Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (14 page)

Ellie would arrive home from the pool about a half hour before Bonnie had to put on her uniform and head off to the restaurant, and in that interval, Bonnie would quickly brief her sister on the day’s events, their grandmother’s mood, and what their mother wanted Ellie to put on for dinner. Then she would hurry off to Eat’n Park, where she was thankfully too busy to think about anything at home. Upon her return home, often near midnight, Ellie and their father would already be in bed, but Bonnie usually found her mother with Grandma Lucy, looking at photograph albums or chatting, or sometimes merely sitting.

On one hot, sticky night in late July as she trudged up the driveway, Bonnie heard her grandmother shouting. She hurried inside and upstairs to find Grandma Lucy clad in a nightgown and resting one hand upon the sewing machine cabinet to steady herself as she thrust a fistful of quilt blocks in her mother’s face. “You did this,” Grandma Lucy shouted. “All of my hard work, ruined!”

Bonnie’s mother ducked out of the way and held up her palms to calm her. “No one touched your quilt blocks, Mom. No one ruined your quilt.”

“Look at these stitches. Just look at them!” Grandma Lucy turned the blocks over and jabbed a gnarled finger at the seams. “Terrible, terrible!”

“Those are your stitches, Mom. You sewed those blocks.”

Grandma Lucy recoiled as if she had been struck. “How dare you,” she muttered, shuffling backward to the bed and sinking down upon it. The quilt blocks fell from her hands. Bonnie watched helplessly from the doorway as her mother fluffed the pillow and eased Grandma Lucy down upon it and tucked her in, strangely, suddenly docile.

When Bonnie’s mother stooped over to pick up the scattered quilt blocks, she spotted Bonnie frozen in the doorway. Bonnie began to speak, but her mother held a finger in front of her lips and motioned for her to turn off the light. She obeyed and waited in the hallway until her mother emerged carrying the quilt blocks and softly closed the door.

“Mom—”

“It’s late. You should go to bed.” Her mother’s voice was heavy with resignation as she turned the blocks over in her hands. “I remember how beautifully she once sewed. Now she doesn’t even recognize her own work.”

“She did yesterday morning.” Grandma Lucy had sewed nearly all day. Bonnie was barely able to trace templates and cut pieces quickly enough to keep up with her.

“Maybe she will tomorrow, then.”

Bonnie knew her mother didn’t believe it.

The next day, after her parents and sister left for work, Bonnie sat with her grandmother on the front porch watching the passersby—mothers pushing baby carriages, neighbors visiting friends. Grandma Lucy called out a cheerful greeting to everyone, her mood so sunny it was as if her outburst of the night before had never happened. She even asked for her sewing basket, and after a moment’s hesitation, Bonnie brought it to her. They spent the morning working on the Glorified Nine-Patch quilt, Bonnie pinning together pieces for her grandmother to sew. For the first time in ages, Grandma Lucy chatted about the Stitch Witches, but she spoke of them as if they were newlyweds and young mothers. Bonnie knew her mother wanted her to gently correct her grandmother when she went on in that way, but Bonnie was too tired, too unwilling to spoil Grandma Lucy’s rare good mood. Instead she went along with her fantasy, murmuring vague agreement and nodding at appropriate times. If it contented her grandmother to believe her friends were still near, still full of life, Bonnie could not bring herself to distress her with the truth.

“It’s almost August,” Ellie reminded Bonnie when she returned home, suntanned and smelling of cocoa butter and chlorine. “In less than a month, we’ll be back at school.”

Her sister’s words lingered with her as Bonnie raced off to the restaurant, ashamed by the comfort they offered. Soon she and Ellie would escape back into their carefree college lives, but what about their mother? What about Grandma Lucy?

When Bonnie returned home at half past eleven, she heard Grandma’s harsh shouts over the chirping of crickets as she unlocked the front door. Drawing a long, slow breath, she debated whether to rush upstairs, wondering how her father and sister could sleep through the noise. They probably were lying awake in bed, she decided, too weary to rush into the melee.

It was tempting to follow their example.

Bonnie left her purse on the hall table and trudged upstairs. She found her mother in her grandmother’s bedroom, tearfully explaining that Grandma Lucy herself was to blame for the large, crooked stitches that barely held the quilt blocks together. Her grandmother denied it again and again, and suddenly Bonnie couldn’t bear it any longer. “You’re right,” she said, striding into the room. “Valerie made those blocks. She should stick to Four-Patches.”

