Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (12 page)

“Perhaps you’ve been much too busy this summer to think about setting up shop here,” said Sylvia, scrutinizing the room, hands on her hips, “but as soon as camp wraps up for the season, I believe we should begin planning in earnest.”

“Do you think so?” asked Bonnie weakly.

“If we want to be ready for the first day of camp next season, indeed I do. Gretchen tells me that her husband is quite a woodworker. Perhaps he can help you design some custom-made shelving to make the most of this small space.”

Bonnie seized her opening. “It
is
a very small space, isn’t it? Quilters hate browsing in cramped shops. Maybe we should give it some more thought before we make any permanent changes to your parlor.”

Sylvia laughed and patted her arm, a gesture of reassurance that made Bonnie feel worse. “We’ll have all winter to think and plan, and I’m sure Joe will contrive something so your customers won’t feel crowded.”

“But what about your grandmother’s furniture? I couldn’t ask you to displace your family heirlooms.”

“Nonsense! We can find another place in the manor for these pieces, and once we do, the room will seem much larger. You’ll see.” Sylvia gestured to the wall adjacent to the doorway. “In my opinion, this would be the best place to set up the cash register, and perhaps Joe could build a cutting table for the center of the room.” She indicated the other walls in turn. “Fabric bolts there, wall racks for notions there, and bookshelves here.” Nodding to a narrow wall right beside the door frame, she added, “And this would be the perfect spot to hang that framed photograph you used to keep on your desk in your office. The woman in the portrait is your grandmother, and the inspiration for your first store, if I’m not mistaken?”

Bonnie nodded and tried to smile. “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought.” She forced a laugh. “Much more than I have.”

“Perhaps too much thought.” Sylvia peered at Bonnie over the rims of her glasses. “Perhaps I’ve overstepped my bounds, telling you how to arrange your shop when I don’t have a single day’s experience to compare to yours.”

“Oh, no, no, that’s not it,” Bonnie hastened to explain. “It’s not that I have to do it my way. I just don’t know if I should do it at all.”

Sylvia studied her, the fine lines of her face gathering in a worried frown. “Surely you’re not worried that Grandma’s Parlor will suffer the same fate as your first shop. You needn’t fear any vandals here.”

“Grandma’s Parlor.” Bonnie’s laugh, though soft, was genuine. “You’ve even chosen a name.”

“You don’t have to keep it,” said Sylvia. “You’ll be in charge, of course, so the choice should be yours. I hope you won’t think me presumptuous, but Grandma’s Parlor seemed fitting to me. It acknowledges the new location while calling to mind its origins, both the place and the person who inspired it.”

“It’s a good name,” Bonnie assured her. “I’ll think about everything you’ve said. We’ll talk more soon.”

Then Bonnie hurried off, crossing the distance between the parlor and the back door as quickly as she could without breaking into a run, leaving more than one camper speculating that in all the time they had known her, Bonnie had never seemed so eager for exercise.

Grandma’s Parlor. Bonnie mulled over the name as she strode through the orchard, pumping her fists, feeling the first beads of perspiration forming on the nape of her neck. Sylvia had no idea how perfectly it suited, or how much it would have delighted the woman in the photograph Bonnie had once kept on her office desk.

Grandma Lucy, her first quilt teacher, her tutor, her most steadfast champion. Sometimes the peal of a camper’s laugh, a glimpse of a brunette flip, or a carefree woman dancing onstage at the campers’ talent show reminded Bonnie of her grandmother. How Grandma Lucy would have enjoyed quilt camp, and how proud she would have been to know that her granddaughter was one of its founders.

Grandma Lucy had always told Bonnie that she could accomplish anything if she set her mind to it. “The world is full of possibilities,” she liked to exclaim, throwing her arms open in the backyard and twirling around as if to embrace the sunlight, the warm breezes, the grass, and the open sky.

