The Beach Quilt (2 page)

It was such a lovely day, a crystalline wonderland. Sarah Mary Bauer sighed happily as she began to remove layers of wool and fleece clothing. She loved everything about every season, but deep down, winter was her favorite.

It was the same Saturday afternoon in January, almost three o'clock, that found her best friend, Cordelia, bemoaning the frosty conditions. In spite of the bitter cold and the still-falling snow, Sarah had been out for a two-hour tramp and had come home refreshed, invigorated, and with the appetite of a lumberjack.

She went into the kitchen to make a grilled cheese sandwich. Her mother and father had gone to the home of a distant neighbor, an elderly man named Ben Downing. They made it a habit to visit Ben, a widower in his nineties, once a week, to cook a few meals, rake leaves or shovel snow or mow the lawn, and tidy up a bit.

Sarah's thirteen-year-old sister, Stevie (short for Stephanie), was probably in her room with her cat, Clarissa, sewing or reading or listening to music. Stevie was very smart and did really well in school. She was also very creative and had an intense interest in style. Sarah wasn't the least bit interested in fashion. She dressed in jeans and hoodies and T-shirts and hadn't owned a dress since first grade. She was naturally slim, like her father, with long brown hair she usually wore in a ponytail. Her eyes were brown, too. She would be the first to admit that she wasn't beautiful or even pretty. And she didn't see the point in wearing makeup, unlike Cordelia who never left the house without mascara and lip gloss and nail polish.

Sarah took the sandwich out of the toaster oven and ate it in four bites. There was a leftover piece of her mother's award-winning apple pie, and she ate that, too. Sometimes she thought that the hardest thing about going away to college would be having to eat awful cafeteria food.

But she
would
go to college no matter the awful food, and after that, she thought that she would like to pursue a career as a nurse. All these commercials on television talked about the health field constantly growing, what with the huge ageing population. Then again, the law interested her too, especially when it involved the preservation and protection of the environment. Law school was insanely expensive, and it might take her a lifetime of hard work to pay off loans, but it might be worth it in the end, especially if she spent that lifetime fighting for a good and selfless cause. Then again, as a nurse she would also be making a positive difference in people's lives, and in a much more immediate way.

Building a career was going to be really tough. But Sarah knew that she could never be content to work at the sort of job that ended when you left the office at five o'clock in the afternoon and that started up again when you walked into the office at nine o'clock the next morning. She knew that she wanted work that would fill all twenty-four hours of her day. That sort of work had to be fought for and earned.

And her parents were totally supportive of her dreams, even though neither of them had gone to college. In fact, the only family member of her parents' generation who
had
gone to college and then graduate school was her father's brother, Jonas. Jonas and his wife lived in Chicago; he was a corporate lawyer and Marie worked for a bank, managing the portfolios of its biggest clients. Jonas and Marie had a Facebook page; Sarah had told her father about it, but he didn't have any interest in following his brother's life via the computer. From what Sarah could tell, there was no animosity between the two men, just a vast canyon of difference.

It was interesting, Sarah thought, as she put her dishes into the dishwasher, how two people could grow up in the same household and yet decide on two very different walks of life. She wondered if she and Stevie would become another pair like their father and uncle, amicable but also kind of indifferent to each other. That, Sarah thought, would be sad. She would try her best not to let that happen.

Sarah peered out one of the kitchen windows at the snowy scene. Nothing made Sarah happier than being outdoors. She found rain refreshing and thunderstorms exciting. Snow was beautiful. Even high humidity could be borne when the payoff was a vista filled with wild flowers and buzzing bees. Most times, her ambles were solitary because she just didn't know anyone else who shared her passion for the outdoors. Justin, her boyfriend, teased her about being “Nature Girl” (his idea of fun was a beer and a baseball game on TV) and Cordelia vastly preferred to spend her free time shopping or watching movies. Kicking through fallen leaves or climbing over the decaying remains of dead trees or tramping along a stretch of hot white sand did nothing for Cordelia. She didn't care, she said, for extremes of temperature (cold made her skin flake and heat made her hair frizzy) and she found rocks boring (they just sat there).

Sarah turned away from the window and looked around the kitchen with fondness. She loved every bit of her home, from the embroidered sampler over the sink to the old marble lamp in the living room; from the slightly slanted floors on the second level to the way the wind sang through the old, ill-fitting windows in the living room. Every inch, every possession held charm for Sarah, largely because the house was the one in which her father's paternal grandfather had been born. His father and mother had owned it after his grandfather's passing, and Joe Bauer, Sarah's dad, had bought it from his parents when they retired to a smaller place closer to the heart of town.

