Page 31 of Ten Christmases Without You
She frowned. “Yeah, but not seriously. They were just little doodles.”
“When we went to the pool when we were young, you would sit with your snack at the table under the umbrella and draw dresses like your mom’s, dripping wet from swimming, wrapped in a towel.”
“I’d forgotten about that. How did you remember?”
“Because your drawings fascinated me. I wished I had the talent you had.”
She met his gaze. “You never mentioned that.”
He shrugged and took a drink from his bottle. Then he waggled a finger at her open notebook. “Let’s see what you can do. Show off for me.”
With a steadying breath, Emmy picked up her pencil. The emptiness of the page cried out for shape and form, but an invisible barbed wire fence of fear encircled it. She hadn’t drawn to this scale in front of anyone before, and she worried about being compared to her mother. After all, the drawings were right there; surely Emmy’s shortcomings would be evident.
She was certain her mother had flaws, but Emmy never saw any. And as she matured, she was compared to her mom, but she never felt like she could live up to her mother’s high standard. So through high school, Emmy had set incredibly high goals for herself that she couldn’t meet—her own self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. The belief took hold that she would always be too flawed to be as successful as the one woman she held in high regard, and she’d never been able to shake it. Over the years,she’d tried to make sense of her feelings, knowing that she put a lot of pressure on herself, but her own criticism had become her inner voice.
She looked up at Charlie. His lips were drawn just slightly upward, his interest clear.
With a deep breath, she dragged her pencil down the page. She mapped out a similar silhouette, accentuating the hourglass figure like her mother had done.
“You said you have a PR job?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.”
“Have you ever considered design?”
She frowned. “No. Drawing designs is all I really know how to do. And it’s always been this private thing I had with my mom. I’d hate to taint it.” She stopped drawing. “You know how work is—the day in and day out can suck the life out of anything.” She dared not admit that doing it every day would remind her of the colossal hole caused by her mother’s passing. Designing would be too painful. As it was, she had to be in the right mindset to draw, and sometimes even sketching was too distressful.
“Yeah, I get it.”
She went back to drawing and sketched the long, slender limbs of the woman and then, from the waist, she completed a skirt that fanned out the way her mom’s had, but she shortened it a bit to make it more current.
“I do love designing dresses particularly. I sometimes wonder if I could ever get tired of it.”
“Design a formal line,” he suggested.
She lengthened the quarter-length sleeves and added a ruffle. The square retro neckline needed a slight change as well, so she widened it off the shoulder. “I rarely even wear dresses, but I’m obsessed with them. I note their hemming and seams…” She looked back up at him. “There’s this second-hand shop near me called The Garnet & Petticoat. It has a dark green dress in theshop window that I can’t seem to let go of. I even went in and looked at it.”
He grinned. “Was it your size?”
“It looked as though it would fit like a charm.”
“Maybe it was meant for you then,” he said.
“It’s an extravagance I don’t need, but I did look inside to see if it was one of Mom’s. I’m always hoping there are other dresses out there.”
“Why?”
“I suppose I just can’t come to grips with the fact that she had all that talent and never used it.”
He met her gaze. “It’s a shame she didn’t.”
Something told her he was no longer talking about Emmy’s mother.
She turned her attention back to the sketch to avoid any further discussion. Before she knew it, she was lost in the work, everything around her fading away. The only thing she was aware of was Charlie’s quiet attention. But instead of worrying her like she thought it would, he calmed her. She colored in her drawing with the edge of her pencil, her attention moving from her mother’s sketch to her own, as if her mom were quietly coaching her the way she had when they drew together.
Emmy was so engrossed in the work that her inner thoughts weren’t her own.
“You’ll want the lines lighter here, to give the fabric movement,”her mother’s voice whispered to her as if she were over her shoulder.“Take the curve lower, like this.”