It was a teasing remark Grandma Lucy had often made about her friend before her death. “Valerie?” Grandma Lucy echoed, her gaze shifting to her granddaughter, her eyes narrowed in doubt.

“Yes.” Bonnie gently freed the quilt blocks from her grandmother’s grasp. “Should I tell her to pick out the stitches and do them over?”

Grandma Lucy bobbed her head, satisfied, and as Bonnie’s mother helped her into bed, Bonnie retrieved the red-handled seam ripper from her grandmother’s sewing basket and left the room. When her mother joined her at the kitchen table a few minutes later, Bonnie had already picked out one seam and had started in on another.

Her mother stood watching her for a moment, then sighed and sank into a chair. “I don’t know whether to scold you or thank you.”

“Then I’ll pick door number two.”

Her mother almost laughed. “Very well, but what’s going to happen tomorrow when Valerie hasn’t redone her quilt block?”

Bonnie didn’t bother to respond. They both knew Grandma Lucy wouldn’t remember.

The next day, when Grandma Lucy wanted to work on her quilt, Bonnie pinned the pieces she had taken apart the night before, threaded the needle, and gave them to her grandmother to sew back together. With a vague, nagging sense of dishonesty, Bonnie traced templates and cut new pieces, chatting idly with her grandmother as she struggled, slowly and carefully, to master the once-familiar motions of quilting.

For two weeks, she prepared blocks for Grandma Lucy to sew by day and undid all her painstaking work by night. Eventually, she was sure, her deception would catch up with her, even though her grandmother’s fragile memory made that unlikely. She dreaded the scene that might ensue if Grandma Lucy ever decided she had accumulated enough Glorified Nine-Patch blocks for a top. Bonnie knew she must have something to hand over if that day ever came, so she began sewing together the block pieces herself after picking out her grandmother’s shaky stitches. She had not quilted since piecing that Trip Around the World top as a child, but with patience and practice, her handiwork gradually improved. One August morning, she slipped her completed blocks into Grandma Lucy’s sewing basket, and was both proud and disheartened when her grandmother could not distinguish Bonnie’s sewing from her own. A few years earlier, Grandma Lucy would have inspected her blocks, pointed out her mistakes with affectionate humor to smooth over the critical sting, and encouraged her to do them over. Bonnie would have gladly picked out every stitch for one glimpse of the old Grandma Lucy. But without her grandmother to spur her on to work harder and imagine greater possibilities, Bonnie had to become her own coach, her own teacher. By the time she returned to Penn State for her senior year, her skills had improved so much that they were almost as good as her grandmother’s had once been, making Grandma Lucy’s acceptance of Bonnie’s duplicity easier to bear.

That fall, Bonnie’s mother persuaded her boss to let her return to part-time hours and the helpful neighbor resumed checking in on Grandma Lucy while she was away. Grandma Lucy continued piecing quilt blocks, and when her outbursts began again, with Bonnie no longer around to pick out the stitches, Bonnie’s mother took over. On her next visit home, Bonnie traced templates, cut pieces, and borrowed needle and thread from her grandmother’s sewing basket to take back to school to work on during study breaks. She mailed the finished blocks home from time to time so that Grandma Lucy could observe the pile steadily growing. When Grandma Lucy suddenly announced that she was ready to assemble the quilt top, Bonnie’s mother sewed the blocks into rows with the sewing machine, set up the old quilt frame in the family room, and taught herself how to quilt by following the instructions in a Girl Scout manual checked out from the library. Facing each other across the quilt frame, Bonnie’s mother and grandmother spent the winter joining the three layers, adding dimension and warmth to the colorful pieced top infused with so much hope and disappointment.

Grandma Lucy died before the quilt was finished. Grief-stricken, Bonnie’s mother abandoned the quilt as a painful reminder of the last months she had spent with her mother, who left them long before her death. It fell to Bonnie to learn how to bind and finish the quilt, which she completed three months before her marriage to Craig. She followed him to Waterford, where he had accepted an administrative job at a small college, and devoted herself to raising their three children. Longing for a circle of friends like the one her grandmother had once known, Bonnie joined the Waterford Quilting Guild and soon befriended Gwen, a professor at the college whose career achievements far outshone her own, and Agnes, an older woman who loved appliqué and antiques. As the years passed, the circle of quilters grew, the bonds tightened, until Bonnie realized that she had been blessed with a group of friends equal to her grandmother’s Stitch Witches. That, too, she believed, was her grandmother’s gift—and not her only legacy.

