The Double Cross (4 page)

“When did your wife start quilting?” Eleanor asked. “Or are you the quilter?”

“Neither of us is, actually. We went to a quilt show with some neighbors of ours. They like all that craft stuff. We saw just how big it is. No idea so many people quilted. Millions and millions. Who knew? Rita’s mom quilted decades ago, but I thought it had gone the way of electric typewriters and my boyish good looks.” He laughed. “Anyway, we did a little research and here we are.” He held his arms wide and looked around, smiling. “Or here we will be, once we get everything in place.”

“Perhaps your wife will sit in on Susanne’s class and take it up,” Eleanor said. “Or you, of course. Lots of men are quilting these days.”

“Not me,” George answered. “I can’t see the sense, to be honest, in cutting up perfectly good pieces of fabric and then sewing them together again, but if it keeps you ladies happy, I guess it doesn’t need to make sense.” He smiled widely.

I could tell that George felt he’d given the right answer, but I knew it was only my grandmother’s desire to help Susanne that kept her from lecturing him on the history of quilting. There is nothing that a quilter hates more than to have a thriving art that has played an important role in women’s lives for centuries treated as if it were the quaint, outdated pursuit of dotty old women and lonely spinsters.

“By the way, we don’t usually allow pets in the place.” He pointed toward Barney. “They tend to mess things up. But since you’re friends of Bernie’s, I’m sure I can get Rita to let him stay in your room.” He smiled at Eleanor. “I’ll just have to remember to add a ‘no pets’ rule to the brochure for the next group.”

CHAPTER 4

“Well, I don’t care if he is Bernie’s first love; I don’t think I like that man,” Eleanor said as we settled into a small room at the top of the stairs. The room was much like the downstairs—tired looking and full of unfinished projects.

“You’re just saying that because he made a joke about quilters,” I said.

“I am not. I just . . .” She stopped. Rather than admit I was right, Eleanor’s way of conceding a point was to change the subject, so I took it as a victory when she looked around the room and grunted. “This place is a mess.”

It wasn’t just a mess. There were cobwebs in the corners at the ceilings and dust on the dresser. “We’re not here for them. We’re here for Susanne,” I reminded her, and myself.

“But I promised to help them set up their shop,” she continued, whispering as though she expected the place to be bugged. “And apparently they don’t know anything about quilting. How am I supposed to help when they don’t know a rotary cutter from a seam ripper?”

“We’ll do our best.” I was feeling a little concerned myself. “I guess it takes the pressure off Susanne. I can’t imagine anyone coming here will expect Rose Hughes or Ricky Tims to be teaching the class.”

“I suppose not.” Eleanor sighed. “But did you hear what he said about Barney? As if this run-down old shack were some kind of showplace.”

We both looked toward Barney. He responded with a yawn and settled into his bed, completely oblivious to the fact that he was an unwelcome guest. Before she’d unpacked her own suitcase, Eleanor had set up a bed for him in the corner of the room. She’d brought several of the quilts she’d made especially for him and laid them one on top of another until she felt the bed was soft enough. Then she placed his two favorite chew toys, his bone, and a few of his favorite cookie treats nearby. After he settled in, Eleanor carefully unwrapped a dish of dog food and cut a vitamin into four parts, pressing them into the meat. She put the dish at Barney’s paws, and he sniffed for a moment, then ate the food, carefully leaving the four pieces of vitamin untouched.

“Look at that.” Eleanor pointed to the vitamin pieces, a large smile on her face. “He smelled the vitamin. I think losing his hearing has heightened his other senses.”

“Or he’s like every other dog and has a great sense of smell,” I pointed out.

She frowned. “Not every dog. Just special dogs.” She pulled up a chair next to him and patted Barney’s head as and he rubbed his nose against her arm.

“When did you get so soft?” I teased her. “I don’t remember you making a fuss over me like that.”

“I have other grandchildren,” she said, “but I just have the one Barney.”

I laughed and sat down on the floor beside Barney. The three of us played with Barney’s toys until we nearly forgot what we’d gotten ourselves into.

I was reminded twenty minutes later, when Susanne came into the room.

“We’re all settled. I’m going for takeout at a Chinese restaurant that George recommended.” She sounded apologetic. “It isn’t quite what we expected, is it?”

“It’s lovely, dear,” Eleanor said, putting the best spin on it she could. “It reminds me of when I was starting the shop. It was a bit of a mess, too, but it turned out okay.”

“But Barney,” Susanne said. “As if that dog ever caused a moment’s trouble in his life.”

“Once they get to know him . . . ,” I offered.

“I suppose.” Susanne stood at the door, dejected. I worried that she might decide to go home before she’d even taught the first class.

Susanne had been a beauty queen in her younger days, and though now a grandmother in her fifties, she was still one of the most beautiful women I knew. Tall, blonde, slim, and elegant, she turned heads when she entered a room. And as a quilter she was talented and versatile. But she could also be shy, nervous, and even insecure.

“How’s Bernie?” I hoped a change in subject would lighten the mood. I was wrong.

