Fly Away Home Read Free

might regret saying. But there were none. For the second time that day, her eyes filled with tears. She hurried inside.
    â€œMom?” called Sipho.
    But she couldn’t turn around. She locked herself in the bathroom. Finally, a private place to grieve.

Chapter Two
    F rancina stopped hemming for a moment to study the bowed head of her adopted daughter, who was sewing beads onto a wedding dress for a lady from a town north of Lady Helen. The poor bride was going to stagger under the weight of a thousand imitation pearls, but Francina always said that she would gladly shave her head if she came across a bride who was not prepared to suffer for beauty on her big day. A groom wouldn’t wear shoes that pinched his toes, or a hairstyle that pulled so tight the corners of his eyes lifted, or a shirt so snug across his stomach he couldn’t eat a morsel from the menu that had been so painstakingly chosen.
    Unlike some of the other fourteen-year-old girls at Green Block School, Zukisa wore her hair in the natural style of proud African women. Sometimes Francina would braid it, but the girl complained that it pulled too tightly on her scalp. Perhaps Zukisa would one day be the first bride Francina had ever met who was not willing to suffer for beauty.
    â€œAm I going too slowly?” asked Zukisa.
    â€œNo, not at all. I was just admiring the neatness of your rows.”
    Although Zukisa and Francina were not related by blood, they both had high cheekbones, aquiline noses and, up until Zukisa became a teenager, the same flawless complexion. But their eyes were different. Francina knew that people were unnerved by the way her left eye stared without blinking. Her first husband, Winston, the son of the chief of the village where she’d grown up, had once beaten her so badly that doctors had had to replace her left eye with a glass replica. Children, more openly curious than adults, frequently requested that she take it out so they could study it, and she often obliged them.
    Francina’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Shabalala, would normally be in the shop in the afternoon, while Francina and Zukisa supervised the boys at Monica’s house, but today Monica had taken Mandla with her to an appointment in Cape Town, and Sipho, at fifteen, was perfectly safe on his own. After some initial fine-tuning, Francina found that this shift arrangement worked well for Jabulani Dressmakers. In the mornings, Francina measured clients for new orders and did most of the sewing. In the afternoons, Mrs. Shabalala balanced the accounting books, ordered fabric, thread and other supplies, wrote invoices, met clients to hand over their completed orders, and cleaned the shop. Though Francina had given her mother-in-law many lessons in sewing, Mrs. Shabalala’s most valuable contribution would always be her cheerful manner, which could soothe even the most agitated client if an order was not ready on time. Jabulani, the name of Francina’s village in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, meant happiness in the Zulu language, and with the division of labor as it was, the atmosphere of the shop always lived up to its name.
    Since coming to live with Francina after the death of her mother, when she was ten, Zukisa had shown an eye for design. The meticulous stitching had come later, after patient tutoring from Francina, but from the start Zukisa had known which colors complemented each other, whether a fabric would look better cut on the bias or not, whether a client would look elegant or ridiculous with ruffles. A year later, she was sketching her own designs and cutting out pattern pieces from newspaper. Some of her early efforts had made the mannequin look dressed for a pantomime, but now clients came in just to see the latest design it displayed. At times, Zukisa needed encouragement to keep working on her creation until it was completely hemmed and pressed, but that was understandable for a teenager. Francina was pleased at her