Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “But—”

  “Please lock up when you leave.” Anna hurried down the stairs before she had to explain further.

  Gordon was cheerful and talkative as they drove to his apartment. When they arrived, Theresa was sprawled out on the living room floor, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans frayed at the ankles. Anna felt prim and overdressed.

  “Hey, Theresa,” said Gordon. “We’re going to make dinner. Are you hungry?”

  “Sure.” Theresa climbed to her feet. “What are we having?”

  Gordon shrugged and turned toward the kitchen. “Beats me.”

  Anna followed, and as Gordon and Theresa pulled open cabinets and the refrigerator joking about how little food they had in the house, she leaned against the kitchen counter and watched them. Finally Gordon found a box of macaroni and cheese and held it up triumphantly. Theresa applauded and laughed, then dug up a dusty pot, rinsed it in the sink, and set water on to boil. As the pasta cooked, Gordon and Theresa bantered back and forth about department politics, but this time Anna made no attempt to follow the conversation. They had no colander to drain the macaroni, so Gordon tried to pour out the water in small trickles through a tea strainer, which sent Theresa into gales of laughter. Gordon and Theresa added margarine and milk and powdered orange cheese to the pasta, then stirred it all together and placed the pot in the center of the table with much ceremony. Anna found a diet soda in the refrigerator for herself and chose a seat at the end of the table. Gordon took the other end, and Theresa sat on his right.

  Anna had not eaten since breakfast, but she found herself with no appetite. She took small bites of the rubbery pasta, forcing herself to smile and nod at appropriate intervals. Then suddenly, desperately, she wanted to leave the room.

  “Will you excuse me?” she said. They broke off their conversation long enough to acknowledge her departure.

  “Down the hall to the left,” Theresa called after her. “You passed it on your way in.”

  Anna went to the bathroom and turned on the fan to drown out the noise from the dining room. She went to the sink to splash her face with water, and when she closed her eyes, she pictured the evening she had originally planned. She saw herself and Gordon gazing at each other over the wild rice soup, feeding each other bites of tenderloin en croûte, sighing with pleasure as the wineglasses reflected the candlelight.

  She opened her eyes and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The water had made her makeup run, and the towel racks were empty.

  She sighed and blotted her face dry with tissues.

  She left the bathroom, but instead of returning to the dining room, she turned in the opposite direction. She strolled down the hallway studying posters and photographs, touching a picture frame, fingering a plastic bowl of potpourri, allowing the laughter and talk to fade into the background. Each step took her farther from the dining room, and each step made it easier to continue. Then she was at the front door, which shut out the noise completely when she closed it behind her.

  She descended the flight of stairs and left the building. She paused on the sidewalk to inhale deeply, and although the August evening was only pleasantly cool, she detected the scent of a wood-burning stove. The end of summer meant fewer salads and berry desserts, more meats and cream sauces. Harvest dishes—pumpkin soup, apple cobbler. Turkey with cranberry cornbread stuffing. Gnocchi in mushroom broth. When she opened her restaurant, she would design her menu around the four seasons, using locally grown organic produce and her own secret recipes, refined from years in the college’s huge kitchens and her own tiny kitchenette.

  Chuck’s Diner was open until ten. Tonight she would take a table for one, order a sandwich, and plan. One day that restaurant would be hers, and on the night of her grand opening, she would look back on this evening and marvel that she had ever allowed anyone to convince her to trade wild rice soup and beef tenderloin for powdered orange cheese pasta.

  Russell

  Russell met Elaine at the Torchlight Run at Seafair. He had run the race every year since relocating from Indiana, but this was the first time he had signed up as part of a team from work. A coworker had talked him into it, insisting that Russ was the computer systems engineers’ key to finally snatching victory from the marketing department’s team, whose names had been engraved on the winners’ bronze plaque in the employee lunchroom three years in a row. A techie team had never won, except for the year that an overly competitive manager in the software division had hired three college track stars as summer interns, which didn’t count.

  The self-appointed coach of Russ’s team told him and their other two teammates that their best strategy was to stick together, shadowing the marketing guys until the last four hundred meters, when they could sprint ahead to the finish line. Rather than hold their faster runners back, Russ thought they each ought to strive for a personal best time and gamble that their average would beat the marketing guys’, but he saw some merit in staying together so they could push one another. Then he spotted Elaine a few yards away in the pack, and all thoughts of the competition vanished. He instinctively slowed to get a better look.

  “Move it, Russ,” the coach called as he fell behind.

  “Okay,” he called back, weighing victory against getting a second look at a very attractive racer. He quickly decided bragging rights were just not that important and feigned a sore hamstring.

  When his friends pulled too far ahead to witness his sudden recovery, Russ maneuvered through the pack toward the woman in the pink tank top, close enough to see the freckles on her pale shoulders. Her black hair was cut so short it barely moved in the breeze, but what struck him most was that of all the runners surrounding them, she was the only one smiling.

