Wedding Ring (43 page)

“You know, you sure took your sweet time telling me,” she said. “You have a lot to make up for.”

He pulled her closer. “I’m only getting older, Nancy. If I have anything to make up for, I ought to get right to it.”

“There’s a lovely little inn on the outskirts of Woodstock. I wonder if they’re all booked up.”

“I have a cell phone.”

“And I, of course, have the number,” she said, right before he kissed her.

T
essa watched as Nancy pulled into the driveway, too fast, as always, but with a certain hard-earned expertise. She did not run over the fading day lilies, and she avoided the worst of the ruts. She cut the engine and bounced out of the car wearing yesterday’s clothes, like a child heading for the presents under an extravagant Christmas tree.

“You’re up early,” she called, before she was even halfway to the porch.

The sun was barely up, and Tessa was surprised to see her mother. She didn’t know what had transpired between her parents yesterday, but she had hoped it was the start of more time spent together. “Where’s Daddy?”

“On his way back to Richmond. He’s flying to Boston this afternoon, and he had to get an early start back home to pack. He sends his apologies.”

Tessa wasn’t sure what to say. Her mother looked so happy, Tessa was nearly blinded by it. “I was just on my way out to Gram’s fence line. I bought some new bluebird boxes yesterday, and I’m going to put them out while it’s still cool.” She held up a plastic bag. Another one sat on the porch floor beside her.

“Want some help?”

For a moment, Tessa didn’t know what to say. “You don’t like to hike, and it’s a ways out there.”

“Tessa, I grew up here, remember? I know where the boxes go.”

“I’m sorry. Of course you do.”

“I feel like a walk. I can carry some of them. Just let me run up and change into better shoes.”

Tessa handed Nancy the second bag when she returned a few minutes later wearing shorts and sneakers.

They were nearing the pond before Tessa finally asked the question she’d been forming. “Okay, what happened?”

Nancy laughed. “That’s the best you can do? I expected a little finesse.”

“One minute you’re not talking to Daddy, the next you’re shacked up at a hotel with him.”

“Hardly a hotel. An inn. A lovely one, too. I heartily recommend it. I’ll give you their business card.”

“I don’t want the card. I want an explanation.”

“You’re my daughter, not my mother. Besides, I wouldn’t tell
her
everything, either.”

“I don’t want everything. Just relieve my fears.”

“Honey, do I look like I’m going to call my lawyer?”

“Then you two have made up?”

Nancy shifted the bag to her other hand. “We understand each other better. We love each other, but there’s a lot we were afraid to say all these years. Neither of us was raised to talk about our feelings, and we did our mothers proud.”

Tessa felt pure, unadulterated relief. “You’re talking now?”

“About time, don’t you think?”

Tessa didn’t say the obvious, but Nancy seemed to hear it anyway. “You’re amazed we could be married so long and not communicate. Right now you’re wondering how we could have missed out on so much pleasure and intimacy purely because neither of us could talk about what we were feeling.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“It should cross your mind. I suspect it sounds familiar, Tessa.”

Helen couldn’t believe her own eyes. For a moment she stared at the insert in the church newsletter, hoping that she just needed new glasses worse than she’d feared. The newsletter had come yesterday, but she hadn’t bothered to open it until now, when she wanted to see what that radical young preacher had chosen to talk about this morning, just in case she decided to go to the late service. But even when she squinted, the words still read the same.

Quilt exhibit? They were doing an exhibit of her quilts and nobody had bothered to tell her?

Nancy and Tessa were living right here, breathing her air, drinking her water, eating her best preserves, not to mention her strawberry cake and blueberry pie, and they hadn’t even mentioned it to her in passing?

But, of course, they hadn’t mentioned it because they were the ones behind it! She sensed Nancy’s hand in this. Nancy, who had never left well enough alone in her entire life. Nancy, who wanted her mother to be more than she was, had always wanted that. Nancy who was pretending Helen was some airy-fairy artist instead of a simple country woman who sewed because she was too old to do much of anything else.

Nancy!

“Mrs. Henry?”

For a moment Helen wasn’t sure if she’d really heard her name being called. She was so angry, the words sounded like they were being shouted underwater. Then someone called her again, and she realized it was Cissy, who was standing at the screen door.

“Well, don’t just stand there!” Helen bellowed.

Cissy slipped inside. “I can come back.”

