Between Heaven and Texas (7 page)

“I was thinking I might get a job.”

Mary Dell rolled her eyes. “With two children and a baby on the way? Don't be crazy. Besides, you're part owner of the ranch. You're entitled to a share of the profits.”

“But Donny is doing all the work. I just don't feel right about it, Mary Dell.”

“Oh, stop it. You'd do the same for me. We're the only sisters we've got. Like Daddy said, ‘We take care of ourselves and our own.' And, anyway, you and I have to stick together. If only to keep Momma from riding roughshod over all of us.”

Mary Dell laughed, trying to keep things light, but Lydia Dale's face was serious.

“I would do the same for you, Mary Dell. If you needed it, I'd do anything I could to help you. I hope you know that.”

“I know.”

Lydia Dale smiled, looked her sister up and down. “I don't know how you were able to keep it a secret so long. Five months along! You can hardly tell.”

Mary Dell looked down. “Well, these ta-tas of mine make it easier to hide. Kind of balances everything else out.”

“I'm so excited for you! Howard Hobart Bebee. How do you know it's a boy? Did you have one of those new ultrasound things?”

Mary Dell made a face. “We had one, but the picture was fuzzy and the baby was turned the wrong way, so we couldn't see anything. The doctor said we could get an amniocentesis test if we wanted; that would have told us the sex for sure, but we didn't want to risk it. The heart looked fine, so that's all I was worried about. I'm calling it Howard because Donny is sure it's a boy. I don't care one way or the other. I just want it to be happy, and healthy, and kindhearted.”

Lydia Dale moved close to give her sister another hug. The two sisters' bellies were pressed so close that, but for the separation of skin, tissue, and amniotic fluid, the unborn cousins could have had a hug of their own.

“That's all any mother wants,” Lydia Dale said. “And he will be, Mary Dell. Howard Hobart Bebee will be all that and more. I'm sure of it.”

C
HAPTER 11

 

V
ery early on Christmas morning, Mary Dell woke to the sight of Donny coming through the bedroom door wearing a Santa suit and carrying her breakfast on a tray.

“Merry Christmas, little momma!”

Mary Dell rubbed her eyes and took a look out the window. It was still dark. She groaned and propped herself up on pillows.

“What time is it?”

“Five o'clock. I was up half the night putting Howard's Christmas presents together, so I figured I might as well make breakfast. Look here,” he said as he set the tray down next to Mary Dell on the bed, her stomach now too prominent to allow him to place it over her lap. “We've got eggs and orange juice and bacon and grits. The bacon is a little burnt, and the grits are a little runny, but I think they'll taste all right.”

Mary Dell kissed him on the cheek. “Bacon is good a little burnt. Thank you, honey. That's quite an outfit you're wearing.”

Donny held out his arms so she could get the full effect. “Saw it on sale at the Woolworth's in Waco. It came with a sack to put the presents in too, but it wasn't big enough to hold everything so I didn't fool with it.”

Mary Dell sipped her orange juice, wishing Donny had thought to make coffee too. “We've got too many presents to fit in Santa's sack?” She yawned.

“Not us. Howard. Let me tell you something, those people who print ‘some assembly required' on toy boxes are the biggest liars on God's green earth. I about needed an engineering degree to put the fire engine together. Still have three washers left over. Can't figure out where they go.”

Mary Dell blinked several times, willing herself into wakefulness. “Fire engine? You bought our unborn child a fire engine?”

Donny grinned. “Yep. Big enough to ride in. Has a siren, a battery-powered engine, and a hose that squirts real water. Finish up your breakfast and come out to the tree. You can see for yourself.”

 

Donny shared his wife's love of all things big, gaudy, and shiny. Together they had picked out the biggest, gaudiest, shiniest tree they could find—a nine-foot-tall fir with a circumference as wide as a fat woman in a hoopskirt, coated in a thick spray of white flocking flecked with gold glitter—and decorated the branches with fourteen strings of blue bubble lights before hanging them with purple, gold, scarlet, and lime-green glass ornaments and five boxes of silver tinsel.

The living room of the two-bedroom, two-bath double-wide Donny and Mary Dell bought when they married and installed on its own electric and sewer system about a half mile from Dutch and Taffy's place wasn't large. The Christmas tree by itself took up about half the floor space; the toys took up most of the rest.

Besides the fire engine—which truly was big enough for a child, and not just a toddler but a child of seven or eight, to ride in—the gifts Donny purchased included a football, a basketball, a baseball and bat, a four-foot-tall stuffed giraffe, a replica of the space shuttle made from chunky plastic and suitable for toddlers, a red toy lawn mower that spat out soap bubbles, two tiny green bicycles with training wheels already attached, as well as a larger purple one with a white banana seat and matching wicker basket, and an even bigger blue bike with a horn on the handle and orange flames painted on the chain guard, a fishing pole and tackle box, a toy six-shooter and holster, a teeny-tiny Western shirt of blue gingham with rhinestone snaps instead of buttons and white fringe on the yoke, a tiny white Stetson, shiny black cowboy boots with silver stitching, a prancing plastic palomino horse suspended on springs hung from a metal frame, a set of wooden ABC blocks, a jack-in-the-box, a toy doctor's kit, a chemistry set, and an entire set of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Mary Dell's eyes bulged when she saw the evidence of her husband's generosity.

