Mornings on Main

by Jodi Thomas

  “Hello, dear,” Gram shouted. “How nice of you to come help me again.”

  “I had so much fun I just had to return. You don’t mind me hanging around?”

  “Oh, no. I love the company and there is always plenty to do.”

  They walked in with arms locked. Jillian wasn’t sure Eugenia remembered her name, but the Southern lady seemed to assume she knew everyone, and she treated all, old friends or strangers, the same.

  “Let’s make a cup of tea first this morning,” Gram suggested. “That will start the day right. I do love tea in the spring.”

  Jillian followed her back to a small kitchen, without mentioning it was still winter. They talked about the tea and the day as if they were old friends.

  The morning passed like a peaceful river. Customers came in, mostly to talk. Jillian made note of the ones who had lived their entire lives in this town. A long-retired teacher named Joe Dunaway, most of the quilters she’d met yesterday, the mailman named Tap. As she settled in, she did what she often did in little towns: she’d ask if they knew a Jefferson James who might have lived around here thirty years ago. The answer was always no, a dead end. She’d found a few Jameses over the years, but none knew a Jefferson. Her father never allowed anyone to shorten his name.

  Joe Dunaway said he thought the name might be familiar, but after forty years of teaching, all names sounded familiar.

  While Joe watched the store, Gram took the time to show her around the tiny office after Jillian explained for the third time that she was there to make a record of all the quilts.

  “Someday, your quilts will hang in a gallery at the county museum, and you’ll want all the facts to be right. I’ll compile that record for you, Gram.”

  “Oh, of course you will,” Eugenia agreed as she sugared her tea for the second time.

  When their cups were half-empty, they began to stroll through the colorful garden of quilts. Jillian kept her questions light. Never too many. Never too fast.

  She noticed how Gram stroked each quilt she straightened as if it were precious. The kitchen and the office might be a cluttered mess, but all the quilts had to be in perfect order.

  “You touch them as if they’re priceless. Like they’re your treasures, your babies,” Jillian said.

  “Oh, they’re not mine. But in a way they are alive. Each one holds memories. I just put them together in the final step of quilting.” She pulled one from the shelf and spread it out on a wide table designed for cutting fabric. “This one belongs to Helen Harmon, who made it as a gift to give the man she loved on their wedding day. They’d known each other since grade school.” Gram pointed to one square. “See, that’s them as kids on the playground. He’s pulling her pigtail. I swear, Helen’s hair was stoplight red when she was little.”

  Jillian saw thick red threads braided together and sewn onto the quilt.

  Gram’s wrinkled fingers passed over another quilt square. A UT logo stood out in burnt orange. “That’s for their college days, and she made this one when he went into the army. When he came home a few years later and started work, his first job was in construction. Turned out he had a real knack for it.”

  Jillian saw the square with tools crossing, almost like a crest.

  “And here we have vacations they took camping, hiking, riding across the country on what Helen called hogs.” One square ran like a road map. “When they finally got engaged, both were thirty-four.” One square held nothing but sparkling material in the pattern of a diamond ring.

  Jillian touched the square of a house. “When they bought their first house, right?”

  Gram shook her head. “When he built what was to be their first house, she made that square. They both agreed neither would move in until after the wedding.”

  “What happened?” Jillian realized she was holding her breath.

  “I’d worked late into the night the evening before their rehearsal dinner. I wanted to have the quilt ready for her to give to him. She was not a natural seamstress, and was years away from being a skilled quilter. Each piece came hard for her. She’d laugh and say she really made ten quilts because she had to do each square over and over to get it just right.”

  “What happened?” Jillian asked again.

  “She didn’t come pick up the quilt the day of their rehearsal. When she woke that morning before her wedding, she found a note on his pillow. He’d had an offer for a new job up north and hadn’t known how to tell her. The note said he’d tried a hundred times to break off the engagement, but she was too busy planning the wedding to listen.”

  “So he just left her?”

  Gram nodded. “And she left this quilt. She told me I could sell it, but who buys another’s memories? She’d even embroidered the wedding date in the middle.”

  Jillian looked at the quilt. June 19, 1971.

  “You’ve kept this for almost fifty years?”

  Gram nodded. “How do you throw away memories? It’s a beautiful quilt made with love. Helen eventually married a man named Green and moved to Houston, but she didn’t make anything for her next groom, and she never dropped by the shop to even look at this.”

  Jillian helped her fold it up and gently lay it back on the shelf. This would be the first quilt she logged.

  The story had been fascinating, but Gram’s memory of the details surprised Jillian. A woman who couldn’t remember if she’d sugared her tea had told every detail of something that had happened nearly fifty years ago.

  As soon as Connor picked up his gram for lunch, Jillian put the be-back-soon sign on the door and spread Helen Harmon’s quilt back out. With care she took pictures and wrote down details. Then, the last thing she did before folding it back into place was to stitch a two-inch blue square of fabric in one corner of the quilt’s back.

  No. 1

  Helen Harmon Green’s memory quilt. Made as a wedding gift to her future husband. Completed 1971. Never delivered.