  They crossed the finish line at nearly the same time, and he stayed close enough so that he did not lose her in the crowd at the postrace party. He squeezed into the buffet line behind her and handed her a plate as she gathered her napkin and plasticware. She thanked him, which gave him enough encouragement to speak to her. “You must love to run,” he said, immediately regretting it. They had just finished a 10K race. Russell McIntyre, Master of the Obvious.

  To his relief, instead of bursting into derisive laughter, she looked up at him, curious. “What makes you think so?”

  “You were smiling exactly like that even at mile five.”

  She turned away to continue moving through the buffet line, but she seemed pleased. “I must have been thinking about how glad I was that the race was almost over. I really pushed myself today. I usually go at a slower pace.”

  “Were you after a personal best time?” Since they were technically in a conversation, Russ did not think she would mind if he accompanied her as she chose a table and sat down. “Or just this carbo-loading feast of pasta?”

  “Definitely the carbs,” she said. “No, I really just wanted to make sure I got here before my kids did, so they wouldn’t worry that I had collapsed somewhere along the way.”

  “Your kids?”

  “Yes, my kids. They’re meeting me.” A small, knowing smile played on her mouth. “They’re legal in this state, you know. You don’t even have to have a license.”

  Russ quickly recovered. “Are they with their baby-sitter? Or … your husband?”

  “No husband, no baby-sitter. My daughter’s sixteen, so she can drive when I’m sufficiently motivated to allow it. She dropped me off at the starting line and she and my son will pick me up later.” She glanced at her watch. “In about an hour.”

  Sixteen? Russ was flabbergasted. Without thinking, he said, “How old were you when you had her, twelve?”

  He was halfway through a hapless apology when he realized she was laughing.

  Although he would catch grief from his coworkers on Monday for costing their department a bitter loss to those smug jocks from marketing, before Elaine left to meet her kids, Russ had her phone number and an invitation to call.

  They met the next Friday evening for dinner at Elliott’s O
yster House on Pier 56. They watched the ferryboats depart and arrive as the sun set behind the Olympic Mountains and shared their life stories. It turned out Elaine was twenty when she had Carly, twenty-two when she had her son, Alex, and twenty-eight when she and her husband divorced. Her ex, a chief financial officer for a dot-com, had decided he needed a new wife to go with his new lifestyle once his company’s stock options made him a millionaire. Under California law, Elaine was entitled to half of his wealth, but she chose to accept a lower settlement in exchange for uncontested full custody of Carly and Alex. “I didn’t want his money for myself anyway, not after what he did,” she said breezily, dismissing his betrayal. “I’m so obstinate I wanted to refuse child support, too, but my lawyer talked me out of it. I’m glad he did. Do you know what college costs these days?”

  Russ thought a better question was how any man could be deluded enough to believe any trophy wife could surpass Elaine. There was a moment when he was unsettled by their six-year age difference, but he quickly shrugged it off. She was so full of life and—and she just had a way about her that made her more attractive to him than most women his own age.

  She worked in public relations for a local nonprofit, which meant that she spent her days trying to convince the wealthy and upper-middle class citizens of Seattle to write checks to support unwed, pregnant teenagers. “There’s not a lot of money in that,” she remarked once. “Orphaned babies? Sure. They’re cute and innocent. You can always find someone willing to help cute little orphans. Teenagers, though, are not so cute, and if they’re pregnant, conventional wisdom says they must not be so innocent. Some say these girls got what they deserved for their irresponsible behavior. If people only knew what these girls have been through, they might believe differently, but they don’t know, and frankly, far too many of them don’t want to know.”

  Her ex-husband’s new wife had once been a spokesmodel for Toyota, but since her marriage, she had devoted herself full-time to promoting her husband’s career and raising their baby boy. Elaine had met her successor only once; Carly and Alex saw her as the destroyer of their parents’ marriage and rarely asked to visit their father at his new home. If they were frosty to their stepmother, they were fortunately only chilly to Russ, with promising warming trends as the months passed.

  In December, Russ’s best friends from college, Charlie and Christine, came down from Olympia to do some Christmas shopping and meet Elaine. Charlie was obviously relieved Russ was finally dating again after breaking up with his almost-fiancée, a fellow engineer he had left behind at his former employer when she decided she liked her job too much to follow him to the West Coast. Christine’s opinion mattered more somehow, possibly because she was the more astute of the pair and also because Russ had once been half in love with her. They had met in history class the first semester of sophomore year, had shared notes, met for lunch, and studied for the midterm together. If Russ had not made the mistake of inviting her to the football tailgater where she met his roommate, she might have become his girlfriend instead of Charlie’s. He had watched with dismay as she and Charlie hit it off better than he had expected, but he hid his feelings when she later asked him if he would be upset if she went out with Charlie.

  What could Russ say? He didn’t own her. He had never even kissed her. “Why would I mind?” he said. “Charlie’s a great guy.”

  She beamed at him with such warmth and sweetness that he would have been filled with bliss had her happiness sprung from any other source but Charlie.

  Still, Russ clung to a thin shard of hope: Charlie always moved on to a new girl every few weeks, leaving her bewildered, jilted predecessor with nothing but vague promises that he would call. Usually Russ felt sorry for the girls Charlie dumped, but this time he hoped that it would happen, and soon, because when it did he would be there to comfort Christine.

