TOP was lost.”
“It was the Mardi dress. Make a note. Yoni finds it. Today. It was in the reception area last night, and it looked like hell.”
“Should I tell Cangemi that?” Laura asked.
“That’s why I have a lawyer. What else did he want?”
Laura swallowed hard. “He wanted to know if you went to the factory to fix things on a regular basis.” There was dead silence as Laura sensed her relationship with Jeremy changing. She looked for a harmless way to say the truth. “I told him you don’t usually go to the factory.”
Benito spoke up, “What exactly did you say?”
“That he avoided it like a skin disease.” She couldn’t look up from her list. And when she realized she’d forgotten to write down the fittings for the Amanda Gown, she didn’t have the heart to pick up her pencil.
“Two minutes!” the guard shouted.
Jeremy knocked on the window, and she realized she’d let the phone drift from her ear.
“Let me see the list.”
She held it up to the window and, while he scanned it, she noticed the red rings around his eyes and the dryness of his lips.
“Anything we don’t have fabrics on today is dropped,” he said. “And kill the Pauline dress. Finish up the production orders and complete that list. I want pictures after every fitting. And you are not to talk to the police again without Tinto.”
“You never go to the factory, Jeremy. You hate it.”
He hung up the phone without looking at her. She felt as if he had severed a lifeline.
From their morning conversations, Laura had pieced together Jeremy’s history.
According to him, he was born on a cutting table. He wasn’t always ‘the famous’ or ‘the great.’ He wasn’t born into a celebrity family, nor was he otherwise rich, lucky, or storied.
After school, before after-school programs and liability insurance for workplace injuries to children existed, Jeremy went to his father’s factory on 40th and Eleventh. At first, he drew trucks on the back of dotted paper, then epic war scenes, while his father managed the floor and his mother took care of the paperwork and bookkeeping. Bored of the wars, he started tracing discarded patterns. The cutters found him adorable and placed a foot-long pair of fabric scissors and some satin pins in his tiny hands. They put him to work on make-believe garments. He cut himself more than once, which was greeted with a tisk and a band-aid, but he knew what a pattern notch was for before he had memorized his multiplication tables and, much like his brother, who was twelve years his senior and stationed in the Gulf—a war from which he would never return—Jeremy wasn’t afraid of a little blood.
He grew into the business without thinking about it. He earned his allowance by sweeping the thread scraps from the floors for two hours after school and, later, helping his mother with the books. With nothing much to do after that, he hung around the cutters and sewers. When he became a fixture, the patternmakers paid him mind.
The 40th street factory made uniforms for schools and the food service industry. Civilian orders came in small test runs, but the bigger reorders never materialized. What Jeremy learned about making beautiful things came from the frustrations of the artisans around him, who would say, “We put the notch here so we can ease the sleeve in, but when we send the pattern to Hong Kong, we take them off. They wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway.” That became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, those frustrations became his own, and he made things in his spare time by modifying old pattern blocks and sewing them using good fabrics left on the bottom of the racks. His mother brought the samples to Bendel’s, and he had his first sale before he passed Algebra 1 with a C minus.
His parents moved to Vancouver when he was nineteen and, soon after, he got the backing of Gracie Pomerantz. The factory was his. Did he hate going to the factory, or was it something
“It was the Mardi dress. Make a note. Yoni finds it. Today. It was in the reception area last night, and it looked like hell.”
“Should I tell Cangemi that?” Laura asked.
“That’s why I have a lawyer. What else did he want?”
Laura swallowed hard. “He wanted to know if you went to the factory to fix things on a regular basis.” There was dead silence as Laura sensed her relationship with Jeremy changing. She looked for a harmless way to say the truth. “I told him you don’t usually go to the factory.”
Benito spoke up, “What exactly did you say?”
“That he avoided it like a skin disease.” She couldn’t look up from her list. And when she realized she’d forgotten to write down the fittings for the Amanda Gown, she didn’t have the heart to pick up her pencil.
“Two minutes!” the guard shouted.
Jeremy knocked on the window, and she realized she’d let the phone drift from her ear.
“Let me see the list.”
She held it up to the window and, while he scanned it, she noticed the red rings around his eyes and the dryness of his lips.
“Anything we don’t have fabrics on today is dropped,” he said. “And kill the Pauline dress. Finish up the production orders and complete that list. I want pictures after every fitting. And you are not to talk to the police again without Tinto.”
“You never go to the factory, Jeremy. You hate it.”
He hung up the phone without looking at her. She felt as if he had severed a lifeline.
From their morning conversations, Laura had pieced together Jeremy’s history.
According to him, he was born on a cutting table. He wasn’t always ‘the famous’ or ‘the great.’ He wasn’t born into a celebrity family, nor was he otherwise rich, lucky, or storied.
After school, before after-school programs and liability insurance for workplace injuries to children existed, Jeremy went to his father’s factory on 40th and Eleventh. At first, he drew trucks on the back of dotted paper, then epic war scenes, while his father managed the floor and his mother took care of the paperwork and bookkeeping. Bored of the wars, he started tracing discarded patterns. The cutters found him adorable and placed a foot-long pair of fabric scissors and some satin pins in his tiny hands. They put him to work on make-believe garments. He cut himself more than once, which was greeted with a tisk and a band-aid, but he knew what a pattern notch was for before he had memorized his multiplication tables and, much like his brother, who was twelve years his senior and stationed in the Gulf—a war from which he would never return—Jeremy wasn’t afraid of a little blood.
He grew into the business without thinking about it. He earned his allowance by sweeping the thread scraps from the floors for two hours after school and, later, helping his mother with the books. With nothing much to do after that, he hung around the cutters and sewers. When he became a fixture, the patternmakers paid him mind.
The 40th street factory made uniforms for schools and the food service industry. Civilian orders came in small test runs, but the bigger reorders never materialized. What Jeremy learned about making beautiful things came from the frustrations of the artisans around him, who would say, “We put the notch here so we can ease the sleeve in, but when we send the pattern to Hong Kong, we take them off. They wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway.” That became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Eventually, those frustrations became his own, and he made things in his spare time by modifying old pattern blocks and sewing them using good fabrics left on the bottom of the racks. His mother brought the samples to Bendel’s, and he had his first sale before he passed Algebra 1 with a C minus.
His parents moved to Vancouver when he was nineteen and, soon after, he got the backing of Gracie Pomerantz. The factory was his. Did he hate going to the factory, or was it something
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