“Why are you here in the first place?”

Cissy held up a cloth bag. Helen recognized the one she’d given the girl to keep her quilting supplies in.

“You told me to come early this morning, remember?” Cissy said. “I’ve got all the blocks sewed together. You were going to show me how to quilt them.”

“You don’t want to learn how to quilt, girl. You know what they’ll do to you if you learn?” She thrust out the circular. “Here’s what they’ll do.”

Cissy glanced at it. “Oh.”

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“I got a bad feeling if I say yes, you’re going to ask me to leave.”

Helen had been about to shout something new and even meaner at her. But Cissy’s response silenced her.

“I did know,” Cissy said. “I think it’s about the nicest thing I ever heard. They done—did—a lot of work on this show. Mrs. Whitlock’s been over at the church every chance she gets, and there are a whole bunch of people helping. Zeke’s mom’s going to make ten dozen of her best shortbread cookies for the luncheon, and I’m making lemon bars. And they’re going to ask for a freewill donation and give whatever they collect to a group of women in India who make quilts to support their families. You know, not those ones where the women just get paid a little for all their work but—”

Helen waved her to silence.

“I guess you’re mad,” Cissy said after a while.

“They just don’t understand.”

“Who?”

“My daughter! And that granddaughter of mine. Tessa had something to do with this, too, didn’t she?”

“I’d sure hate to get anybody in trouble.”

“They’re already in trouble.”

“It’s just that those quilts of yours, well, they’re real special. Everybody sees it but you. They want you to see it, too.”

“Everybody’s just going to laugh.” Helen looked up and saw that Cissy was paler than she ought to be. “Just sit down, girl. I don’t want you falling over.”

“You don’t want me to go?”

“I told you I’d show you how to quilt, and I will. Now sit down!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Cissy took the closest chair, picked up a magazine and started to fan herself. “Only if I’m gonna stay, I have to say something.”

“What do you have to say?”

“That there ain’t gonna be nobody laughing. I don’t really mean ain’t. I mean isn’t. Isn’t anybody gonna laugh. Your quilts make my heart hurt, they’re so beautiful.”

Helen wanted to rage, but the girl kept cutting her off. She didn’t know what to say to that. Heart hurt?

Cissy leaned forward earnestly. “I think, if you do something that makes the world a beautiful place, well, you’re supposed to show it to people. It’s a talent. God gave you that talent. And now you have to give it back in the form of pleasure to the eyes.”

“Pleasure to the eyes?”

Cissy flushed. “I don’t know how else to say it. But it’s your job now to show off what you got.”

“My job?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what if I don’t want to?”

“Well, I kind of think that’s out of your hands now. They’ve already got the quilts—”

“They already got my quilts!”

“Yes, ma’am, ’cause they knew you’d be just this way once you found out.”

That set Helen back. She dropped into a chair herself and stared at the girl. “They knew I’d be upset, but they took the quilts anyway?”

“They have a lot of people coming, and they couldn’t disappoint them even if you, you know, threw a fit.”

“I don’t throw fits!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Took my quilts, like thieves in the night?”

“Well, no, ma’am. They just borrowed them till after the show. You can see the difference, can’t you? And you probably didn’t notice ’cause you got so many.”

Helen couldn’t speak. Finally she managed a bitter laugh. “I don’t know why I’m worried. Nobody’s going to be there.”

“Well, you’d be wrong about that. The way I hear it, they’re bringing in busloads. A couple of the nursing homes are bringing their folks, even the ones in wheelchairs, because they’re fussing over handicap access, and all the quilt guilds in the area know about it. They even got it on the radio. I heard it myself. Of course, there were a lot of those public service announcements that day, but yours was sure there, too.”

“Radio?”

“And the newspaper.”

Helen hung her head and stared at her shoeless feet.

“Everybody you ever gave a quilt to will be there,” Cissy said. “And that was a lot of people, wasn’t it? And people from church who know you, and people on Fitch Crossing and—”

Helen waved her to silence again.

But this time Cissy refused. “The way I see it, there are a whole lot of people who want to honor you, and you just got to let them.”

“I don’t have to do a thing, girl. Not one blessed thing. I’m not going to be there. They’ll look for me, and I’ll be right here, sitting in this chair, my arms crossed just like this.” Helen demonstrated.

“Well now, Ms. Henry, you sure could do that.”

