“Pearl,” Rhonda said, laughing. “That’s a lot of tickets, honey.”
“It’s for the furnace,” Pearl said. “And I’ve had my eye on that quilt since you hung it.”
She looked over at the wall where it was hanging. My quilt. The Double Wedding Ring in the soft colors.
“I never owned a quilt somebody made new,” she said.
She said it so simply. Not complaining. Just a fact, like the weather.
“Vern’s mother had some old ones,” she said. “But they were all worn through by the time they came to me. I’ve been sleeping under one with a hole in the middle for forty years.” She smiled. “I’d like to sleep under something new before I go. Just once.”
Rhonda counted the quarters. She tore off sixty dollars’ worth of tickets. Thirty-six tickets. At three for five, it should have been thirty-six. She gave Pearl thirty.
I noticed. I didn’t say anything.
Pearl folded her stubs carefully and put them in her coin purse. Then she went and sat down in the back row of the fellowship hall with a plate of meatloaf.
She didn’t win either.
When Rhonda said “Katie,” I looked at the back row. I couldn’t help it.
Pearl was sitting there with her coin purse in her lap. Her face didn’t change. Not a flicker.
And then she clapped for Katie.
Slowly. Politely. From the back row. The way you clap at a funeral when somebody finishes a hymn.
That was the part I couldn’t let go of.
Not the cheating. Not my four months of evenings. Not even Rhonda standing up there saying the Lord works in mysterious ways.
The sixty dollars.
A widow’s grocery money. Two hundred and forty quarters she’d saved, probably one at a time, from God knows where. On a paper chance. For a quilt she’d never own.
That’s what had me on a ladder scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
Chapter Four: The Visit
The second week, I drove into town on a Tuesday.
I told Dale I needed thread from the Ben Franklin. That was true. But I drove past the Ben Franklin and turned left on Third Street and parked across from the little white duplex by the grain elevator.
I sat in the car for a long time. I didn’t know what I was going to say.
Then I saw Pearl come out onto her porch. She was wearing her navy coat and carrying a plastic Hy-Vee bag full of something. She came slowly down the porch steps, one hand on the railing, and walked down the sidewalk toward the end of the block.
I followed her. Slowly. In the car. Like a fool.
She walked two blocks to the Casey’s General Store on Main Street. Not inside. Around the back. To the redemption machine by the dumpster, where you return your pop cans.
She opened her Hy-Vee bag and started feeding cans into the machine. One at a time. The machine sucked them in with a little rattle and spat out a ticket.
Five cents a can. That’s what Iowa pays for a returned can. The bottle bill.
She had maybe forty cans. Two dollars.
When she was done, she took the ticket into the store and came back out with two dollars in quarters. She put them in her cloth coin purse.
And walked home.
I sat in my car in the Casey’s parking lot and cried so hard I had to turn the engine off.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
Twelve hundred cans.
She walked the ditches. I found that out later. Along Highway 3, and the county road out past the cemetery, and the ball diamond after the Little League games. Picking up cans other people threw away. Every day. For years.
She took that money and bought raffle tickets for a quilt. For the furnace fund. For the church.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in bed next to Dale, listening to him snore and the wind push at the old windows. I thought about Pearl’s quilt with the hole in the middle. Forty years.
I thought about my mother. About sitting on the floor of her sewing room in Clarksville when I was eight, sorting scraps by color into coffee cans while she worked. About the sound of her treadle machine. About the way she’d hold up a finished quilt to the window and squint at it.
“A quilt is just a prayer you can sleep under,” she told me once. “Every stitch is a little wish for whoever’s going to use it.”
Around two in the morning, I got up.
I went downstairs in my robe and turned on the lamp in the front room. I went to the closet under the stairs and pulled out my scrap bins. Six big plastic tubs, full of fabric, sorted by color, the way my mother taught me.
I couldn’t undo the drawing. I couldn’t prove anything. I couldn’t make Rhonda shake the can.
But nobody could stop me making another quilt.
So I did.
Chapter Five: The Second Winter
I started the next night. After Dale went up to bed.
This time I made a Grandmother’s Flower Garden. It’s the oldest pattern I know. My grandmother made one. My mother made three. I’d never made one myself, because it takes forever.
It’s made of hexagons. Little six-sided pieces, each one about the size of a half dollar. You sew seven of them together into a flower: one in the center and six around it. Then you sew a ring of green hexagons around that, for the leaves. Then you sew the flowers together with white hexagons in between, like a garden path.
A queen-size Flower Garden takes about two thousand hexagons. Every one of them cut by hand and basted over a paper template and whipstitched to its neighbor.
One flower at a time.
I chose the colors carefully.
The petals were every color I had. Pinks and yellows and lavenders. Old feed sack prints from my mother’s scrap bins. A green check from a dress I wore in high school. A red calico from Dale’s mother’s apron. Little flowers from everybody’s life, all mixed together.
But the centers were all the same. Every single flower.
Blue. A soft, faded blue with a tiny white dot. It came from my mother’s old housedress. The one she wore every day in her kitchen for twenty years. The one she was wearing in the last picture I have of her, standing at her stove in Clarksville, laughing at something my father said.
After she died, I couldn’t throw it away. I’d kept it folded in my cedar chest for eleven years.
Now I cut it into hexagons. One for the heart of every flower.
Dale found me the first night. He came downstairs at midnight for a glass of water and saw the lamp on.
He stood in the doorway in his long underwear and looked at me in the rocker, with my lap full of paper hexagons and Mom’s thimble on my finger.
