Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (9 page)

“What’s on your mind?” asked Nate as she filled the sink and squeezed dish soap into the stream from the faucet. They had a dishwasher, but Nate disputed the manufacturer’s claim that it used less water and energy than hand washing. So they used it to store the trashcan and the recyclables bin instead.

“Nothing,” said Karen quickly. “Well, okay. Something. Sit down,” she added, as he began to rise. She retrieved the magazine from the diaper bag on the counter, where she had placed it in anticipation of this moment. She returned to her seat and set the magazine on the table before her. “Please don’t panic.”

“Panic?” He looked warier than she had ever seen him. “Why should I panic?”

She gestured to the magazine. “Because I allowed one of these into the house.”

“What?” He glanced at the magazine. “This? That’s what all this is about?”

She nodded.

He strangled out a laugh. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought you were going to tell me you were pregnant again.”

He of all people ought to know there was little chance of that. Karen flipped the magazine open and placed it before him. “I think I’d like to apply for this job,” she said after giving him a moment to skim the ad. “It’s not my traditional line of work, but I think I’d enjoy it more than any other part-time work I could—”

She broke off at the sound of a thud from the living room. She paused, but when neither of the boys howled in pain or outrage, she returned her attention to Nate. “So. What do you think?”

“Sounded like something hit the wall.”

“No, honey. About the job. Look.” Karen pointed to a line of type. “It says seasonal work and flexible hours are available.”

“But it’s all the way in Waterford.”

“That’s an hour drive at most.”

“What about the kids? Won’t you miss them?”

“Of course I’ll miss them, just like you miss them when you go off to work in the morning.” She had expected objections to the magazine, but she had not prepared any counterarguments to concerns about the job itself. “Elm Creek Quilt Camp is open only March through October, so I would be working less than if I tried to get a teaching job someplace. We always said I would go back to work when the kids were old enough—”

Another thud sounded from the living room, followed by an ominous crash.

Nate twisted in his chair. “Ethan, what are you boys doing in there?”

“Nothing!” Ethan shouted. “Lucas threw his sippy cup at the lamp again.”

“Why?”

“He needs a reason?” asked Karen.

“Because the first time he missed,” called Ethan. “It fell off the table and rolled under the sofa. I can’t reach it.”

“Just leave it alone. I’ll get it.”

As he rose, Karen placed a hand on his arm. “May we finish this conversation later?”

“Sure.” He pushed back his chair. “First chance we get.”

Karen watched him go, muffling a sigh. She waited, but when she realized he was not returning anytime soon, she got up and finished cleaning the kitchen.

Later that evening, she bathed the boys while Nate checked his email and graded exams. He shut down his computer long enough to read the boys a story and tuck them into bed, but soon after she kissed the boys goodnight and turned off their lights, the phone rang. She snatched it up, praying that the boys would sleep through the noise. It was one of Nate’s undergraduate students, frustrated with a particularly difficult section of code he was trying to write for a class project. While Nate patiently talked him through it, Karen returned to the basement and finished her résumé. She printed out a copy and took it upstairs to seek Nate’s advice, but found him in the recliner, feet propped up, computer on his lap, eyes riveted on the screen.

Rather than interrupt him, she returned to the basement and put in a load of laundry. She switched on the baby monitor and worked on a foundation paper-pieced Pickle Dish quilt in between shifting loads to the drier and folding the clothes. By the time she carried the basket of warm, crisp, neatly folded laundry upstairs, Nate had fallen asleep. She made sure to save all of his documents before shutting down the computer and carefully setting it on the table beside him. It was a warm night, but she drew a light quilt over him and shut the windows before turning off the lamp and going upstairs to bed, laundry basket balanced on her hip.

“Karen?”

She left the laundry basket on the landing and returned to the living room. “I thought you were asleep.”

Nate turned on the lamp and reached for something on the
floor beside his chair. It was the
Modern Quilter
magazine, and when he placed it on his lap, it fell open to the ad. “Do you want to talk about this job now?”