Helen was glad she had made her point. “Don’t you think I’m not considering it,” she said.

“I don’t. I sure don’t. I know you’re mad now. But you got to ask yourself why they did it this way.”

“Because they knew I’d say no.”

“That’s exactly right. And they want to do something for you even when you’re being bullheaded. Because they love you.”

Helen didn’t know what to say to that. She supposed it was true, that Nancy and Tessa did love her. It wasn’t something she sat around and worried about, but things had changed this summer. Maybe before they weren’t so sure whether they did or they didn’t. But now, well, even she knew things were different.

“I could just sit right here in my old housedress,” Helen said. “Just like this. All those people wondering where I’d got to…”

Wisely, Cissy didn’t respond.

The front door opened, and Nancy and Tessa walked in. Helen looked up and saw her daughter’s face, saw a smile in Nancy’s eyes that hadn’t been there before, saw Tessa’s gaze flick to the circular Helen had left on the coffee table in full view.

Helen sighed. “Well, it’s about time you two got home.”

“We walked a lot farther than we intended,” Nancy said. “Cissy, how are you?”

Cissy looked from one woman to the other, her eyes wary. “Just fine, but I think I’d better—”

“You stay!” Helen cleared her throat. “You stay, and I’ll show you a thing or two about how to make a real quilt out of that top. Just the way I said.”

Cissy’s eyes widened as Helen stood and pointed her finger at her daughter. “And you, Nanny?”

“Mama?”

“You figure out where I can go to get a new dress. Something that fits me for once. And make me an appointment at that place where they cut your hair.” She lifted her chin. “And that’s all I’m going to say about this. Cissy!”

Cissy jumped to her feet. “Ma’am?”

“We’re going upstairs.”

Helen could feel two sets of eyes on her back as she climbed.

“You showed ’em,” Cissy said in a stage whisper.

Helen smiled for the first time that morning.

H
elen shook one more hand among the many she had shaken that day. It seemed to her that everyone in six counties had come to see her quilts. She couldn’t imagine their lives were that boring. Didn’t people know how to entertain themselves these days?

The red-haired woman, someone Helen had never seen in her whole life, couldn’t seem to stop pumping her hand or talking about the Job’s Troubles quilt hanging in the sanctuary.

“My grandma had one on her bed until the day she died,” the woman said. “She stitched it herself in red and green. My cousin got it after Grandma passed away, and I still wish I’d spoken up and asked for it. But yours is just breathtaking.”

Helen wished the woman, who had talked nonstop, would
take
a breath.

She didn’t. “Those earth tones are scrumptious, like a Southwestern desert at sunset. My husband and I retired to Arizona. We’re just visiting for Labor Day. And that quilt would look so perfect on our bed. It would feel right at home there.”

Helen nearly tuned out. After three hours of standing there chatting with strangers, she was exhausted, but the woman’s final sentences made it through her fatigue. “Unless you just got burned out or flooded, I don’t give away my quilts.”

The woman laughed. “Of course you don’t, although I read every one of those tributes to you from the people you did give quilts to. No, I’m leading up to asking if you’d sell that quilt to me. I promise I would take only the best care of it. And my daughter will take care of it when I’m gone. She’ll love it as much as I do.”

Helen knew she was tired, but had this woman just offered to buy one of her quilts?

Nancy joined them, as if she’d seen that her mother was fading quickly. “Mama, are you ready for some lunch and some time off your feet?”

“This woman wants to buy my Job’s Troubles quilt,” Helen said, nodding to the Arizona retiree who was still holding her hand.

“Does she?” Nancy smiled. “I’m Mrs. Henry’s daughter.” She held out her hand, and the woman reluctantly dropped Helen’s to take it.

“Say eight hundred dollars?” the woman asked. When Nancy didn’t respond right away, she added, “Or nine hundred dollars?”

“Holy smokes,” Helen said. “I don’t even know why they hung that quilt in the first place, only because the name comes from the Bible. I—”

“Why don’t you give me your name and address,” Nancy said, cutting off her mother’s explanation. “I’ll talk to Mama in private, and we’ll let you know what she decides. Will next week be okay?”

The woman looked excited. “You just put a price on it and let me know. If I can afford it, I’ll buy it like that.” She snapped chubby fingers.

After a flurry of goodbyes, Helen and Nancy were alone for a moment.

