An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler (89 page)

Vinnie didn’t know why Aunt Lynn didn’t have any children of her own, except that ladies had to have a husband first, and Aunt Lynn didn’t. That was one of the things that the other aunts didn’t like about her. They also didn’t like that she wore lipstick and worked in an office and had turned down two marriage proposals. Vinnie didn’t understand why the aunts whispered such things when Aunt Lynn wasn’t there; she thought Aunt Lynn was very pretty and nice, and her life sounded terribly exciting.

When she left several weeks later, Vinnie was sorry to see her go. She asked Aunt Lynn to stay, but Aunt Lynn said her boss needed her. “Your Daddy will look after you,” she promised, then kissed Vinnie and carried her suitcase outside, where a taxi waited to take her to the railroad station.

As the days passed, it seemed that Aunt Lynn had taken Daddy’s restored energy with her. He still went to work and sent the children off to school each morning, but in the evenings he sat alone in his chair by the radio, smoking and listening to music. Vinnie eventually grew accustomed to the gloom, but her memories of happiness grew ever fainter.

She ached for her mother. She ached with the large, constant pain of knowing her mother was gone, and in dozens of small ways when each day brought another sign of how much Vinnie still needed her. The sight of an incomplete Nine Patch block reminded Vinnie that her mother would never finish the quilting lessons that had begun only months before. Each morning Mother had plaited her brown locks into two smooth braids, but the braids her father attempted hung loose, with tufts of hair sticking out here and there, and her bangs grew nearly to her chin. When the popular girl who sat across the aisle at school told her she looked like a sheepdog, Vinnie pretended not to hear her and tried to poke the unruly bangs into the braids. When that failed, she tucked the strands behind her ears. She thought she looked better, but the popular girl snickered. Vinnie’s face grew hot with shame, and she whispered, “At least I’m not worst in the class in spelling.”

The popular girl’s face grew sour, and at once Vinnie knew she should have ignored her. At recess the girl waited until the teacher was out of earshot before calling her a sheepdog again, and before long her friends had joined in, laughing and jeering. Vinnie stood very still, watching the popular girl’s sour little mouth blabbering insults, the smug disdain in her eyes, the sunlight gleaming on her two perfect, blond braids—and then something inside Vinnie exploded. She charged into the girl, knocking her to the ground. By the time the teacher ran over and pulled her aside, the popular girl was sobbing, her face red where Vinnie had repeatedly slapped her.

Vinnie was sent home. When her father read the principal’s note, he sighed so heavily that Vinnie grew even more ashamed. She stammered out an explanation, but her father seemed not to hear her. Then he said, “Bring me the scissors.”

Her heart sank as she found her mother’s sewing basket, untouched for so many months, and brought her father the scissors. He sat her down in his chair by the radio, combed out her sloppy braids, and began to trim her bangs. He frowned in concentration as he worked, cutting straight across above her eyes, trimming the uneven edges, then pausing to study his work before cutting again.

“Daddy, that’s short enough,” Vinnie said, alarmed by the sight of the snipped ends collecting on her lap.

“Be still. I’m trying to make this even.”

Vinnie hoped for the best, but when her father finally sat back, satisfied, and sent her to look in the mirror, she discovered a short brown stubble where her bangs had once been.

She felt tears gathering, and tried to hide her face before her father noticed, but his eyes met hers in the mirror. “I can fix it,” he said hastily. “If I cut the sides a little shorter, they’ll blend in.”

“Do you think so?”

“Sure,” he said, and steered her back to the chair. Vinnie clutched her hands together in her lap and closed her eyes, cringing inside with each snip of the scissors. As her head grew lighter, her stomach grew more queasy. She was afraid to open her eyes, but when her father told her to, she obeyed.

She looked into the mirror, and a familiar face stared back at her in horror. Frankie’s face. Daddy had cut her hair so that it looked exactly like Frankie’s.

She burst into tears. “I can’t go to school like this.”

Her father stared at her, an odd, distant expression on his face. “Your mother is dead, and you’re crying over your hair.”

Vinnie’s tears choked off abruptly. She climbed out of the chair and went to her room.

The next day she went to school and got into another fight when the popular girl’s cronies teased her for looking like a boy. The following morning she walked to school with Frankie as usual, but as soon as he ran off to join his friends, she doubled back and hid in her bedroom. The school contacted her father when she had been absent a week. He was instructed to bring her in for a conference, where the principal lectured them on truancy while Vinnie stared at the floor and her father repeated assurances that Vinnie’s absences were over.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” her father said as they walked home. His voice was flat and hopeless. “Frankie doesn’t give me this kind of trouble. I wish … ”

He never finished the thought, and Vinnie found herself wondering what exactly he wished.

She was only a little surprised when Aunt Lynn returned the next week. Her father gave Vinnie a quick hug, so hard it almost hurt, then took Frankie to the park to play catch.

When they were alone, Aunt Lynn smiled at Vinnie, but her voice was tentative when she said, “Your father and I thought maybe you could come to live with me.”

Vinnie’s heart sank. She liked Aunt Lynn, but this was her home. “For how long?”

Aunt Lynn shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“What if I don’t want to?” she asked in a small voice.

Aunt Lynn watched her without speaking for a moment, and Vinnie could see the sympathy in her eyes. “Come on. Let’s pack your things.”

They packed all her clothes and books, and her favorite toys. Vinnie was too numb to cry. She worked slowly, hoping her father would return before she left, but all too soon the last box was filled, and she realized her father would stay out even past Frankie’s bedtime to avoid her.

A black car waited at the curb, its back door and trunk open. Aunt Lynn loaded the boxes into the car, motioned for Vinnie to climb into the back seat, then sat beside her and shut the door.

