Authors: Clare O'Donohue
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t know whether to be scared. Barneyclearly wasn’t. But then I was becoming alarmed about something else. His presence was attracting attention from inside the quilt shop. The man waved at someone in the shop, then looked back at me.
“I’m Jesse Dewalt,” he said to me as he stretched out his hand. “You’re Eleanor’s granddaughter, I guess.”
“How did you know that?” I asked as I shook his hand.
“It’s a small place.”
“And who might you be?” My eyes were on the gun peeking out from under his suit coat. He adjusted his coat to hide the gun.
“Sorry, I should have introduced myself,” he answered in a quiet, serious tone. “Chief of Police here in town. I’m out making my nightly rounds.”
“You don’t look like a cop,” I said stupidly. “I mean, you’re not in uniform or anything.”
“No, not tonight.” He didn’t crack a smile.
I smiled, if for no other reason than to show him how it was done. But he didn’t return the gesture, just waved at Barney, nodded toward me, and kept walking. He hadn’t exactly been friendly, but Barney liked him and that was as good a reference as a person can get. I found myself watching Officer Jesse walk off into the darkness.
And that was a mistake. It was just the opening Barney was looking for. He scratched at the entrance to the shop and barked a friendly hello. There was really no way to leave Barney there and sneak home. My grandmother would be upset if she thought I’d let the dog go off on his own. And it was clear now, thanks to my momentary interest in Officer Jesse, that Barney was outside. I was left with no choice. So I made the best of it. I opened the door.
Inside the shop my grandmother was laughing with the women sitting in a circle around her. For a half second I wondered if they were laughing at my broken engagement, but I knew that was only my bruised ego talking.
“Look who’s here,” my grandmother said as she waved me to come in. “How was your nap? It was a long one.”
“Just what I needed.”
I moved in a little but still stayed close to the door. Barney, on the other hand, bounded into the middle of the circle to greet each of his ladies in turn. I don’t think any of them noticed me until they were done greeting him. When they did they each smiled enthusiastically.
“The granddaughter,” the oldest one said. I remembered her from my childhood visits. Maggie Sweeney, one of Eleanor’s dearest friends and a stern presence to a ten-year-old, and to me now. She looked the way old women used to look before they were running corporations and skydiving at eighty years old. She had gray hair pulled back in a bun and wore one of those Laura Ashley-style dresses, with a black floral print and a white lace collar. She had a warm face, though, and the greenest eyes I’d ever seen.
“She is,” my grandmother said, and looked around the room with a warning. “And nobody give her a hard time.”
The women nodded and smiled at me again.
“Sit down,” said another, and someone took some fabric off a chair in the corner and moved the chair to the circle. The whole group inched closer to leave enough space for me to join them.
I sat and tried to meet their smiles with my own. It was all very uncomfortable.
“These are the girls,” Eleanor said with a sweep of her hand. “Except Nancy. She couldn’t come tonight.”
“She’s missed a lot of meetings lately,” said one woman.
“Well, I suppose she spends enough time at the shop as it is.”
“Enough about who isn’t here. Let’s talk about who is,” Maggie said.
“Hi, Mrs. Sweeney,” I said, “it’s nice to see you again.” Then I turned to the others. “I’m Nell.”
“Everyone knows that, dear,” said a blonde with deep blue eyes and heavy makeup, who looked to be in her fifties. “Eleanor filled us in on all the details.”
I shot an angry look toward my grandmother, who smiled at me innocently. The rest of the women seemed to be studying me, waiting for me to launch into a story or burst into tears or otherwise entertain them. Instead I sat with an idiotic smile on my face and an embarrassed look in my eyes, trying to feel less strange in a room full of strangers.
“Leave her alone, Mom,” came a voice from the back. Finally, someone on my side. I turned to see a woman about my age coming up from the basement. “I’m Natalie. Don’t worry. They’re just excited to have a new recruit,” Natalie assured me. She was the picture of her mother, blond and blue-eyed, but Natalie wore no makeup at all, and she didn’t need to. “They won’t rest until every man, woman, and child knows how to quilt.”
“Are you interested in quilting?” Maggie turned to me, suddenly excited.
