: Using backing fabric as binding, rather than attaching a separate binding strip.
TO PACE THEMSELVES for the long haul, the three sisters divided their days into thirds. Or more accurately, Madison divided their days up into thirds and Shelley and Gia just fell in line like always.
Madison even made a spreadsheet and gave them all copies, just in case spontaneity broke out and it had to be wrangled into submission.
Excel, oh ye purview of the anal retentive, Shelley thought but did not say.
After leaving eight hours for sleeping, and one hour for transitions, Madison sliced up their schedule thusly. From seven A.M. to noon, they would rotate who sat at Grammy’s bedside. The twenty-six members of the Quilting Divas would fill in on the afternoon and evening shifts. Darynda—who was only partially committed to Maddie’s rigorous schedule because of her age—would take Wednesdays. Of the remaining six days, they each took two days apiece. Shelley ended up with Thursdays and Sundays. The two sisters who weren’t sitting at Grammy’s bedside would then run errands and cook breakfast and lunch for the sister who was on hospital duty.
The tight schedule was possible because none of them currently had jobs getting in the way. Madison’s show was going on hiatus, and Gia had temporarily closed the kite shop and sublet her kiosk to Mike.
That meant the parlor—aka the TV room—was now kite central, with Gia’s inventory hanging all around the room. Until they got the renovations finished there’d be no guests anyway and no time for TV watching. Shelley had been without a TV for five years, so that was no sacrifice. As far as a job? Shelley’s employment prospects were bleaker than February in Alaska, but she couldn’t worry about that now.
From noon until five P.M. they would work on renovating the Victorian. Each day, they’d take turns cooking dinner, one of them breaking off from the renovations at four for food prep. Then, from 5:30 to 10:30 P.M. they would all quilt.
Shelley added her own personal time to the schedule, sleeping only six hours and getting up at 4:30 A.M. as she had at Cobalt Soul for yoga, meditation, and a run on the beach. Maintaining her daily practice kept Shelley grounded and sane. Especially in the face of Madison’s control-freakishness.
On Thursday, May 21, three days after she’d come home, Shelley slipped into her grandmother’s hospital room with ten different colors of fingernail polish tucked in her tote. When she was small, she loved playing beauty shop, and Grammy had good-naturedly been Shelley’s guinea pig.
“Look what I brought, Gram-Gram,” Shelley said, calling her by the nickname only she used.
She fished the bottles of nail polish from her tote and settled them on the blanket at Grammy’s feet. Once upon a time she had rocked mani-pedis, going for interesting colors and intricate designs, back before The Incident with Raoul and that whole shit show.
Which was why she was in possession of so many bottles of polish. She’d found them where she’d left them, stored far back in the extra fridge Grammy kept in the garage.
“All the colors of the rainbow. Let’s hope some of them are still good. I brought polish remover to thin them down, if need be, to get them flowing again.”
She grabbed the chair, recently vacated by one of the Quilting Divas who’d spent the night—those Divas were the bomb-diggity—moving it from the side of the bed to the foot. Shelley plopped down and folded the covers back to expose Grammy’s toes. Clicked her tongue, tsk, tsk.
“Girlfriend, you are in serious need of a pedi.” Shelley put a pillow under her grandmother’s right foot to elevate it, then got out cotton balls to wedge between Grammy’s stiff toes.
“Not that I can talk.” Shelley stared down at her own bare fingernails. “But don’t worry. I’ve got you covered.” She picked up a bright red polish, Essie, Forever Yummy. “What an optimistic name. Me likey. Let’s use that for