“It’s not even one of my best quilts,” Helen said. “No fancy quilting to speak of.”

Nancy made a note on the woman’s card before she put it in the pocket of her blazer. “It’s a gorgeous quilt. And you were going to give it away, remember? It was in your giveaway pile.”

“Think she’d go higher?”

Nancy laughed. “I think we ought to have a good heart-to-heart talk about what you want to do with your quilts when this is over. Then we can talk about selling the ones you don’t care about.”

“I want you and Tessa to have whatever quilts you want.”

Nancy put her arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but that giant dahlia’s been on my bed at the farm since the day you showed it to us.”

“You think I didn’t know?”

“Let’s make you comfortable outside with some lemonade and chicken sandwiches. The women’s auxiliary is going to buy a quilt frame for their meeting room in the basement with whatever they make from lunch today, and start a weekly quilting bee. I told them you’d be a regular if they did.”

“You sure take a lot on yourself.”

“I learned from a master. Look what you took on years ago. A collection of some of the finest quilts in Virginia.”

Helen knew better, of course. She could point out flaws in every single quilt. A red that was a shade too orange in this one, applique stitches that were visible in that one. The eagle beaks on her memorial to 9/11 weren’t curved or prominent enough, and the quilting pattern she’d chosen for a star quilt that Nancy had named “Celestial Galaxy” would have been peppier in a variegated thread.

But all in all, even she had to admit that her quilts dressed up the church and made it glow. If there was a heaven, and she wasn’t taking any bets on it just in case, then she would like to think that her mother and aunts were looking down on her handiwork today and nodding their heads proudly.

Nancy guided her mother toward the door. “Billy set up chairs in the shade near the outdoor display. Tessa’s been handing out programs and talking to people all morning, but maybe I can get her to join us, too.”

“I haven’t seen Mack.” Even with all the flurry, Helen had noticed that her grandson-in-law hadn’t yet come to see the quilts. She was afraid that was a bad sign.

“Oh, he’s coming,” Nancy said. “He called this morning to tell me he’d be late. Something about an eviction and a court order. And I think some politician was in jail or ought to be, but he said he’d be here in time for lunch.”

“That boy leads an interesting life.”

“The question is whether he’ll be leading it with Tessa in a couple of weeks when we go home again.”

“Weeks? You’re going to stay weeks? I thought I’d have my house to myself.”

“Soon enough.”

They were stopped before they got to the front door by another group of well wishers. Helen figured she’d already heard more compliments today than she’d gotten in her whole life.

She made it outside at last, and Nancy waved to Billy, who came to escort her to the chairs he’d set up. Helen wasn’t sure what had transpired between her daughter and her husband, but she wasn’t about to ask and jinx it. There was a lot more smiling than she remembered in the past, and a fair amount of touching. Nancy hadn’t looked so moon-eyed since their courting days.

“I’ll get lunch. Do you want brownies or pecan pie?” Nancy asked.

“I’ll take both, and don’t think about arguing.”

“I’ll get the food,” Billy said. “You two relax a little. You deserve it.”

“Did you see Tessa?” Helen asked Nancy.

“She was talking to somebody and showing her the quilts in the sanctuary. I pointed outside. She’ll probably join us here.”

Helen slipped her feet out of her new red shoes. They were stiff even though she’d tried to break them in all week. She figured she would be long dead before they were actually comfortable. But she couldn’t help noticing how pretty they were. They had a shine to them, like nothing she’d bought for herself in years and years. And they looked good with the dress Nancy had insisted on. The dress was navy blue with a flowered skirt, and there was a cotton sweater with short sleeves and embroidered flowers to wear over it. She felt young just looking at it.

It hadn’t cost that much. She thought it was just possible she might buy another before this one even wore out. And she might get her hair cut at that salon now and then, too. It didn’t look the same when somebody else cut it. It looked better. Much better.

Not that there’d be anybody much to see it after Nancy and Tessa left.

“Did you get downstairs to see the quilts hanging in the nursery and kindergarten room?” Nancy asked.

“I barely got to peek in the chapel. People just won’t leave me be.”

“I know,” Nancy said in mock consolation. “They seem to think you’re a celebrity or something.”

“You put some of my baby quilts down there?”

“You ought to see for yourself.”

Helen made a mental note to do just that.

Billy returned with stacked paper platters of chicken and potato salad. Tessa was right beside him, carrying drinks.