“Donny! Have you lost your mind? Where did you get all this?”

Donny's smile faded. He scratched his left ear.

“Mostly at Toys‘R'Us in Waco,” he said. “But I found the boots, shirt, and hat in the Sears catalog, and I bought the encyclopedia from a man who knocked on the door one day while you were over at your sister's. What's the matter? Don't you like it?”

Mary Dell spread out her hands helplessly, searching for words. “Well, it's . . . it's just . . . you've got four bicycles here, honey. How many do you think we need?”

“I bought those other three for your sister's kids. Jeb's been moping around so much. Thought it might cheer him up, and of course, I had to get something for Cady and the new baby too.”

“That was real nice of you, Donny.”

“We can afford it, if that's what you're worried about,” he said defensively.

“I'm not worried,” Mary Dell said gently, aware that she'd wounded his pride. “It's just that this is an awful lot of Christmas. What's there left to give him next year?”

“Have you been to that Toys‘R'Us store?” Donny asked. When Mary Dell shook her head, he said, “Well, it's about as big as Texas Stadium, no kidding, stocked floor to ceiling with toys, sports equipment, remote-control cars, games, bicycles—even playhouses and swing sets. I didn't buy but a tenth of what I could have. Didn't want to overwhelm the little guy, not right off.”

Mary Dell tried to suppress a smile. “That was good thinking, honey.”

Donny narrowed his eyes. “Fine. Make fun of me if you want,” he said, “but this is my first and probably my only son we're talking about. He's going to have the best of everything and all the opportunities I never did.

“If Howard wants to be a rancher, then fine. He can be a rancher. And if he wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman, an astronaut, or a quarterback, or president of the United States, then he can do that. I don't want anything to hold him back. I don't know what our boy is going to do, but I do know it's going to be something great. Something you and I could never have imagined. He's going to surprise us, darlin'.”

Donny crossed the room, stepping over the bubble mower to reach his wife's side, knelt down in front of her chair, and rested his head against Mary Dell's stomach.

“You wait and see if I'm not right. This boy is going to be something special. One of a kind. Aren't you, Howard?”

The baby kicked. Donny looked up at Mary Dell with a broad grin.

“Did you see that? He heard me!”

Mary Dell bent forward and kissed the top of her husband's head.

C
HAPTER 12

 

D
onny was a good provider, and that was fortunate because he had very definite ideas about who should and shouldn't play the role of family breadwinner.

Not long after they married, Mary Dell had put out the idea of her getting a job in town, but Donny was absolutely against it. Since Mary Dell figured she'd soon be too busy raising children to work outside the home, she had not fought him on it. However, when a third miscarriage made it apparent that motherhood was not going to be her full-time career anytime soon, she decided it was time to think about resurrecting her childhood dream of becoming a dress designer.

Though his position on the roles of men and women hadn't altered, Donny could see that Mary Dell was unhappy, so he withdrew his earlier objections to the idea of her working,
if
she could figure out a way to work from home and
if
it didn't interfere with her taking care of him and their home. At the end of a long day of work, he wanted to see his wife's pretty face. That was the best part of his day.

Mary Dell agreed to this. Using the $350 seed money he gave her, she purchased fabric, notions, a not-too-used used sewing machine, and booth space at the annual Methodist Women's Christmas Craft Show. This, Mary Dell decided, would be the perfect venue to launch her new clothing business.

She stitched up twenty dresses, all beautifully constructed and sewn from a collection of fabrics in colors, patterns, and textures that only Mary Dell could love, hung them up on a rack at the craft show, and waited for customers. None came. She didn't sell a single dress.

Mary Dell was heartbroken. But she was never one to wallow in self-pity, or waste expensive fabric, so she ripped out the seams (which she'd sewn in sizes that fit a more standard figure, in other words, one smaller and less voluptuous than her own), trimmed off the raveled edges, salvaged the yards of rickrack, lace, buttons, and froufrou trimmings, and spent the whole winter, spring, and summer turning the unwanted dresses into scrap quilts, with surprising results.

Those garish, gaudy, overtrimmed creations that no one besides Mary Dell would consider wearing didn't work as dresses, but when patched into crazy quilts and decorated with bits of beading, and ribbons, and lace, then further embellished with all the fancy hand embroidery Mary Dell had learned at Grandma Silky's knee—blanket stitches, bird tracks, back stitches, French knots, and whatnot—the results were charming and feminine, the kind of quilts a Victorian lady might lay at the foot of her brass bed or drape over the back of her red velvet sofa.