Karen was so tired that all she wanted to do was close her eyes and crawl into bed, but she had laundry to put away, bills to pay, and three unanswered emails from her mother waiting on the computer. She needed eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, not a lengthy, overdue conversation, but she got down the laundry basket and nodded.

“Do you really want to work at a quilt camp?” asked Nate. “Would you—I mean, I thought your quilting was just a hobby. When you said you wanted to teach, I thought you meant—”

“You thought I meant teaching undergrad business courses at Penn State,” Karen finished. “I know this isn’t what I went to graduate school for, but I loved quilt camp and I think I’d enjoy working there. It would be fun.”

He studied the magazine for a moment before closing it with a sigh. “I guess life hasn’t been much fun for you for the past four and a half years.”

“No, honey, that’s not true.” She loved her life with Nate and the boys. She had never laughed so much or thought herself so utterly necessary to another human being. “But I do want something more. Something … separate. Something where I can be just me again and not someone else’s mom. You know, almost everyone I’ve met since Ethan was born knows me not as Karen Wise but as ‘Ethan’s Mom’ or ‘Lucas’s Mom.’ Isn’t that sad? Even other mothers don’t bother to learn mothers’ names.”

“So you want to get a job to prove there’s more to you than motherhood?”

“That’s part of it, but not everything.” She hesitated, wondering how to explain without hurting his feelings. It wasn’t because her best friend had found a job and she resented being left behind. She had earned her own money ever since accepting her
first baby-sitting job at thirteen, and she hated depending upon someone else’s income. She hated that guilty feeling of spending Nate’s salary, even though she knew he considered his earnings to be hers as much as they were his own. In theory she agreed; he would not be able to be both a father and a tenure-track university professor if someone else were not willing to care for his children during the day. Karen agreed with that philosophy, and yet, she still wished she had a little part-time income to spend as she pleased, guilt-free.

“I’m sure I’ll want something full-time when the boys are in school,” she told Nate. “But in the meantime, a part-time job like this one would help support my quilting habit.”

“Then you should apply.”

“What about the kids? We’ll have to get a nanny or day care or something, and we’ll have to work out a schedule to cart them around to their activities.”

“We’ll figure something out.” He lowered the footrest of the recliner and beckoned her to curl up on his lap. “If other families can manage, we can. First, get the job. We can work out the other details later.”

Karen had never taught quilting, but in her previous life, she had taught introductory marketing courses as an MBA student at the University of Nebraska. Before the boys woke the next morning, she searched the basement for the carton holding her old graduate school papers and books, still taped tightly shut from their move to Pennsylvania eight years before, when Nate accepted an assistant professorship in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology. She hoped some of her undergraduates’ teaching evaluations would qualify as letters of recommendation from former students. Her students had graduated long ago and she had no way to track them down before her application package was due.

She drafted sample lesson plans after taking Ethan to nursery school, typing with one hand while cradling a nursing, dozing Lucas on a pillow on her lap. She doubted she had the sort of employment history the management of Elm Creek Quilt Camp expected of their applicants. What would they think of her four years as an associate director in Penn State’s Office of University Development? Would they have any idea what that meant, or should she work into her cover letter pertinent details such as the size of her office in Old Main or the fact that she had been the youngest associate director in the history of the university?

How would she reply when they asked her why she had abandoned such a promising career?

The truth was that she had fallen passionately in love with Ethan the moment she held him in her arms in her hospital bed. She stayed awake throughout the night holding him, marveling at him, rather than miss a single moment of his first hours in the world. The nurse scolded her and threatened to whisk him off to the nursery, telling her she would be sorry later that she had not taken advantage of the chance to get some rest. She would have ample opportunity to admire her baby later, every day until he left for college if she so desired. Karen refused to hand over her son and compromised by sleeping with Ethan in the bed beside her. The nurse did not approve, but fortunately her shift ended at six in the morning, and the nurse who replaced her believed that a newborn could never be held too much.