A blond woman in the driver’s seat turned around and grinned. “Hiya, Vinnie,” she said. “Welcome aboard the Lynn and Lena Express. Hang on to your hat.”

Vinnie was too heartsick to reply. She shut her eyes and let Aunt Lynn pull her close as they drove away from the only home she had ever known. She never once looked back.

In the decades that had passed since then, she never forgot how easily a girl could be sent away and ignored as if she had never existed. As she grew older, she realized that age was no protection: Wives could become inconvenient and be put aside as easily as daughters.

Now, with her eighty-second birthday only a day away, she had met a kindhearted woman who deserved better, just as Vinnie herself had deserved better so long ago. Vinnie recognized the grief she saw in Megan’s eyes, and the spark of resolve that had not yet been quenched. She remembered what that felt like, and how only the love of two compassionate women had helped her grow from a lonely little girl into a strong, resilient woman. It was long past time she helped another as she had been helped.

If Vinnie had her way—and she usually did—she would see her new friend happy again before another birthday passed.

Megan saved seats for Donna and Grace in Color Theory, and was pleased when Grace came to sit beside them without waiting to be invited. At the beginning of class, Gwen assigned an exercise, working with paints to explore tints and hues. Each student selected a tube of her favorite color, squeezed a sample onto an artist’s palette, and colored the first section of a chart. Next Gwen told them to mix in white paint, one drop at a time, and to fill the chart with the resulting color variations.

Donna tried to convince Megan to use purple, but Megan snatched the blue tube before Donna could hide it. Grace chose red, so Donna took yellow. “Someone at this table has to be daring,” she said.

“What’s so daring about yellow?” Megan teased.

“For a quilter, yellow is daring,” Grace said. “Some quilters refuse to use it at all, and some use so much that it completely overpowers the other colors in the quilt. It’s challenging to strike the right balance.”

“Besides, it’s next to impossible to find the perfect shade of yellow in a fabric store,” Donna said. “You want a butter yellow and you have to settle for canary or daffodil.”

“Recently I’ve resorted to dyeing my own to get the colors I need.” Grace frowned at the tip of her paintbrush. “Although to be honest, ‘recently’ is a relative term. I haven’t dyed anything in more than a year or started anything else, for that matter.”

“I have the opposite problem,” Donna said. “I have so many projects in the works that I won’t possibly live long enough to finish them all.”

“You should do what my mother does,” Megan said. “She keeps each of her works in progress in a separate box labeled with the name of one of her friends. If, God forbid, she should pass away unexpectedly, each friend will receive the box with her name on it and think my mother was working on a quilt especially for her. She uses the names of women she doesn’t get along with, too. She says it’s a great way to make sure she has plenty of guilt-ridden, sobbing mourners at her funeral.”

Grace laughed, but Donna shuddered. “That’s morbid.”

Megan smiled to herself. Donna only thought so because she didn’t understand her mother’s sense of humor. Megan wished she had inherited more of it and less of her father’s somber pragmatism. Maybe then she’d be able to laugh off her failures instead of brooding over them. Maybe then she wouldn’t worry about Robby’s tendency to embellish the truth beyond recognition and how she could never hope to fully compensate for his father’s absence.

“Is your quilter’s block because of your daughter?” Donna asked Grace.

Grace hesitated. “Yes … well, that’s part of it.” She added a drop of white paint to her palette and fell silent as she blended the new shade. “I don’t know what bothers me most: that she’s seeing an older man or that she hasn’t told me about him.”

Megan thought of her own futile attempts at dating after the divorce. “Maybe she doesn’t want to mention him until she knows whether she’s serious about him.”

“That’s exactly the problem. She must be serious about him, because she already introduced him to her son. She’s adamant about not letting him meet casual boyfriends.” Grace sighed. “I think I’ve answered my own question. What bothers me most is that she didn’t tell me. For all I know, he might be a perfectly wonderful man.”

“He probably is,” Megan said to reassure her, but Donna shook her head.

“I keep telling myself the same thing about Brandon—my daughter’s fiancé,” Donna said. “I feel like I’m trying to convince myself that everything is going to be okay, because deep down, I don’t really believe it. Does that make any sense?”

Grace nodded emphatically. Megan watched the two women, linked by their similar worries, and thought with some trepidation about her own child. What, if anything, could Megan do to help Robby avoid repeating his parents’ dismal mistakes?

Her pragmatism asserted itself. There was no point in worrying about Robby’s future relationships now. She’d have time enough to worry when she allowed Robby to begin dating—which she’d be ready to do in about twenty years.

Just then, she heard footsteps behind her and felt a light touch on her shoulder. She looked up to find Sylvia Compson.

“Megan Donohue?”

“Yes?”

“Your mother’s on the phone. You may take the call in the parlor, if you’d like some privacy.”

“My mom?” Megan pushed back her chair and rose. “Is something wrong?”

“She didn’t say so, dear. I’m sure she would have if it were an emergency.”

Megan quickly gathered her things and followed Sylvia out of the classroom, finding no comfort in the older woman’s sympathetic assurances. Robby. She pictured broken limbs, car accidents, malevolent strangers. By the time they reached the formal parlor in the west wing, Megan’s heart was pounding, and she snatched up the phone without remembering to thank her hostess, who quickly departed. “Hello?” she said breathlessly into the phone.

“Honey?”

“Mom? What’s wrong? Is Robby okay?”

“He’s fine,” her mother assured her, then lowered her voice. “I’m so sorry to call you like this, but Robby’s upset. He’s been crying all morning, and I don’t think he’ll calm down unless he talks to you.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Nothing happened, honey, it’s just that …” She hesitated. “He’s afraid you aren’t coming back. I hate to tell you this, but he thinks you’ve left him like his father did.”

“Could you put him on the phone, please?” Megan said, fighting to keep her voice steady.

“Of course.”