Bonnie and her younger sister, Ellie, adored their grandmother. They didn’t mind that their mother worked as a secretary instead of staying home like their friends’ mothers, because it meant they could spend a few hours after school and every long summer day at Grandma Lucy’s house. When the weather was fair, they would explore Erie, Pennsylvania, on bicycles, go hiking along the lakeshore, or play marathon games of croquet on the front lawn. On rainy days, Grandma Lucy would take them for a “machine ride” to the library, where they would check out armloads of books and pass the day reading on the shaded screen porch, safe and dry while thunder rolled overhead. But what Bonnie and Ellie liked best of all was when Grandma Lucy beckoned them up the creaking attic stairs, where they would throw open old trunks and play dress-up with clothes from the olden days, when Grandma was a young lady. Feather boas, high-heeled shoes, fringed dresses, and white satin gloves that reached almost to the girls’ shoulders—such lovely, beautiful things. “If I had such pretty clothes, I would wear them every day,” Bonnie had often declared. When Ellie chimed in her agreement, Grandma would merely throw her head back and laugh.

Dressed in their grandmother’s finery, they would play marvelous games of make-believe. They were glamorous movie stars traveling to exotic locales to shoot a new feature; they were secret agents posing as a singing group in order to outwit a gang of notorious bank robbers; they were princesses and queen battling an evil sorcerer intent on destroying their kingdom. While rain pattered on the sloped roof or winter winds swirled icy snow crystals against the windowpane, their grandmother’s attic transformed into a place where anything they imagined could come to pass.

Their mother’s voice calling up the narrow staircase would break the spell, and Bonnie and Ellie would scamper downstairs and watch as their glamorous ensembles worked their own magic upon their mother’s face, as laughter erased the weariness around her eyes. Sometimes, as they changed back into their ordinary clothes, the girls begged to stay and have dinner with Grandma Lucy and Grandpa Al, but usually their mother scooted them outside to the car, to race home and prepare their own supper before their father came home from work.

Grandma knew how to tap dance, and she had saved every dance costume she had worn since she was eight years old. She taught Bonnie and Ellie the jitterbug and the fox-trot, and sometimes she and Grandpa Al would waltz around the living room while the radio played. They had met at a dance at the Lakeside Pavilion when she was seventeen and he was nineteen. Grandma was very popular and danced with many young men, unaware that Grandpa, who attended a different school, had taken notice of her. When the bandleader announced a contest, Grandpa strode across the dance floor and took her hand just as she was about to take a classmate’s brother’s arm. “You’re the best dancer here,” he told her, leading his astonished partner to the middle of the dance floor. “Whoever has you for a partner is going to win, and I need to win.”

“The prize was a new pair of shoes,” Grandma would explain. “He might not have been so bold except he really needed those shoes.”

“How did Grandpa know the shoes would fit him?” Ellie always interrupted at that point of the story.

“The prize was a gift certificate to a shoe store, dearie. The winner would get to pick out whatever he liked.”

Grandma helped Grandpa win first prize, and they danced every dance together for the rest of the evening. “We’ve been partners ever since,” Grandma would conclude the tale, and if Grandpa was in the room, she would throw him a teasing glance and add, “I think he kept me around in case he ever needed to add to his wardrobe.”

As the years passed, marriage and family did not change Grandma’s popularity. Her circle of friends evolved as their husbands’ jobs took them to distant towns and as their common interests waxed and waned, but she was never without companions. By the time Bonnie and Ellie came along, Grandma Lucy’s favored circle was her quilting bee, the Stitch Witches. Ever since she was a young bride, Grandma Lucy and nine friends had met once a week to sew and chat. They had seen one another through marriages and births, illnesses and disappointments, and there were very few secrets they did not share around the sewing circle. “They’ve got the goods on me, all right,” Grandma Lucy told Bonnie once as she mixed batter for a pineapple upside-down cake to serve at a Stitch Witches’ bee. “If we ever had a falling out, and they told the world my secrets…” Grandma Lucy shook her head, imagining the disastrous result. But of course, the Stitch Witches would never betray her, and not only because Grandma Lucy knew their secrets, too. The years of shared confidences had forged a bond between them that nothing would ever shatter. Bonnie knew that Grandma Lucy’s secrets, whatever they were, were safe.

When Bonnie was old enough, Grandma Lucy occasionally allowed her to attend when the Stitch Witches met at her house. Bonnie’s interest in learning to quilt charmed the older ladies, and as she struggled to sew together squares for her first top, a Trip Around the World, each offered her advice, some of it contradictory.