Susanne sighed. “I knocked on her door and told her about the food, but she said she wasn’t hungry.”

“You ordered her something anyway, I hope,” Eleanor said.

“Of course. Broken hearts need fattening foods.”

“What is the story with that anyway?” I asked.

“High school sweethearts, broken promises. He married the best friend,” Eleanor said. “At least as far as I know.”

“I don’t mean to be . . .” I tried to think of the right way to say it without sounding like a bratty kid who thinks her generation invented love. “It’s just that it’s been such a long time . . .”

“Why is a sixtysomething-year-old woman still carrying a torch for her high school sweetheart?” Eleanor finished my thought. “I don’t think it’s the man. It’s the life that could have been.”

“But she’s had a good life, hasn’t she?” I asked. “Why have any regrets about the road not taken?”

“Oh, I hate that,” Eleanor said. “That idea that we can’t have any regrets because our experiences make us who we are. That’s greeting-card psychology. We all have regrets. The people we’ve hurt, the times fear held us back from exciting possibilities . . .”

“The weird fabric we bought and could never find a use for,” I added.

Eleanor and Susanne laughed.

“Not fabric,” Susanne said. “You never regret a fabric purchase, no matter how weird.”

After Susanne left to get the Chinese food, I settled back on the floor, laid my head on Barney’s back, and let him lick my hand. I envied his uncomplicated life of dog treats and unending love. “If she’s going to have regrets anyway, what good does coming here do her?” I finally asked my grandmother.

“She needs to make her peace with them,” Eleanor said. “Bernie is wondering what might have been, and she can’t shake herself out of it. People get stuck like that sometimes.”

She reached out and brushed a few stray hairs off my forehead, stroking my head gently. “It’s like when you make a quilt,” she said. “You see a pattern you like and you think you want to make something just like it for yourself. But as you find fabrics, and cut and sew, the idea becomes something else. Something real, but something different from that pattern. If you measure the success of your quilt, or your life, by what you started out to do, more often than not you will decide you’ve failed. But if you realize that the pattern you followed is the one you created for yourself, you will love the quilt you made, and the life you made, more than the one you thought you were supposed to make.”

Twenty minutes later while I was still thinking over my grandmother’s words, Susanne opened the door to the room, her hands filled with plastic bags. “This place is spooky. When I drove up, I thought I saw a light coming from the woods. Then I swear I saw something run from the back of the house.”

“Probably a deer,” I suggested.

“Maybe, but it didn’t run like a deer. It sort of floated. I couldn’t see what it was because the porch light was out. It must have burned out when I was gone.”

The thought of something out there, in the dark, hovering around this broken-down inn, made me shiver, but I put it out of my mind. It was going to be a long week if I succumbed to my imagination.

“Whatever it was, it’s gone,” I said. “And tomorrow we’ll be quilting. Nothing’s going to spoil that.”

CHAPTER 5

Quilt retreats are usually weekend or weeklong quilting classes where experts, often nationally known teachers, give participants a chance to immerse themselves in a new technique or pattern. During the day, the teacher instructs the class, and in the evening the students are welcome to sew on their own or wander into town. The retreats are often set in the country, so there’s little to do but quilt, talk about quilting, and look at quilts. And that’s just what most of us want to do anyway.

It was going to be the first retreat for the Patchwork Bed-and-Breakfast, but, instead of comforting her, this seemed to make Susanne nervous. She had piled every possible tool, book, fabric scrap, and finished and half-finished quilt she could find into her car.

I’d volunteered to work as Susanne’s assistant. I wasn’t sure what that would involve beyond helping set up the classroom, but it seemed to provide Susanne with some relief to know that there would be a friendly face in the room. In her mind, the class would be filled with quilters as expert as herself, and I tried to reassure her that, regardless of their skill level, every student would learn something because Susanne wasn’t teaching a pattern or a technique that someone might have picked up elsewhere. She was teaching a class on how to express oneself in fabric.

Journal quilts have become popular among quilters. Generally eight inches by ten inches or smaller, they serve as a way for quilters to document their experiences, much like a page in a diary. But journal quilts use visual images as well as words and reach beyond fabrics to include found objects, paint, paper, and lots of nontraditional methods. I’d never made a journal quilt and I couldn’t think of any experience important enough to document, but I was looking forward to the class anyway.

Though Susanne, like most of us, had started as a traditional quilter, she had moved toward making art quilts—a large and sometimes difficult-to-define category that my grandmother described as quilts made, not for use, but solely for visual effect. And Susanne’s quilts certainly had visual effect. She made landscapes, variations on traditional patterns, pictorial quilts of her grandson, and vibrant abstract quilts. Every quilt was free and open, and unconcerned with what quilters laughingly call “the quilt police”—the rules or rule enforcers that insist a quilt should have matching seams and perfect corners and the like. Every time I looked at a quilt of Susanne’s, I sensed the rebel in her that I rarely saw in real life.

I knew there was a lot I could learn from her. And that, as much as a friend’s desire to show support, was why I had offered my services.