Betsy used a variety of methods to keep the walls up to date. One was to stitch them herself, but Betsy was still learning the craft and so had to lean heavily on her customers, borrowing finished patterns from them. Sometimes she offered a particularly talented customer free finishing-washing, stretching, and framing, an expensive service-in exchange for the right to display it for a time, or to giving the model maker the materials for a project, plus deep discounts on other patterns and materials, in exchange for doing a particular project.

She had also gained some recent models by a sadder method: Wayzata’s Needle Nest had gone out of business, and Pat had sold Betsy some of her models to hang on Crewel World’s walls. Fineries of Nature was the last of them.

It was a little after noon when Betsy, looking over a new and complex Terrance Nolan pattern, said, “I wonder if we could get Irene to make a model of this for us.”

And as if on cue, the front door went Bing! and Irene came in. Irene Potter was one of Betsy’s most loyal customers. She was also rude, opinionated, passionate, difficult-and an extraordinarily talented needleworker. A short, thin woman with angry black curls standing up all over her head, she had a narrow face set with very shiny dark eyes. Her clothing came from a Salvation Army store. She wasn’t poor, but she put every possible nickel of her income into needlework supplies.

She had a project rolled up under the arm of her shabby winter coat, a faux leopard skin probably thirty years old. “I need your opinion on this,” she said without preamble.

“What, on how to finish it?” asked Betsy from behind the big desk that served as a checkout counter.

“No, just an opinion. Yours too,” she added over her shoulder, not quite looking at Godwin. This was unusual. Irene had a very accurate notion of Betsy’s lack of proficiency but her fear and loathing of Godwin as a gay man normally kept her from acknowledging his expertise in needlework. That most other Crewel World customers thought he had a heightened sense of color and design because he was gay cut no ice with Irene.