Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (25 page)

“Russ?”

“Do you remember?” Three days had passed since Christine had driven off with the boxes. Elaine’s possessions were surely scattered by now; he had no hope of gathering them together again. “The cartons. Her quilting things. Where did you take them?”

“Russ—”

“I need to find her cancer quilt. You put it in a green and white carton that used to hold copier paper. Did you donate it or throw it out or—”

“Russ,” said Christine. “I have it.”

She had kept everything for him, every box, a safeguard against future regret. Later that day, Charlie returned them. He helped Russ carry the boxes upstairs but left quickly, mercifully, before Russ began unpacking.

He searched for the cancer quilt first just to assure himself that it had not disappeared. He pressed each jagged piece to the design wall exactly as Elaine had arranged them, exactly as they had been indelibly seared into his memory.

He set up the sewing machine, found the manual, and read it cover to cover. The machine was capable of producing more stitches than he had known existed. He doubted he would need them all. As far as he could recall, Elaine had used only the one that went in a straight line and the one that zigzagged.

It took him four tries to thread the machine properly, but once he did, he proceeded slowly and methodically through a few practice seams. Elaine had always whizzed through everything, hacking off pieces that were too large or steaming them with the iron and stretching them if they were too small. That was her way in many things. Had been her way.

He hesitated before taking pieces of the cancer quilt from the design wall. How Elaine would have marveled at the sight of him. She probably would have smothered a laugh before diplomatically coaching him through his first few clumsy stitches.

He sewed a green triangle to a red, added a black pentagon, then stuck the assembled pieces to the design wall and stepped back to take a look. It didn’t look like much. He took a few more pieces, sewed them together, and then a few more. He interrupted his work to set up the ironing board; he pressed all the sewn sections flat and discovered that they adhered to the design wall better. “What do you know,” he said aloud, rearranging a few pieces, then immediately shifting them back to Elaine’s original placement. It was her quilt, her last quilt. Nothing he did could improve upon it.

He sewed late into the night, and he worked on the quilt every weekend and every evening after work until the top was completed. Tentatively pleased, he stuck it to the design wall and studied it. The sight struck him like a punch in the gut. It was all sharp
angles and angry colors; it was shattered glass and anguish. This is how Elaine had felt.

He had to leave the room.

When he returned to the quilt studio a few days later, he unpacked the boxes of books and returned them to the shelves. One title caught his attention:
All About Quilting from A to Z
. That sounded promising. He set it aside and referred to it later as he layered and basted the quilt top.

The book provided an entire section on machine quilting, but Elaine had never quilted any other way but by hand. Russ had often watched as she sat on the sofa beside him, quilt hoop on her lap, the rest of the quilt’s layers bundled around her. The book said machine quilting could be sturdier and faster, but he decided to stick with what was most familiar.

He found Elaine’s lap hoop in the largest of the cartons, put it around the center of the quilt, and tightened the screw until the three layers were secure and smooth. Carrying it downstairs so he could quilt during the Mariners game, he stepped on a corner of the quilt, tripped, and stumbled down several stairs before grabbing hold of the handrail. He swore softly, envisioning his skull cracked open upon the tile floor of the foyer. Untangling himself, he discovered that he had not torn the quilt, but had stepped on the hoop and broken one of the thin wooden circles.

The next day, he spent his lunch break at Elaine’s favorite quilt shop, wandering the aisles in search of replacement parts for quilt hoops. He found new hoops and more gadgets for machine quilting than he would have imagined necessary, but no replacement parts. Occasionally an employee or another shopper, invariably female, would smile indulgently at him in passing. No one offered to help, but he suspected that was not because he looked like he knew what he was doing.

His lunch hour half over, Russ went to a large island in the middle of the room where a shop employee was cutting fabric.
She smiled at him as he approached, but she immediately returned her attention to her work.

“Excuse me,” said Russ. “I’m trying to find some replacement hoops.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” The woman set down her rotary cutter. “I just assumed you were the husband of one of our customers.”

“No.” Not quite.

“I’d be happy to help you. What did your wife send you in to buy?”

Inwardly, Russ winced. “She didn’t send me. I broke the inner wooden circle of her quilting hoop and I was hoping to find a replacement.”

“Before she finds out?” said the woman, amused.

“No,” said Russ. “I need it to finish one of her quilts.”

“Finish one of …” The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Do you think that’s a good idea? Maybe you should ask her first. I know if my husband started poking needles into my quilt, I’d really let him have it.”

“If my husband did, I’d take away the scissors before he hurt himself,” remarked a passing customer.

“Can you point me in the right direction?” asked Russ patiently.

“We don’t sell replacement parts for quilting hoops,” said the woman. “In fact, I don’t know anyone who does. It probably wouldn’t be very cost effective. You can buy a new hoop pretty cheap. Do you want me to show you where they are?”

“No, thanks. I remember.” Annoyed and embarrassed, Russ purchased a hoop similar to the one he had broken and left the shop as quickly as possible.

He quilted in the evenings in front of the television, as Elaine used to do. Something about the repetitive motions of quilting allowed his mind to disconnect from himself, to float on a stratum out of reach of his anger and the slow, steady ache of loneliness. In those moments he could remember Elaine without pain.

Working on the cancer quilt became a way to fill the empty hours between work and sleep. The quilt became a tribute to her, a link to her. Sometimes he felt as if she were watching over his shoulder, encouraging him to persevere, shrugging off his mistakes. At first his stitches were huge, crooked, and scattered, as if someone had spilled a bag of long grain rice on the quilt. As the weeks passed, they became smaller and more precise, falling into a distinguishable pattern of loops and scrolls.