Though the land on which the house sat was no longer used for commercial farming, Sarah's parents had planted a big vegetable garden, and Cindy, her mom, maintained a lovely flower garden. There had been some talk about raising chickens, too, but when the girls had admitted they would probably not be into cleaning the coop, the idea had been abandoned.

The house was a classic old farmhouse, white clapboard and two stories high with an attic that extended the length of the structure and a big porch out front. The first floor contained the kitchen and mudroom in back, and the living room in front. Stairs to the second floor were against the right wall of the front hall. The second floor contained Sarah's parents' room in front, Stevie's bedroom next, the house's one bathroom, and at the very back of the house, Sarah's bedroom.

The rooms throughout the house were small and the ceilings low by contemporary standards. It felt a bit like a warren compared to the more open plan of the Kanes' development house. There was no central air-conditioning, but there were window units in the bedrooms. As a result, the first floor of the house could feel brutally hot and close in summer. Fans did little to alleviate the oppression of the heavy, still air; most times, the Bauers didn't even bother to waste the electricity.

Sarah went up to her room now to change her socks. They had gotten slightly damp, which meant that she had to waterproof her boots again. If she were lucky, they would last for one more season. Good boots were expensive.

From her bedroom window, there was a perfect view of the extensive vegetable garden and beyond that, a heavily wooded area dense with pines and white birch and oaks. From this vantage point, you could often see deer grazing, and hedgehogs nibbling flowers, and chipmunks scurrying under rocks. On rarer occasions, you could spot a fox sneaking along the remains of an old stone wall not far into the mass of trees. Some years there were coyotes; you heard more than saw them, and the lonely sounding howls usually meant big trouble for the neighborhood cats and small dogs.

And there were parading families of wild turkeys and all sorts of other birds on the wing, from tiny, brightly colored songbirds to impressive birds of prey, hawks, falcons, and even, on occasion, an eagle. At night, you could hear the haunting cry of owls on the hunt. And in the morning, if you looked, you could find the skeletons of the owls' prey at the base of trees. Sarah had pointed this out to Cordelia on one of the rare occasions Cordelia had, reluctantly, accompanied her friend into the woods. Cordelia had run shrieking back to the house. Sarah had not made that mistake again.

The room itself was very simply furnished. There was one bed, one dresser, and a small wooden desk with a chair. On the desk sat an old laptop, which Sarah used for school and research only. She had a very basic phone, and she was very careful about using it wisely.

The walls of the room were painted white and on her bed lay one of her mother's quilts, the one she had made for Sarah right after her birth. It was a magnificent example of something called a log cabin quilt. Every time she looked at it, Sarah was amazed at her mother's skill.

A bookshelf her father had built was crammed with volumes she had collected at yard sales and secondhand bookshops. Sarah loved to read, and it almost didn't matter what the content was—fiction, nonfiction, history, mystery. She read everything but bodice-ripping romance. Recently she had discovered the works of May Sarton. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's
Gift from the Sea
was also a favorite. There was a biography of George Washington that had taken her almost a year to get through, not because it was difficult reading but because schoolwork came first. When her history teacher had asked what famous person from the past she would most like to meet, Sarah chose Abigail Adams. She had read a biography of her, too, and a lot of the letters she and her husband had written to each other. If she ever got married, Sarah hoped she would find a best friend in her husband, like Abigail had found in John.

For now, Sarah had Justin. She really liked him, but marriage was the last thing she could think of, not until she finished school, and that could be eight or nine years from now.

The blare of a horn alerted Sarah to the arrival of her boyfriend. She tossed the damp socks into a hamper in the bathroom, raced downstairs, grabbed her outerwear, and ran down the front steps.

Justin was driving his friend Bud's four-wheel drive truck. There was a raised plow attached to the front as Bud made extra money plowing for his neighbors. He had offered to cut Justin in on the business, but Justin had laughed off the offer. He was the first to admit that he was a pretty lazy guy.

Gosh, he really is beautiful
, Sarah thought as she climbed up into the passenger seat. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“How about back to my place? I got a frozen pizza for us.”

“That sounds great,” she said.

Justin lived in a small apartment above a family-owned hardware store in downtown Yorktide. The apartment was clean enough but kind of messy. It was sparsely decorated with cast-offs from his parents' house and plastic milk crates that Justin used for storage and as surfaces for dirty plates and empty beer bottles.