When the holidays rolled around, she carted her pile of quilts back to the craft fair, hoping to sell at least one or two. By lunchtime, every quilt was gone. Mary Dell was surprised and delighted by her success. Several ladies who arrived too late to buy a quilt tried to commission her to stitch up more in time for Christmas gift-giving, offering to pay in advance. She was flattered by the offers, but considering the pittance she earned per hour of effort and the tight schedule, Mary Dell declined.

But when two ladies, sisters, begged Mary Dell to give them a class in quilt making, Mary Dell agreed to give it a try. She'd been teaching quilting ever since.

Because it was impossible to accommodate more than three students at a time in the living room of Mary Dell and Donny's trailer and she only taught classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Mary Dell never made much from her classes. However, she did earn enough to support her fabric habit, make payments on a fancy made-in-Switzerland sewing machine, and take Donny out for a round of beers and an evening of line dancing at the Ice House every other Saturday. Teaching quilting was more of a hobby than a business, but Mary Dell enjoyed it.

Of course, she had her fits and starts. It took time for her to appreciate that what seemed obvious to her was not always obvious to others and to understand how to explain things in clear and simple language. The most important quality in a good teacher, she realized, was the ability to instill confidence in her students, to give them permission to experiment and help them realize that mistakes aren't really “mistakes” as such, but an opportunity to learn something new or rethink your original idea and come up with a different one, sometimes a better one. Her biggest and best tools for communicating that were her sense of humor, her ability to laugh at herself, and her insistence that quilting was supposed to be
fun.
If it wasn't fun, Mary Dell often told her students, then it was time to take a break.

When students saw that even the teacher had her “uh-oh” moments and could chuckle about them, they didn't feel so self-conscious about their failures. As the years passed and Mary Dell honed her communication skills and added to her own knowledge about the history, art, and techniques of quilting, she became a very good teacher.

About five years after she began teaching quilting, Mary Dell was flipping through the glossy pages of
Quilt Treasures,
her favorite quilting magazine, when she came upon a set of instructions explaining how readers could submit designs to the magazine. Mary Dell was excited right down to the tips of her pink cowboy boots. Until then, she'd never stopped to consider that the quilts shown in magazines might come from the imaginations of ordinary people—people like her!

Without telling anyone what she was doing, Mary Dell took and printed several photos of a quilt she'd designed using a Churn Dash block, wrote a pattern and cover letter, and sent everything off to C. J. Evard, editor-in-chief of
Quilt Treasures
magazine, Dallas, Texas.

Then she waited.

While she waited, she conjured up mental images of what C. J. Evard, who she'd decided must be named Claudia Jean but went by her initials because it sounded more genteel, was like. Mary Dell spent a lot of time thinking about C. J. Evard, coloring in the outline she'd created in her own imagination, until the name C. J. Evard summoned up a three-dimensional image in Mary Dell's mind, an independent and glamorous woman who lived the sort of life others could only dream of.

She was, Mary Dell decided, a tall and willowy natural blonde with hazel-green eyes. Being a businesswoman, C. J. Evard dressed in suits with big shoulder pads made of satin or shantung, maybe even silk brocade. She read a lot, being an editor and all, so Mary Dell figured she wore glasses, but very elegant ones that made her look wise and serious but stylish. She owned a pair of diamond earrings the size of dimes and always kept a thin gold pen tucked behind her ear. She was, of course, a brilliant quilter. She could join the points of an eight-pointed star in her sleep and could hand-quilt fourteen stitches to the inch. She was a master of every technique—piecing, appliqué, reverse appliqué, trapunto, foundation piecing, English paper piecing, and a bunch of other styles and techniques that Mary Dell had probably never even heard of.

Miss Evard (Mary Dell had decided that she must be single. How would a married woman have had time to develop all these accomplishments and run a whole magazine?) was well traveled. She had gone to college. And Paris and Rome. She had a big office with an enormous white French Provincial desk and a secretary who hung on her every word, following her down the hall taking notes on everything Miss Evard said.

Mary Dell was sure that Miss Evard was always on the lookout for new talent. And that when she saw the photos of Mary Dell's quilt and read the pattern, she would be so overcome that her knees would actually go weak. She would have to sit down for a moment to collect herself, her heart palpitating beneath the lapels of her silk brocade suit. Then she would press a button that would sound a buzzer to bring her secretary, who Mary Dell had decided was named Mrs. Frost, to her desk, pen and pad in hand.

C. J. Evard would look up at Mrs. Frost with tears of joy in her eyes and say, “Mrs. Frost, take a letter. . . .”

A letter.
The
letter! The letter that would change Mary Dell's life! But not more than she wanted it to. Not in any way that might upset Donny or mean she had to leave Too Much. Well, not very often. Maybe just once or twice a year. Maybe to Houston? Or Paris? No. That would be too far. Houston, then.