He finished the quilt a few weeks shy of the first anniversary of Elaine’s death. Following the instructions in her books, he attached a hanging sleeve to the back of the quilt and hung it in the living room. It clashed with the rest of the furnishings, but he didn’t care. In fact, he respected the disruption. He figured that was part of the message of the quilt.

On the night that marked one full year without Elaine, Christine and Charlie came into the city to distract him with dinner at his favorite restaurant. They didn’t tell him that was the reason, of course, but he knew. When they came over to pick him up, they stopped short at the sight of the cancer quilt. Christine sucked in a breath; Charlie let out a low whistle.

“Interesting choice in … art, buddy,” said Charlie dubiously.

“Elaine designed it,” Christine warned in an undertone.

“I mean, it’s great,” said Charlie quickly. “It’s … Wow. Elaine did good work.”

“Elaine started it. I finished it.”

Two pairs of eyes fixed on him. Then Charlie laughed. “You finished it?”

“That’s right.” Russ studied the quilt for a moment. “And I’m thinking about starting another.”

“Why?”

Russ shrugged. “Something to do.”

Charlie and Christine exchanged a look. Christine delicately changed the subject, and no one mentioned the quilt for the rest of the evening.

Elaine’s books listed what must have been thousands of quilt patterns—stars and baskets and geometric designs with names like Shoo-Fly and Lone Star and Snail’s Trail. Russ leafed through the pages and tried to pick one or two he wouldn’t mind attempting, but cutting out precise pieces and sewing from point to point and making the same block over and over did not appeal to him. He liked the way Elaine’s last quilt just fell together.

He needed something to fill the nights and weekends. Elaine had left an inexhaustible supply of fabric to experiment with, so he decided to improvise. It wasn’t as if anyone else would see the quilt, unless he decided to hang it on the wall just to provoke another reaction from Charlie.

Russ had grudgingly admired Elaine’s rotary cutter from the time he first saw her slicing through fabric, years before. It was sharp, fast, and metal—in short, it was a guy tool. After sorting her fabric stash by color, he took about a yard of green and a yard of blue, stacked them on top of the cutting mat, and, using Elaine’s longest acrylic ruler as a guide, made four arbitrary slashes across the whole width of the fabric from left to right, varying the angle of the cut and the distance between them. He then turned the ruler and made four more slashes from top to bottom. He swapped every other green piece for blue and sewed the pieces together, checkerboard fashion. It was quick and satisfying, but the green and blue fabrics, so distinct and different when seen alone, blended into one mass when sewn together.

He tried again, this time choosing a deep green and a dull copper. Layering the fabrics as before, he cut more strips, some wide, some narrow. He swapped colors and sewed them together, for the first time racing along with something approaching Elaine’s speed. When he put the quilt top on the design wall and stepped back to examine it, he let out a dry chuckle. Looking at the quilt was like looking out at a lush green field through the metal bars
of a cage. Only one small opening at the bottom where the bars did not completely reach the edge allowed for an escape.

He returned to the quilt shop, ignoring the curious stares of the employees as he picked out batting and an iridescent quilting thread unlike anything in Elaine’s sewing box just because it looked interesting. He came back a few days later after reading in one of Elaine’s reference books that such thread was meant for machine quilting only. He intended to exchange the thread for something more suitable for hand quilting, but he left the shop with the spool of thread still in his pocket and a new sewing machine foot especially for free-motion machine quilting.

His first attempt was a disaster. The bobbin thread bunched and knotted on the back of the quilt, the stitch length on top of the quilt varied from minuscule to long enough to catch on the presser foot, and he could only sew a minute or two before the top thread stretched and snapped. He took a perverse pride in being responsible for what was probably the worst example of machine quilting ever produced. The only thing he did right was to practice on junk fabric first.

When he thought he had learned all he could from books and practice, he committed his quilt top to the needle. The results were mixed. The quilting stitches brought out an interesting depth and dimension to the flat surface of the quilt top that he liked, but the finished quilt had somehow become distorted from true square. Obviously he was doing something wrong, but he had no idea what or how to fix it.

Finally he called one of Elaine’s quilting friends, Francine, a woman not quite his mother’s age who had organized the delivery of casseroles and cookies in the weeks following Elaine’s surgery and chemo. “You want help doing what?” she asked after he explained the purpose of his call.

“Free-motion machine quilting.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

“You’re trying to make a quilt?”

“Yes,” he said, impatient. Why was it such a shock that he wanted to quilt? These quilters, who were so generous and encouraging to other women who wanted to learn to quilt, acted like he was demanding the right to use women’s public restrooms.

“Why?”

Russ did not have a good answer for that. “Never mind. Thanks anyway.”

“Wait!” commanded Francine. He returned the receiver to his ear. “Don’t hang up. Our quilt guild has a machine quilting workshop coming up this weekend. There are still a few spots open. Ordinarily you have to be a guild member to sign up, but I think we can make an exception for you, as the husband of a longtime member.”

“You mean, take a class with other people?”

“You’re not afraid of us, are you?”

“No, but—” He doubted he would be any more welcome there than at the quilt shop. “I was hoping you could just give me a few pointers over the phone.”

“It’s much easier to learn by watching. We’re meeting on Saturday at ten in the community center rec room, same place as always. Do you have a sewing machine?”

“There’s Elaine’s—”

“Don’t forget to bring it. And some fabric to practice on. I’ll sign you up and you can just pay at the door. See you then.”