Well, Justin might not be the neatest guy around, but Sarah thought he was certainly the most handsome one. He made her feel things she had never even guessed existed, a sort of excitement she had certainly never heard her mother, or Cordelia, or any of her teachers talk about. At first, it had terrified her. But over time, she had come to befriend her feelings. Eventually, she had given in to them; she had let them overwhelm all sense of caution or embarrassment. After all, sexual feelings were natural, weren't they? You weren't supposed to feel bad about having them. Her health teacher back in freshman year had stressed that.

“Here,” Justin said, holding out a little white paper bag, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “I have something for you.”

Sarah smiled. Every time they met, Justin gave her a little gift. She wished he wouldn't spend his money on her—she knew he didn't earn a lot—but he seemed to get real pleasure out of giving her the tiny stuffed animals and the hair baubles. The hair baubles were more appropriate for a frillier girl, but it was the thought that counted.

Sarah took the bag and peered inside. It was one of those thingies you clipped onto your key chain. It had a green plastic disc on which was printed the image of a grinning chimpanzee.

“You like it?” Justin asked. She heard the unmistakable note of hope in his voice.

“I do,” she said. “It's wonderful. Thank you, Justin.”

Justin smiled, and Sarah felt an intense rush of warmth. She couldn't wait to get to his place, and the pizza had nothing to do with it.

Later that same wintry Saturday afternoon, thirty-eight-year-old Adelaide Kane, Cordelia's mother, was sitting at the small island in her kitchen with a fashion magazine and a cup of orange-and-cinnamon-flavored tea, enjoying a few minutes of downtime before she would have to start dinner. Cordelia was taking a nap, and Jack, Adelaide's husband, had been out shoveling snow since about two o'clock.

Adelaide's hair was dark blond, and she wore it in a swingy bob. Her eyes were very blue. Cordelia had inherited their color and also her mother's poor eyesight. Unlike her daughter, Adelaide was comfortable wearing glasses. She was a little taller than Cordelia and over the years had put on a fair amount of weight. But she had made peace with it. She was always fashionably dressed and was very smart about what suited her. She glanced at the slinky sleeveless minidress advertised on the page in front of her and laughed.
That
was not going to happen.

For the past ten years, Adelaide had owned a successful quilt shop called The Busy Bee: Quilts and Quilting Needs. She had first gotten interested in quilts in college when she had taken a class called American Women and the Domestic Arts. Though she did occasionally make quilts, over time she had become more focused on restoring, preserving, and selling other people's work. Opening her own business had been a scary enterprise, but she had proved to have a good business head, and with Jack helping her with what heavy labor was required to get the shop in shape, The Busy Bee, which occupied the front rooms of an old house on Meadow Street, had soon become a success. Her dear friend Cindy Bauer helped her run the shop. She was an expert quilter who had learned the craft from her mother and grandmother before her. The fact that Cordelia and Cindy's older daughter, Sarah, were best friends, was, Adelaide thought, the icing on her professional cake.

Adelaide took another sip of her tea and thought about how different her upbringing had been from Cindy's. While Cindy had grown up locally, Adelaide had been raised in a pretty suburban town in Connecticut, the only child of well-to-do professional parents. She had gone to excellent private schools. She had spent summers swimming at the Olympic-sized pool at her parents' country club and school holidays skiing at fancy resorts in Vermont. The family had traveled to New York City once a year, just before Christmas, and stayed in an old and very respectable hotel on the Upper West Side. Every Friday night until Adelaide was a teen, the three of them had dinner at a four-star restaurant in a neighboring town. Adelaide had never wanted for anything, and until much later in life, she had been only dimly aware that other people—many other people—were less fortunate than she was.

She had met her husband, Jack, while on vacation in Ogunquit the summer after she had graduated from college. He was living in the neighboring town of Yorktide and working as a teacher at the local middle school. They began to date long distance; six months later, she moved to Yorktide, and another six months later she and Jack were married with no protest if, equally, no enthusiasm from her parents. If Mr. and Mrs. Morgan would have preferred their daughter marry someone at least equal to their own social and financial standing, they chose not to say. Adelaide couldn't help but think that after her “near miss” at seventeen (she had heard her mother call it that) they were simply relieved to have her safely deposited with a decent, noncriminal man.

Adelaide got up to make another cup of tea. Cindy always boiled water the old-fashioned way. Adelaide used the microwave. Well, what was the point of
having
a high-end appliance if you weren't going to use it?