Sometimes, if one of their circle needed to finish a quilt quickly, the Stitch Witches would put aside their individual projects and set up a quilt frame in Grandma Lucy’s living room. Pulling up chairs around it, they would sew the three layers together—patchwork top, batting, and backing—with deft and meticulous stitches. Bonnie would sit on the floor beneath the frame, the quilt a canopy over her head, and watch the darting needles pierce the layers and wrinkled, blue-veined hands push them back through to the top. Bonnie was responsible for picking up dropped thimbles and spools of thread, but her duties were so light that sometimes the Stitch Witches forgot she was there and their talk turned to matters usually not discussed in front of children. Holding very still, barely breathing lest she remind them of her presence, Bonnie listened wide-eyed to laments about husbands straying, daughters dating unsuitable men, sons struggling to find work or finish school, or siblings arguing over inheritances. In later years, the details of the individual dramas faded from her memory, but she never forgot how each woman seemed to feel her burden lightened when shared with her friends.

The Stitch Witches relied upon that unconditional acceptance and support even more as the years passed. Time, which initially allowed their friendship to ripen and mellow, eventually began to exact its toll upon them. One of Grandma’s girlhood chums was the first of the Stitch Witches to pass away, unexpectedly and far too soon, from a heart attack when she was only sixty. The shock of their loss cast a shadow over the circle of quilters, and although no one said so in Bonnie’s hearing, she sensed beneath their visible grief their reluctant acceptance that this would be only the first of many partings.

Then Grandpa Al died, and the Stitch Witches were there to console Grandma Lucy, as she later consoled those who followed her into widowhood. Gradually, sadly, their numbers diminished as old friends retired and moved away, or succumbed to illnesses, or became homebound. Even though Bonnie was too involved with her own circle of friends in her teenage years to attend quilting bees, she often looked back wistfully upon those days, her heart aching for her grandmother, who grieved deeply for every lost friend. She resolved to do all she could to fill the void when the last of Grandma Lucy’s circle of friends left her. For it was inconceivable that vibrant, clever, indomitable Grandma Lucy would not somehow, miraculously, escape the fate that awaited her aging friends. It was true that she wore bifocals now and did not bound up the attic stairs the way she used to, but Bonnie could not imagine a world where her grandmother was not holding court in her two-bedroom brick bungalow with the attic full of marvels.

The first signs were easy to ignore. Everyone misplaced car keys sometimes or forgot what errand had compelled them to enter a room. Bonnie misplaced her dorm room key so often that her freshman-year roommate resigned herself to leaving their door unlocked for most of the fall semester. Bonnie’s own parents sometimes called her by her sister’s name, so it was no big deal when Grandma Lucy called her by her mother’s name when Bonnie phoned to chat.

Then, on a rare weekday visit home from Penn State, Bonnie and her family had just finished dinner at Grandma Lucy’s house when the remaining Stitch Witches arrived for their weekly meeting. Flustered, Grandma Lucy invited them to sit and offered them dessert, and she teasingly scolded them for changing the date without telling her. Her friends apologized and departed, reluctant to interrupt a family dinner even though everyone assured them they were welcome. Later, as she helped clear the table, Bonnie surreptitiously studied the calendar hanging inside the pantry door. The Stitch Witches’ meeting was clearly marked for seven o’clock that evening.

From that day forward, her grandmother’s lapses in memory became more frequent and bewildering. Grandma Lucy sounded puzzled when Bonnie called her on Sunday afternoons, and Bonnie often had to remind her that she couldn’t come to dinner because she was more than two hundred miles away at school. “Of course,” her grandmother said one afternoon in early February. “And how are your classes?”

“They’re fine,” Bonnie replied. “My lowest grade is in calculus, but that’s no surprise. I’m supposed to declare a major by the end of the year, but I still can’t decide between business and the liberal arts. History and art are much more compelling, but I’ll have an easier time finding a job after graduation if I take a business degree. What do you think I should do?”

“Heavens, Bonnie, you’re at college, not trade school. Seize the opportunity to expand your horizons. Education isn’t just a means to an end; the journey itself is what truly matters. A liberal arts degree will show employers that you’re intelligent, hardworking, and an able learner. Let them worry about job training after they’ve hired you.”