In those days, a frequent lament at meetings of the Waterford Quilting Guild was the lack of a decent quilt shop within a reasonable driving distance. In winter, especially, it was annoying to have to drive over the pass through the Four Brothers Mountains for a simple spool of thread or a new sewing machine needle. Then one day two signs went up in the window of the shoe store on the first floor of the Markhams’ building:
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
! 75%
OFF
! read one, and
FOR LEASE
, the other.

At first Craig opposed the idea. Bonnie had last held a paying job between college and marriage, years before, and she had never run a business. The kids were still young, although he grudgingly acknowledged that they were in school most of the day and could do their homework in the store’s office while she worked. As a last-ditch attempt to dissuade her, he pointed out that they simply could not afford such a risky business venture.

“We can afford it,” Bonnie replied, and reminded him of her inheritance. In one of her last lucid decisions about her estate, Grandma Lucy had left her house to her granddaughters. When Bonnie’s parents sold it, they divided the proceeds and invested them into two mutual fund accounts, one for Bonnie and one for Ellie. When Craig balked, protesting that he assumed that money was intended for their children’s educations and their own retirement, Bonnie threw herself into persuading him that her business would succeed so well as the only quilt shop in an underserved market that they would come out ahead, much better than if they simply let the money earn interest.

“I can see there’s no talking you out of it,” Craig finally said, resigned, when weeks passed and her enthusiasm for the quilt shop did not waver. The very next day, she signed a long-term lease for the shop and began ordering stock. Then she commissioned a sign to hang above the door, eagerly anticipating the day the red-and-gold letters would proudly beckon quilters inside to the haven she would create for them.

There was no question what she would call her quilt shop; no other name ever entered her thoughts. Her quilt shop would be cozy and welcoming, full of surprises, marvels, necessities, and endless delights. Upon entering, aspiring quilters who had never touched a needle would believe that anything they imagined could be realized if they worked hard and trusted that the world was full of possibilities. Thus Grandma’s Attic became her grandmother’s last gift to Bonnie, the destination their winding ways had been leading to as they walked along together.

Bonnie had hoped to pass this legacy on to her children, but they had dreams of their own, other roads to follow. And now the time had come for Bonnie to continue on, to steel her courage and set out on a new path, though she could not see beyond the first bend. She did not know where it would lead, but as much as she wanted to please Sylvia, she could not believe that her path ended at the parlor of Elm Creek Manor. It must lead to something greater than the place she had departed. She had to believe that, though she could not imagine where a place greater than Grandma’s Attic might be.

But she knew Grandma Lucy would have wanted her to dance along the entire length of this unknown winding way, flinging her arms wide to embrace the possibilities.

Sylvia waited on the back steps for Bonnie to return from her walk through the orchard, but although many other quilters came and went, her friend was not among them. Glancing at her watch, Sylvia realized the time for the start of Bonnie’s afternoon workshop had passed. Either Bonnie had failed to return, which was unlikely, or she had circled the manor and returned inside through the front door. Sighing, Sylvia rose and absently brushed fragments of dried leaves from her skirt. She did not like to think that Bonnie was deliberately avoiding her, but she clearly was not interested in continuing their conversation.

As eager as Sylvia was to see her friend happily bustling about her new quilt shop, she would drop the subject of Grandma’s Parlor for now and wait for Bonnie to approach her with her own ideas, her own plans. Perhaps she needed time. She had only recently closed the doors to Grandma’s Attic. Perhaps it was too soon to contemplate a new venture, especially with the distraction of that louse of a husband of hers and their impending divorce.

Sylvia returned inside and decided to stop by Bonnie’s classroom just to make sure her friend had not twisted her ankle or tumbled into the creek on her walk. As she suspected, Bonnie stood at the front of the classroom demonstrating English paper piecing to several curious campers. She threw Sylvia a weak smile without missing a beat in her presentation, which confirmed Sylvia’s suspicions. Honestly. Had Bonnie waded across the creek and snuck through the north gardens to avoid her? Such subterfuge was unnecessary among friends.