The Kane house was one of a development called Willow Bay Estates. It was the second smallest of five different plans that had been available to the new owners, a two-story structure with a back deck off the first floor and a finished basement. The ceilings were high. The first floor was organized on an open plan, with the kitchen, dining room, and living room flowing into one another. In the living room, there was a large gas fireplace with a deep flagstone ledge. Sure, it would have been more romantic to have a real fireplace, but Adelaide wasn't a big fan of the mess logs made, so a gas fireplace it was. In the spring, the house felt welcoming and airy. Central air-conditioning kept it cool even on the hottest summer days. In the fall and winter, a zoned heating system and the roaring fire in the living room made the house feel toasty.

There was a contemporary feel to the structure though Adelaide had decorated with lots of antiques. Painted wooden chests of various sizes were stationed throughout the house. A lovely old spinning wheel had pride of place in a corner of the den, a room that doubled as Jack and Adelaide's home office. A collection of unique ceramic pitchers lined a shelf in the kitchen. And, of course, there were quilts. They were hung on the walls and draped over the back of the living room couch and laid across the foot of each bed. Her collection included sampler quilts, appliquéd quilts, postage stamp quilts, and even a few “art quilts,” or, as some people called them, works of fiber art.

Art quilts aside, which were meant to be admired and not used, Adelaide loved the fact that quilts were both beautiful and practical. In the days of the pioneers, they were hung over cracks in wagon walls to keep out the cold and rain and dust; they were hung from the ceiling to partition off a large room; they were used as coverlets on beds to keep the sleepers warm. Most touchingly, they were used as shrouds when burying loved ones who died in the middle of a desolate nowhere.

No doubt about it, Adelaide was proud of her home. Her mother, too, was house proud, though Nancy Morgan had a lot more disposable income with which to decorate. And Nancy Morgan's interiors were always lifted almost directly from popular home decorating magazines. Individuality wasn't her strong suit. Impressing the neighbors was.

Adelaide heard the front door open and shut. A moment or two later, Jack appeared in the kitchen. In spite of the cold, he was drenched in sweat. He continued to strip off his outerwear—coat and boots had already been abandoned in the front hall—until he stood in a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and socks.

“You look exhausted,” Adelaide said.

“I feel exhausted,” he admitted. “And a little bit numb. At least, my fingers feel numb. If you can feel numbness. I never really understood that. . . .”

“Something hot to drink?”

Jack nodded. “I'm going to be very adult and very naughty and make myself a cup of coffee liberally laced with Jameson.”

Adelaide grinned. “And I won't tell a soul.”

Jack Kane, forty, stood at six feet four inches. His shoulders were broad, and his hair was thick and prematurely silver. In striking contrast to his hair, his eyes were intensely blue. He and his wife made an attractive couple; they had been told so often enough, which Adelaide found a little embarrassing, but which Jack took in his stride.

Though he had been born and raised in upstate New York, Jack had lived in southern Maine since graduating from college in Boston. He was popular with everyone, energetic and dynamic. Now the principal of the local high school, he had twice been asked by a group of local business owners to run for the office of town comptroller. It was a responsibility he wasn't ready to take on yet, but Adelaide was sure it was in her husband's future. For the past few years, he had played on a local bowling team and he enjoyed an intense game of chess once a week with a colleague from a neighboring town.

Jack's parents were retired to Arizona. He spoke to his mother on the phone once a week and at Christmas made sure to send Alice and John Sr. a generous gift basket of fruit, chocolates, nuts, and herb-laced crackers.

He had one sibling, an older sister named Rita, who lived in a tiny camp on the border of Canada. Rita was fiercely independent and a bit of a loner, completely unlike her very social brother. She had journeyed south when Cordelia was born but had not seen her family since. Once a year, Jack and his parents received a missive, written on an ancient typewriter, that chronicled Rita's adventures in living a solitary life with no electricity, water from a well, and a diet that largely had to be cultivated, shot, or foraged. Jack thought the letter made interesting reading. Adelaide and Cordelia did not agree.

“Is your student coming?” Adelaide asked. During the summer months and occasionally throughout the school year, Jack ran a tutoring program designed to help kids prepare for the SATs. Even families with limited “extra” income seemed to be willing to plunk down their hard-earned cash to help ensure their children got into a good college. Not that Jack took advantage of this fact; his fees were reasonable, especially considered against what other tutors in larger, more prosperous towns were charging. Still, this source of income was enough to ensure that the Bauer family could put a decent chunk of money into one of their savings plans.

Jack shook his head. “His mom called. She can't get out of the driveway. Plow guy hasn't come yet.”

“That's too bad.”

“We'll make up the session.” Jack took a sip of his hot drink. “Mmm,” he said, “that hit the spot.”

Adelaide smiled. “Good thing your student had to cancel.”

“Yeah. Whiskey doesn't exactly go with teaching math skills.”