As her last trimester drew to a close, Karen had written detailed notes for her colleagues and assistant so they could carry on smoothly in her absence, and she had reassured her superiors that she would be back on the job eight weeks to the day after she gave birth. She and Nate managed to obtain a place for Ethan in the most sought-after day-care program in town, the Child Development Laboratory operated by the College of Health and Human Development right on the Penn State campus. Karen knew Ethan
would be well cared for, but as the eight weeks of her maternity leave raced by in a blur of wonder and exhaustion, she grew less certain she would be capable of leaving him. She spent every evening of the last week crying in the glider rocker as she nursed Ethan to sleep, as Nate sat on the edge of the bed worriedly watching her and assuring her that everything would be fine.

On her first day back to work, she put on the least obvious of her maternity ensembles, having not yet managed to fit into her prepregnancy suits. She kissed Nate good-bye and offered him a ride as she had hundreds of times before, but this time she loaded a breast pump in the car along with her briefcase. She left her precious baby sleeping in the arms of a competent-looking caregiver and made it all the way back to her desk in her beloved office in Old Main before racing back to the Child Development Lab with a hasty excuse for the first colleague she passed on her rush out the door. Remorseful and relieved, she buckled Ethan in his car seat and drove home.

During Ethan’s afternoon nap, she phoned her most understanding supervisor, apologized, and promised to return in the morning. This time she did not even manage to leave the Child Development Lab before hurrying back for her baby. The following day she turned the car around before reaching College Avenue. That day, after meeting Nate in his campus office for a tearful discussion, she phoned her supervisor and told him that the next time she returned to Old Main would be to submit her letter of resignation. He replied—rather cheerfully and not at all surprised, or so it had struck her then—that he had assumed as much. They had already cleared out her desk and would interview her potential replacement the following morning.

Unfortunately, every embarrassing, graceless misstep was part of her employment record and fodder for a job interview. Given her history, the Elm Creek Quilters might be justifiably wary of hiring a woman who had intended to return to a job she loved but found,
at the very last possible moment, that she could not bring herself to leave her baby. They might also be concerned that she would quit Elm Creek Quilt Camp if she became pregnant again. But what could she do? She could not retract her choices, and despite the hassles and the loss of income, she never regretted stepping off the career track to stay at home with her boys. She could not help it if the Elm Creek Quilters held her indecisive wavering against her, but she would tell them the truth and hope for the best.

Nate had given her a digital camera for her birthday, so it should have been an easy matter to photograph her quilts for her portfolio. It would have been if the boys had not been so eager to help. Ethan insisted on holding up the quilts for her, but although he stretched his arms high above his head and stood on tiptoe, even the smallest crib quilts dragged on the ground. When reasoning with him failed, she pretended to take pictures his way, but suggested they also hang the quilts in case they needed extras. Ethan agreed that this sounded like a good idea, but then he insisted on posing in front of each quilt and smiling brightly while she took the picture. Bribes or threats were powerless to persuade him to step out of the shot. Meanwhile, Lucas flung her other quilts into the air and danced upon them where they landed on the floor, apparently mistaking them for the parachute at Gymboree.

When she finally gave up, she had wasted an hour and squandered the last bit of her carefully conserved patience. She stuck Lucas in his playpen, handed out Veggie Booty, and put on a Dragon Tales DVD before locking herself in the bathroom with the quilt magazine. Ten minutes of deep breathing and art quilt inspiration later, she emerged with a renewed sense of resolve and purpose—only to find Lucas asleep on one of her quilts with his little diaper-clad rump sticking in the air and Ethan engrossed in the adventures of Zak and Wheezie. Karen abandoned her project for the rest of the afternoon rather than jeopardize the miraculous calm. After supper, she prevailed upon Nate to distract the boys while she
quickly hung the quilts and snapped pictures during fifteen precious, uninterrupted minutes.