  * * *

  As Jillian ate the apple she’d brought from the bed-and-breakfast, she walked around the shop. She’d have to do two or three handmade treasures a day to get them all logged. And she’d have to hear every story. Some might be short, but she’d bet they’d all be interesting. If only Gram’s memory would hold up just a little longer, she’d get them all down.

  When Connor brought Gram back from lunch, Jillian showed him what she’d done and he approved of her system. “You know,” he added as an afterthought. “If you want to write up a few of the stories, they might make nice human interest pieces for the Laurel Springs online paper I put out. It’s mostly just a blog, a bulletin of what’s happening, but something like this might interest people.”

  “I’ll give it a try after work. See what you think.”

  He handed her a key to the shop. “If you want to work after hours when the shop is closed, that’s fine with me.”

  “Thanks. I might do that.”

  To her surprise, he smiled. “I’m not trying to run you off early or keep you longer than you want to stay. I get a feeling you have somewhere else to be.”

  She thought of denying it. No matter what she said, she’d be giving away too much information, so she simply smiled back.

  That evening, they walked home together, each talking about their day. When she turned into the gate at the bed-and-breakfast, he didn’t say goodbye. But this time he did smile as he waved.

  She stood on the porch, watching him vanish. A paper man who would disappear from her mind as fast as a match fired. Maybe she’d describe him on her “Laurel Springs” journal page.

  Yes, she could mention how normal it had felt to just walk and talk about nothing really. Her father had called it passing time like it was a waste of energy, but he was wrong. Invisible threads were binding people who took the time to talk, helping them to care about each other even in a small way, to know each other. Making
them almost friends.

  She’d seen it happen with doormen in big cities or clerks in stores she’d frequented in towns. Not friends exactly, but no longer strangers.

  This was something rare for Jillian, but she realized Eugenia Larady had been doing it all her life. With Joe Dunaway, with customers, and with the quilters. Talking, caring, relating with everyone she met.

  Invisible threads. Invisible bonds. Not strong enough to hold her down, but nice to feel.

  5

  Connor Larady’s world of routine shifted as the days passed. After a week, Jillian James had become part of his life as easily as if a piece had always been missing and she simply fit into the void.

  He liked the easy way she greeted him every morning, not too formal, not too friendly. He looked forward to the few minutes they’d talk before the bus chauffeured his grandmother to the door of the quilt shop. He liked collecting little things he learned about Jillian, the pretty lady who never talked about herself.

  Some mornings he’d studied the way Jillian dressed, casual yet professional, as if every detail about her mattered somehow. She might be tall, but she wasn’t too thin. Her eyes often caught his attention, stormy-day gray one moment and calm blue the next. She watched the clock, always aware of time, and she seemed to study people as if looking for something familiar in their faces. And she listened, really listened.

  All the women he knew in town seemed shallow water, babbling brooks. But Jillian was deep current and he had a feeling it would take years to really know her. She never started a conversation, but if she disagreed with him she didn’t mind debating.

  Who knew, maybe they’d become friends. But no more. The one thing Connor had figured out about himself a long time ago was that he was a watcher, not a participant, where women were concerned. If life were a banquet, he was the beggar outside the window looking in. He’d rather put up with the loneliness than take another chance.

  He’d stepped out of his place once. He’d married Sunnie’s mother, Melissa, a few months after they slept together on their first date. He’d been home from school for the summer the year he turned twenty-one and she’d been nineteen. He’d used protection, but she’d told him it hadn’t worked.

  Marriage had seemed the only answer. She went back to school with him. He took a part-time job and rented a bigger apartment. He’d known the marriage was a mistake before Christmas that year, but Connor wasn’t a quitter. He carried on.

  Funny, he thought, he’d been caught in her net like a blind fish, but he hadn’t minded. It was just the way of life, and Sunnie made it all bearable.

  Melissa loved that he was from one of the oldest families in East Texas. Almost royalty, she used to say. He was educated, a path she had no interest in following. His family might be cash poor at times, but they were land rich, she claimed, though none of them seemed inclined to sell even one of their properties.

  Sunnie was eight months old when his parents were killed in a wreck. Afterward, Connor, Melissa and Sunnie had moved back to his childhood home, where he finished his degrees online. The house was roomy, but Melissa hated it from the day they moved in. She went back to her high school friends for entertainment, and he spent most of his days learning to handle the family business and his nights in his study with Sunnie’s bassinet by his desk.

  He wanted to write children’s stories, blending Greek myths with today’s world. Though he rarely left Laurel Springs, his character, a Roman soldier, traveled through time visiting battlefields that changed the world. In his novels, Connor’s hero collected knowledge in hopes of ending all conflict.

  But in reality, Connor simply fought to survive. To keep going when there never seemed enough time for his little dream; reality’s voice was always outshouting creativity’s whisper.

  When Sunnie started school, he moved his stories to the newspaper office and set up a writing desk. As the newspaper dwindled to a one-man job, he set up a business desk across from his editor’s desk to handle his rental properties in town and his leasing property outside the city limits. Next came the mayor’s desk, with all the city business stacked high. Of all the desks in his office, the writing desk was the most neglected.

