They Never Picked Up My Calls, So I Made Dolls That Answer novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: All Hands

"Please give our best to Mr. Farrington," I read out loud.

Gus took the phone and read it himself, holding it at arm's length.

"He bought the mill," he said. "To starve you."

"He bought eighteen months of it."

"Can he do that?"

"He just did."

Fletcher took the phone next. He read it twice.

"How much felt do you need?"

"For the February run? Two thousand dolls. Enough red felt for two thousand hearts, and four hundred yards of cotton."

"And if you don't make the run?"

"Then I show up at Toy Fair with a sample and an apology, and the network picks the company with forty thousand stores."

Nobody said anything.

The alley light buzzed.

I stood up.

"I'm not going to sit on a step and let him do this."

At seven the next morning I was calling every fabric shop in Maricopa County.

At ten I found one.

An upholstery shop in Mesa, closing after forty-one years. The owner's husband had passed and she was selling everything by the bolt.

"I've got cotton duck. I've got canvas. I've got wool felt in six colors," she said. "Including a red I couldn't move for ten years. Nobody wants red sofas."

"I want red sofas," I said. "All of them."

Fletcher drove the truck. Gus came along to supervise, which meant sitting in the cab with the window down, telling Fletcher how to back up.

"Left. Your other left. Your mother's left."

"I'm going to leave you in Mesa."

"You wouldn't. I'm your father."

The owner gave us everything for half price because, she said, Gus reminded her of her husband.

"He also swore at trucks," she said, and kissed his cheek.

Gus was pink the whole drive home.

That night the building came.

I hadn't asked anybody.

The ward nurse came after her shift with two other nurses and a sewing machine in a rolling case.

The three sewers came back after dinner with their husbands, their sister and somebody's grandmother.

The night-shift mother from the old hallway came with her son.

He was nine now, all elbows and front teeth, and he still had the first Answer Doll in his backpack. Its felt heart was faded almost pink.

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