“She’s got talent but no discipline,” my grandmother offered. “I’ve tried to teach her.”
“I was twelve,” I said in my own defense, then regretted it because I knew what was coming.
“Well, if she has talent, then there’s hope,” said another woman who had been quiet up until then.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. A weak excuse, but something.
The heavily made-up blonde answered with a dismissive wave. “You’re in,” she laughed. “And once you’re in, there’s no getting out. Unless you die.”
They all laughed. I laughed a little too, but it was a nervous laugh.
CHAPTER 5
For the next dizzying hour I was introduced and reintroduced and then quizzed by each member of the club. It didn’t surprise me that Maggie was the leader, even with Eleanor in the room. A former librarian, she had raised eleven children and now had twenty-five grandchildren. Every one of them had at least one quilt, hand sewn by Maggie, who didn’t believe any machine, even a sewing machine, could do as good a job as a person.
Natalie was twenty-eight, only one year older than me, and the mother of a ten-month-old. She had a husband everyone in the group described as “tall, dark, and handsome,” which made Natalie roll her eyes. Her mother, Susanne, was the one with the makeup counter on her face. She turned out to be the artist of the group. Her quilts had won ribbons at national shows, and one had even been featured in a magazine.
“I got married very young,” she said to me. “Too young, I think. Didn’t have a chance to figure out who I was, as they say.”
“Have you figured it out yet?” came a voice from the other side of the group. Bernadette, known in the group as Bernie, was a hangover from of the sixties, now in her sixties. She was another familiar face among the crowd. I knew I had been introduced and reintroduced to her over the years, but the only thing I’d ever learned about her was that she owned the pharmacy in town and she had a warm, friendly face.
Susanne smiled toward Bernie. “Have I figured myself out yet?” she laughed. “I don’t think I want to know anymore. I certainly don’t want to know who my husband is.”
The others laughed with her. “I was nineteen,” said Maggie. “I found out pretty quickly it isn’t always roses and I love yous.”
“You got roses?” shouted Bernie. “I don’t think any of my husbands got me roses.”
“Why would you marry men who were so unromantic?” Natalie asked.
“The sex was good,” Bernie retorted. All the woman roared with laughter.
“Bernie, we have a newcomer in the room,” my grandmother admonished.
Bernie looked at me. “She won’t be a newcomer for long.” Bernie leaned in. “I have stories that could make even a girl living in New York blush.” Then she looked toward Eleanor. “But I won’t.” She turned to the fifth member of the group. “Carrie here, she has a romantic story to tell, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Carrie was, it looked to me, in her late forties. She began to tell me about herself but was interrupted by Bernie and Natalie, who felt they could tell Carrie’s life story much better. Apparently she had married right out of college, divorced three years later, and spent the next fifteen looking for Mr. Right, while amassing a small fortune as a New York stockbroker. When he didn’t appear, she decided to have a child. She quit her job, moved to Archers Rest, and scaled her lifestyle back so she could work as a consultant and stay home with her baby. It was a good plan, but she soon found a better one. Months after she gave birth to her son, she married his pediatrician. Now they also had a daughter.
“It wasn’t quite what I expected,” she said to me. “But it worked out.” All the women voiced their agreements. It was a not very subtle nod to my uncertain future, but it was much appreciated.
Every Friday, these woman cleared out a small amount of floor space amid an overflowing stock of fabric, patterns, rulers, and quilt-related books. Then they sat in a circle to gossip, eat sugar-laden treats and drink (only caffeinated) coffee. They passed around their latest quilting projects and complained about what they called UFOs, or “unfinished objects,” as Maggie explained.
“It happens when you start something with a great deal of excitement and then run out of interest about halfway through,” Maggie told me.
“Are we talking about marriage again?” Susanne laughed.
“Stop putting marriage down,” her daughter Natalie protested. “Some of us are happily married.”
Maggie let out an exaggerated sigh and continued. “The trick is not to get stubborn about it. If the project doesn’t work, then you have to let it go.”
“That must be frustrating,” I said.