  It had been that way from the beginning of his marriage. There was always too much to do. Too little time for dreams of writing.

  Even when Melissa had started needing her nights out after Sunnie was born, he never thought to complain. But after they moved back to Laurel Springs, the nights turned into long weekends. She needed to feel alive, she’d say. She needed to get away.

  About the time Sunnie started school, the weekends grew into weeks at a time.

  When Melissa would return, she’d bring gifts for Sunnie, and her only daughter would forgive her for not calling. They’d go back to being best friends, not mother and daughter, and Connor would prepare for the next time she’d leave with only a note on the counter.

  Even before she could read, Sunnie would see the note and cry before he read it.

  He learned to cook. Kept track of Sunnie’s schedule. He was there for the everyday of her life. Melissa was there for the party.

  Until three years ago, when she didn’t come back at all. A private plane crash outside of Reno. Both passengers died. Connor hadn’t even known the man she’d been with.

  That day, he became a full-time widower, not just a weekend one. No great change. But Sunnie’s world had shifted on its axis. That one day, she changed.

  Connor lost himself in the order of his repetitive days. He ran the paper his grandfather had started, even if it was little more than a blog, except on holidays. He looked after his daughter and his grandmother. Ruled over the monthly meetings of the city council. Paid the bills. Showed up.

  And, now and then, late at night, he wrote his stories. The dream of being a writer slipped further and further away on a tide of daily to-do lists.

  He told himself that hiring Jillian hadn’t changed anything. She was simply someone passing through, no more. Gram’s time in the shop would soon be ending, and somehow he had to preserve an ounce of what she’d meant to the town.

  The short articles about the quilts Jillian penned were smart and well written, and they were drawing attention. The number of hits was up at the free Laurel Springs Daily, and more people were dropping in to see the quilts she’d described so beautifully.

  Which slowed her cataloging work for the museum, leaving him with hope that she’d stay longer. He hadn’t thought about how much it meant, talking to an intelligent woman his age for the first time. Now, he was spending time trying to say something, anything, interesting on their walks home. All at once he didn’t have to just show up in his life; he had to talk, as well.

  Tonight he’d ask Jillian all about the tiny houses quilt she had logged. She’d said a lady quilted a two-inch square of a house every day for a year, then put them all together. Every one unique. The discipline would be something to talk about.

  “Dad, did you get a haircut?” Sunnie interrupted his thoughts as he pulled into the high school parking lot.

  Connor glanced at his daughter sitting in the passenger seat. “I did. What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “Not much change. Better, I guess. I’m glad I got Mom’s straight hair and not your wavy curls. After you scratch your head it’s usually going every which way.”

  “You have a suggestion?”

  “Yeah, wear a hat.” Sunnie glared at him, her substitute for smiling. “Derrick says you should slick it down a little, then you’d look like one of those newscasters. He said his mother thinks you’re handsome in a nutty professor kind of way.”

  “Tell Derrick’s mother thanks for the compliment, I think.” Connor tired to remember what Derrick’s mother looked like, but all he remembered were the tats covering her arms like black vines.

  He studied his beautiful daughter beneath her mask of makeup. T
he last thing he ever planned to do was take advice from Derrick or his mother. “You know, women thought I was good-looking when I was in college.”

  “Dinosaur days.” She rolled her eyes.

  He nodded. Without reaching his fortieth birthday, he’d already become old to someone. Maybe he’d talk to Jillian about that on the walk home. She had to be in her early thirties, so surely she wouldn’t think of him as old.

  No, he decided. People who don’t have children don’t want to hear what other people’s children say. Correction, what their children’s pimpled-faced, oversexed boyfriends say.

  Sunnie was always texting Derrick, even when he sat a few feet away. If she ever glanced up and really looked at him, she’d drop the reject from The Walking Dead. Ten years from now Derrick would still be wearing his leather jacket while he worked at the bowling alley.

  As soon as Connor pulled up to the curb, Sunnie bolted from the old pickup. He remembered a time when she’d lean over and kiss his cheek before she headed to school. Those days were long gone.

  A few minutes later he parked behind the quilt shop, walked through the place turning on lights, and unlocked the front door. He was early. It made sense to go across the street to his office and at least go through the mail, but he liked the silence of the shop. He’d known every corner of this place for as long as he could remember. In grade school he’d run, not home, but to Gram’s after school, where she’d have warm cookies from the bakery and little milk bottles in her tiny fridge waiting. He’d do his homework on one of the cutting tables until his mother came over from the paper and picked him up.

  He knew his parents were just across the street, working on what was then a daily paper filled with local ads, but they were busy. Gram always had time to talk, even when her fingers were busy sewing. She’d ask about his day, and she’d tell him who came by the shop. Only, she’d never told him the stories about the quilts that Jillian was writing. To him, each one was a treasure and he wished he’d thought to ask about them when he was a kid. It would have been nice to have the stories woven into his childhood.