  But even Charlie recognized what he had found in Christine. They dated exclusively for the rest of their college years, and eventually Russ resigned himself to their romance. It was impossible to avoid them—not that Russ tried very hard, because he liked Charlie, and his admiration for Christine increased as his infatuation diminished. Before long she, too, became a close friend. Still, Russ knew when he was welcome and when they wanted to be alone, which was probably why the three of them got along so well.

  Christine tried to set him up with some of her friends, but although they were all friendly, smart, pretty girls, he never really clicked with any of them. Once, after an exam week all-nighter turned into a predawn breakfast off campus, the three friends’ conversation turned from their sadistic professors to the dismal state of Russ’s love life. That was when Christine delivered her devastating verdict: Russ was doomed because he was “too nice.”

  “Great,” said Russ gloomily, loading his fork with pancakes. “So I should become a jerk?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Christine.

  “Are you saying that I’m not nice?” Charlie asked her, wounded. “I open doors for you. I remember birthdays. Your mother loves me.”

  “Of course you’re nice, honey,” said Christine, but when he wasn’t looking, she rolled her eyes at Russ.

  “Russ’s problem is that he’s waiting for the girl of his dreams,” said Charlie. “Once he figures out that no such girl exists, he’ll settle for a real girl.”

  Russ could tell from the pointed look Christine gave Charlie that she took in all that this implied and was not pleased, but she didn’t rebuke him. Instead she turned to Russ and said, “Keep looking, Russ. You’ll find her.”

  And in Elaine, he thought he had. She and Christine struck up a friendship immediately, and as soon as Charlie got him alone, he said, “Russ. Marry her. Marry her now. Don’t give her the chance to get to know you better or she’ll never have you.”

  “Very funny,” said Russ, but he couldn’t stop grinning. It meant the world to him that his best friends liked Elaine, because he was falling in love with her.

  They married a year and a half after meeting in the road race.

  Charlie was the best man and Elaine’s sister was the matron of honor. Carly and Alex, the only other attendants, tentatively approved of the marriage. They even consented to spend a week with their father so Russ and Elaine could honeymoon in the California wine country. They had mixed feelings about leaving their home to move into Russ’s, but Elaine decided the sacrifice of next-door friends and a familiar school was worth it for a larger house in a better neighborhood on the other side of the city. Russ, eager for Elaine’s children to feel welcome, offered to help them repaint their new rooms, choose new furniture—anything they wanted, anything that would make them feel at home. They thanked him politely and took him up on the offer, while a subtle nonchalance in their voices told him they would tolerate these new arrangements only because their mother loved him and they would be moving out soon anyway.

  Elaine was thrilled with her new surroundings, not only because her kids would finish up high school in a much better district, but also because Russ agreed to let her turn the spare bedroom into a sewing room. Elaine was a quilter, and although Russ had known that about her, he had not entirely understood what that meant until moving day when she enlisted his help in carrying box after box of carefully folded fabric into her new sewing room.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, wondering how it would all fit and secretly concerned that she might ask to move their bed into the spare room so the master suite could become her sewing room.

  “My stash, of course.”

  “Your stash?” It sounded vaguely illegal. “Do you think you’ll have enough room?”

  “I’ll make it fit,” she said cheerfully, and somehow she squeezed everything into the closet. Her sewing table took up the entire length of one wall, across the room from two bookcases stuffed full of books on quilt patterns and quilting history. She hung a large, flannel-covered board on another wall. As she designed a new quilt, she would press fabric shapes to it until they stuck, t
hen stand back and study the arrangement, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time.

  But helping Elaine set up her new sewing room, or “quilt studio,” as she preferred to call it, was only the beginning of his initiation into the world of marriage to a quilter. The whirr of her sewing machine woke him in the morning, and she stitched by hand on the sofa beside him while they watched television at night. Before ironing his shirt and slacks every morning, he had to remove stacks of quilt squares from the ironing board. At least once a week, a quilt magazine turned up in their mailbox. Little bits of thread clung to everyone’s clothing; fashion conscious Carly ran a lint brush over herself every morning before going to school at an age when most girls had probably never seen a lint brush. Elaine communicated via the Internet with other, similarly obsessed quilters from around the world; she peppered their dinner conversation with references to friends she had never seen in person, ladies who identified themselves by such names as “Quilt-lady” and “Scrappbagg.” He learned the hard way not to walk around in bare feet after she pin basted a quilt on the living room floor. Every vacation, every excursion to a new city turned into a quest to spend at least twenty dollars at every quilt shop within a ten-mile radius. He also discovered that one does not ask a hardcore quilter to sew on a loose button.

  The first and only time he did so, Elaine stared at him in astonishment. “Would you ask Picasso to paint your living room?”

  “I might,” he said, “if he owned a three-thousand-dollar Bernina painting machine.”

  Elaine gave her sewing machine an affectionate pat. “It was only fifteen hundred, used, and worth every penny.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked except you love to sew. You have enough fabric in here to outfit the entire Spanish Armada in full sail. What’s one little button?”