Bernie’s eyes lit up and she leaned toward me. “It’s freeing,” she said, exaggerating the length of the words to, I’m guessing, make their importance clear. And they must have been important words, because the others all nodded in agreement. “With every quilt you make you have a picture in your mind of what it
should
be,” Bernie continued. “Then you start. You pick fabrics, you cut the fabrics, you sew the pieces together. All along there are compromises, mistakes, inspirations. When it works, then you are truly holding your dreams in your hands. When it doesn’t . . .” She shrugged.
“You just throw it out?” I asked, looking to my grandmother for confirmation. Eleanor saved bags of two-inch pieces of fabric, “just in case.” She kept a plastic bag with fabric and a needle to sew whenever she had time to kill. I couldn’t believe my grandmother would endorse wasting hours of work for artistic reasons. But she was nodding along with the rest of them.
“We trade sometimes,” Carrie admitted. “Or sew them into charity blankets.”
“I have a lot, so I usually give mine to Nancy,” Natalie admitted. “She finishes them off and sends them to her son’s college friends, who I guess don’t really care what the quilts look like as long as they’re warm.”
Maggie patted Natalie’s hand, as if to comfort her for having so many UFOs. It was an odd pair. Watching seventy-five-year-old Maggie laughing easily with Natalie, nearly fifty years her junior, made me a little envious. Aside from quilting, the two seemed to have little in common, but quilting was enough to bind them together. I wondered if my friendships were as tight.
But envy was one thing; joining the group was an entirely different matter. Suddenly, all I wanted was to head back to the house and sleep. I yawned.
“Oh, she’s tired,” Carrie pointed out.
“You should get her home, Eleanor,” suggested Bernie.
“The poor thing, she needs her rest,” agreed Susanne.
“I am sleepy,” I volunteered, and yawned again.
My grandmother nodded and patted Barney’s head. “Barney, take her home.”
Barney got up, went one more time around the circle to say his good-byes, and led me to the door.
“We’ll see you next Friday,” the group said in unison.
“Oh,” I stammered, “I don’t think so. I’m only here for the weekend.”
I opened the door and was almost free when I realized that all night I’d forgotten something. I turned back. “Thank you all for the quilt you made me. It’s more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
They each looked at me as if they were about to cry. As I left the shop, I knew the subject of my breakup had started up again.
CHAPTER 6
Morning came too soon. I could hear my grandmother downstairs and I knew it was only a matter of time before she came up looking for me.
Instead she sent her assistant. My door started to open slowly, and a blond furry snout sniffed in the opening. There was a grunt, more pushing, and then Barney was in the room, wagging his tail and sniffing at the bed for signs of life.
There was no point in staying in bed with this hairy alarm clock drooling and whimpering. I got up and made my way toward the kitchen to find myself some coffee.
“Are you up?” My grandmother stood at the door to the kitchen.
“Nope.” I smiled. “Still in bed.”
“Then you should get dressed.”
“I was going to eat first.”
“No food,” she said, and she walked past me to the front of the house.
No food? There was always food at her house. And not just food. Hot out of the oven blueberry crumble, melt in your mouth pot roast, garlic mashed potatoes. How could there not be food?
I love my grandmother, but one of the reasons I came to visit was the food. In New York, I’d gotten used to grabbing a muffin for breakfast, a salad for lunch, a slice of pizza for dinner. I had a kitchen the size of most people’s linen closets, so aside from making coffee, my cooking skills—such as they were—went unused. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a maestro in the kitchen. And though she also lived alone, she cooked every day. She cooked for herself, of course, but also for several senior citizens who, as she put it, “needed a little help to get going every day.” She cooked for school bake sales, town picnics, and for the charity drives of all three churches in town. If someone needed help, my grandmother was there with a pie.
Except, apparently, today.
I went after her to at least get her to make me some scrambled eggs. I found my grandmother by the front door talking quietly with Nancy.
“Well hello.” Nancy smiled as I walked toward her. “I wondered whether our paths would cross this weekend.”
“Hi, Nancy.” I hugged her lightly. “It’s been a while.”
“Well, a city girl can’t be expected to find many reasons to come up here,” she said.
“Thanks,” my grandmother responded sarcastically.
“Don’t take offense, Eleanor. It’s good she has her own life.” She looked me up and down. “Are you staying for a while this time?”