“I don’t see my desserts,” Helen noted.

“I’m going back,” Billy promised. “Did you want to start
and
end with chocolate?”

“Smart-aleck. Not that different from a college boy I used to know.”

He smiled warmly. “I hope not.”

Tessa handed her grandmother lemonade. “Gram, there’s a woman who wants to meet you. I told her you’d talk to her after lunch and a little rest.”

“If she wants my Job’s Troubles quilt, well, it looks like she’s too late.”

“No, she wants the Shenandoah Album quilt.”

Helen had been about to raise the lemonade to her lips. She stopped midway. “No chance of that. That belongs to your mother, unless she doesn’t want it?”

Nancy stopped just short of her first bite. “It’s the most beautiful quilt in the world. Of course I want it when you’re ready to give it away.”

Tessa spoke before Helen could answer. “That’s okay. I told her I doubted you’d sell it. That’s not a problem for her. She wants to hang it as much as she wants to buy it.”

“Hang it? Where?”

“In the Virginia Quilt Museum. She wants to build an exhibit around it. And she said that you need to have it insured right away, that it’s worth more money than you can possibly imagine.”

Tessa stood in the doorway of the sanctuary and watched her grandmother and a curator from the Virginia Quilt Museum in Harrisonburg discussing each quilt. Helen still looked shell-shocked. After today she would never be able to think of herself as a simple country quilter again. The woman from the museum was using terms like
luminosity, emotional resonance
and
dramatic focus
. Helen was simply nodding.

“Quite a success, huh?”

Tessa turned to find that her husband was standing beside her. Her heart sped faster. She had yearned for Mack to be here to share her grandmother’s day. And, too, she had simply yearned for
him
. Ever since their last encounter.

“It is a success,” she agreed. She looked him over carefully. She wondered what it would be like never to see him again, never to feel this surge of excitement, this desire to investigate even the minutiae of his days, to catalog each and every change he underwent.

“Do you want to show me around?” he said.

She realized she wanted nothing more, but she had promised her mother she would make sure Helen and the curator weren’t disturbed while they were in the sanctuary. “I have to stay here a few more minutes. Why don’t you start downstairs? I haven’t been there myself yet, but I know there are some quilts in the nursery and the kindergarten room next door. I’ll meet you there, then we can come upstairs and I’ll give you the three-dollar tour.”

“You look good.”

“I’m not working. I guess you figured that out.”

“I talked to Joe. He called about some technicality with your health insurance.”

Joe was Tessa’s principal. She was ashamed she hadn’t discussed her decision not to teach this semester with Mack.

“It’s temporary,” she promised. “Spur of the moment. I guess I was afraid to tell you.”

“Why? Because I’m such a tyrant? Because I don’t make enough money to support us and then some?”

She looked away, as if checking on her grandmother. “No, because it’s an admission that I haven’t been handling things very well.”

“Handling things has never been a competition. We put one foot in front of the other the best way we could. We’re both still here. We’re talking. That’s something.”

She could feel stress seeping from her body. In this, as in all things, he had understood. “It’s important to me that at least I look like I’m in control.”

“I know.”

She didn’t add what she needed to, that she was not in control and hadn’t been for a long time. That she had nearly drowned and might not yet be finding her way to shore.

But Mack knew it. No one knew the facts better than he did.

“You scoot downstairs,” she said. “It looks like they’re on their final quilt. Then I’ll join you.”

She missed him when he was no longer visible. She’d gotten used to him being out of her life. But one glimpse, and she missed him already.

She needed to remember. She needed to take that into consideration before she pushed him away again. There were a million things to take into consideration, but none was more important than that.

The baby quilts were bright and whimsical. The committee had draped them over crib rails and the backs of rocking chairs. Some hung on the wall. Mack was particularly enamored of a lime-green frog sitting on a lily pad, watching for the next course of that night’s supper. Butterflies, dragonflies and ladybugs adorned the borders. If he had another child, if he ever was blessed that way again, he wanted that quilt. And he was going to tell Helen so.

He heard a noise behind him and expected to find Tessa in the doorway, but Nancy stood there instead.

“I heard you were down here.” She walked over and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Aren’t these adorable?”

“Kayley had a quilt with kittens on it that Helen made for her. She loved it to death. I don’t think there was a thread left by the time she moved to a real bed.”