After three months, a letter in a creamy envelope with a
Quilt Treasures
logo bearing a Dallas postmark did arrive. Mary Dell took a deep breath, opened the envelope, and pulled out a letter that said:

It would be the first of many such letters she would receive. Mary Dell refused to give up.

 

Her Wednesday class was her favorite because it was composed of her three original students, women who had signed up for her very first class and become friends. Pearl and Pauline Dingus were the eldest and youngest of the six daughters of Marvel Anne Dingus and the Reverend Charles Dingus, retired former minister of the First Baptist Church. Susan Satterfield, known as Sweetums, was their cousin.

After so many years together, the Wednesday classes were more like open sewing sessions than formal quilting lessons. She felt funny about taking money from the Wednesday group, but the ladies insisted on continuing to pay the five-dollar-a-week class fee, so Mary Dell worked hard to make sure they got their money's worth, continually searching out new techniques and projects to challenge them.

This week, because Valentine's Day would soon be upon them, the ladies were working on wall hangings with a hearts-and-flowers motif. The design was Mary Dell's own, but her students had realized long ago that Mary Dell's success in fabric selection was limited to crazy quilts. Pearl, Pauline, and Sweetums always picked out their own fabric. While the three women worked on their wall hangings, Mary Dell hand-stitched the binding on a crib quilt for Lydia Dale's baby.

“I thought you already made a baby quilt for Lydia Dale,” Pearl commented when Mary Dell explained what she was working on.

“Lydia Dale didn't like it. She didn't come right out and say so, but she said that she wasn't sure that orange, pomegranate, and lime would go in a nursery with yellow-striped wallpaper. Momma said it looked more like a fruit salad than a baby quilt.”

Pearl chuckled. “Orange, pomegranate, and lime? That sounds like how one of my migraines looks.”

Mary Dell tied off a stitch and shrugged. She was used to their teasing and tried not to take it personally. She liked what she liked and didn't care, not much anyway, that the rest of the world preferred to wear a different shade of rose-colored glasses.

“Well,
I
thought it was nice, so I kept it for Howard and made another quilt for Lydia Dale's baby. Good thing she's overdue, or I never would have finished in time. The doctor says if the baby doesn't come on its own by tomorrow, they're going to have to induce.”

She snipped off the tail of the thread, flipped the now-finished quilt to the front, and asked, “What do you think?”

The women gasped.

“Gosh-all hemlock! Will you look at that?”

“Isn't it just the sweetest thing you ever saw?”

“Well, I never did! It's beautiful!”

The baby quilt, composed of six-inch Grandmother's Fan blocks, was intricately and precisely stitched with a skill few quilters could hope to match. Knowing Mary Dell, the perfection of the stitching didn't surprise the women, but the color composition did.

The “slats” of the fan, radiating like pointy-edged flower petals surrounding a center circle of deep yellow the color of egg yolks laid in winter, were made up of small-scale prints of jade, emerald, sapphire, cobalt, azure, and amethyst, rich colors, exotic colors, radiant colors, like gemstones lying at the bottom of a tropical lagoon or orchids growing wild behind crumbling walls of a secret garden, colors that none of the women would have thought to put into a baby quilt but, especially when set against a background of egg yolk yellow that matched the block centers, which looked exactly right together, surprising but not jarring, harmonious but not dull. It was a stunning quilt.

Pauline, who was a little bit nearsighted, which probably explained why the points of her quilts never quite matched, put her hand against her cheek and leaned down to get a closer look at the quilt.

“Mary Dell, you've made some awful nice quilts in your time, but this is the best ever. So pretty! Honey, if I didn't know you were the only woman in three counties who could stitch six-inch Grandmother's Fan blocks and have every one of them come out perfect, I'd have said somebody else made this quilt. Or at least chose the colors.”

Mary Dell's skin was thick but not impermeable, and she frowned, annoyed by the backhanded nature of Pauline's compliment.

“Lydia Dale picked out the fabric,” she admitted.

The women exchanged knowing glances. It all made sense now. Lydia Dale didn't quilt but she had beautiful taste. When Sweetums decided to redecorate her family room, she'd asked Lydia Dale to help her pick out wallpaper and paint.

Pauline didn't want to hurt Mary Dell's feelings, but felt compelled to point out what she was sure everybody else was thinking. “Mary Dell, honey, have you ever thought about asking your sister to help pick out your quilt fabric? Because I'll tell you . . .” She sighed and clasped her hands to her breast, seemingly enraptured as she gazed at the beautiful baby quilt. “If she did, I think the fair judges would have awarded your quilts a pile of blue ribbons by now, instead of all those honorable mentions.”