“Another one,” he said.
“Another one.”
He didn’t ask who it was for. He knew.
He went to the kitchen and filled his glass. On his way back through, he stopped and put more wood in the stove. Then he went up to bed.
He did that every night that winter. Put more wood in the stove on his way to bed. Never said a word about it.
The winter was long that year. It snowed the week before Thanksgiving and didn’t stop. By January, there were drifts against the machine shed higher than Dale’s head.
I sewed through all of it.
Some nights I’d do one flower. Some nights only half of one. My eyes aren’t what they were, and the hexagons are small, and my mother’s thimble was getting thin on top, just like hers had.
I counted them, the way she taught me. Stitches to the inch. Hexagons to the flower. Flowers to the row.
When I got to fifty flowers, I laid them out on the dining room table. Dale came in from chores and stood looking at them.
“That’s a lot of little pieces,” he said.
“Two thousand and four,” I said.
He whistled.
In December, the church council met to talk about the furnace.
The raffle had raised eleven hundred and forty-six dollars. With everything else, the bake sales and the free-will offerings and a gift from the Hoffman family, the furnace fund had about nine thousand dollars. Still almost six thousand short.
Kaufman Heating said they couldn’t hold the price past spring.
Dale was on the council that year. He came home from the meeting in a quiet mood. He hung his coat on the hook by the door and stood by the woodstove warming his hands.
“Rhonda gave a report,” he said. “On the raffle. She said it was the most successful fundraiser in church history.” He paused. “She thanked you three times.”
I didn’t look up from my hexagon.
“And she said,” Dale went on, “that Katie’s going to put the quilt on the gift table at the wedding. So everybody can see the beautiful prize she won.”
My needle stopped.
I didn’t say anything. I put three more stitches in. Then I set it down.
“Dale,” I said. “Do you know anything about Pearl Wendt’s house? The heat?”
He looked surprised. “Why?”
“I drove by on Tuesday. All her windows have plastic on them. And there’s frost on the inside of the front one.”
Dale was quiet for a moment.
“That’s Howard Brenner’s duplex,” he said. “Out of Cedar Falls. He doesn’t fix anything. Folks say that furnace has been on its last legs for years.”
I picked up my needle again.
“Somebody should look at it,” I said.
Chapter Six: The Wedding
Katie Pfeiffer married Tyler Brandt on the second Saturday in June. At Grace Lutheran. With the reception afterward in the fellowship hall.
The same fellowship hall. The same folding tables. The same coffee urn.
We went, of course. Dale is her uncle. He wore his good suit and I wore my blue dress and we sat on the bride’s side, three rows back. Rhonda cried through the whole ceremony. Katie looked beautiful.
I want to say that clearly. She looked beautiful. She’s a sweet girl, Katie. She always has been. She used to follow me around my kitchen when she was little, asking to lick the beaters.
At the reception, the gift table was set up along the back wall. Right where the clothesline had been in October.
My quilt was on it.
Folded on top, with a little card propped in front of it, written in Rhonda’s curly handwriting.
Handmade Double Wedding Ring Quilt. Won by the bride at the Grace Lutheran Fall Raffle! Made by her Aunt Joan. A sign from above!
People stopped to look at it all evening. Women ran their fingers along the binding.
“Isn’t that the luckiest thing,” I heard Doris Engel say. “A wedding ring quilt, for a wedding.”
“I always say the Lord has a sense of humor,” somebody else said.
I stood by the punch bowl and smiled.
Across the room, I saw Pearl. She was sitting at a table by herself in the corner, in a flowered dress that must have been thirty years old. She had a piece of wedding cake in front of her. She hadn’t touched it.
She was looking at the gift table. At my quilt.
Then she looked away.
Halfway through the dancing, Katie found me by the punch bowl.
She was flushed and happy, with her veil off and her shoes in her hand. She hugged me hard.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the quilt. I’m going to keep it forever. I mean it.”
“I’m glad you like it, honey.”
She pulled back and looked at me. Something moved across her face. Just for a second.
“Aunt Joan,” she said, quieter. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She opened her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder. Rhonda was across the room, laughing with the Lutheran Women, looking our way.
Katie closed her mouth.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’ll ask you sometime.”
She went back to the dance floor.
Dale drove us home that night. In the dark, with the window cracked.
“She knows,” he said, just past the Mueller place.
“Who?”
“Katie. She knows. I watched her face when she was talking to you.”
I looked out the window.
“Maybe,” I said.
I finished the Flower Garden in March. On the first warm day of the year, with the windows open for the first time since October.
I put in the last stitch of the binding at four-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Then I took it out to the clothesline in the backyard and hung it up in the sunshine, the way my mother always did with a new quilt. Let the air through it. Let it breathe.
Dale came around the corner of the barn and stopped.
He stood there for a long time in his work boots, looking at it. Two thousand and four hexagons. Every flower a different color, every heart the same faded blue.
“Your mother’s dress,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
He walked over and put his hand flat on one of the blue centers. Gently. Like he was touching her.
“She’d have liked that,” he said.
Chapter Seven: The Storm Door
In April I folded it into a pillowcase.
A plain white one, ironed, from my linen closet. I folded the quilt in thirds and then in thirds again and slid it in carefully, the way you’d put a baby in a bassinet.
I drove to Pearl’s side of town on a Wednesday afternoon. Third Street. The little white duplex by the grain elevator.
The plastic was still on the windows. Grayer now, after a whole winter. Peeling at one corner.
