A Single Thread (Cobbled Court)

by Marie Bostwick

  A Single Thread

  Also by Marie Bostwick

  ON WINGS OF THE MORNING

  RIVER’S EDGE

  FIELDS OF GOLD

  “A High-Kicking Christmas” in COMFORT AND JOY

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  A Single Thread

  MARIE BOSTWICK

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  For my sister,

  Elizabeth Walsh

  Contents

  With Gratitude

  Prologue

  1 Evelyn Dixon

  2 Evelyn Dixon

  3 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  4 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  5 Evelyn Dixon

  6 Evelyn Dixon

  7 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  8 Evelyn Dixon

  9 Evelyn Dixon

  10 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  11 Evelyn Dixon

  12 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  13 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  14 Evelyn Dixon

  15 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  16 Evelyn Dixon

  17 Evelyn Dixon

  18 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  19 Evelyn Dixon

  20 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  21 Evelyn Dixon

  22 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  23 Evelyn Dixon

  24 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  25 Evelyn Dixon

  26 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  27 Evelyn Dixon

  28 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  29 Evelyn Dixon

  30 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  31 Evelyn Dixon

  32 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  33 Evelyn Dixon

  34 Abigail Burgess Wynne

  35 Evelyn Dixon

  36 Evelyn Dixon

  Author’s Note

  Discussion Questions

  With Gratitude

  This story was inspired by the real life story of a wonderful and lovely lady, Deb Mella. Until recently, Deb was the owner of my favorite local quilt shop. She has now closed the shop to fully devote herself to her family, friends, and to raising breast cancer awareness. Thank you, Deb, for being so generous with your time and for educating me about this disease as well as the challenges of running a quilt shop. It is my fervent wish that, if only in a small way, this book will be a useful tool to you and others who are leading the charge for breast cancer awareness.

  I am also deeply grateful to Joan Berlin for sharing her story with me and for answering my many questions about the diagnosis, treatment, and emotional impact of living with breast cancer. Joan, your open heart and candor made this book better. Thank you.

  While A SINGLE THREAD is not an official sponsor of the foundation, I urge readers to join me in supporting the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure® in their promise to end breast cancer. Whether you participate in a Quilt Pink event, run a 5K Race for the Cure, or simply write a check, your help is needed and appreciated. For more information, please visit www.komen.org.

  Also, many thanks to Chris Boersma Smith, a dear friend and quilter extraordinaire, for taking my vision of the “Broken Hearts Mending” quilt and turning it into an actual design that even we quilters who are somewhat less than extraordinaire can make.

  And finally, my thanks to the people I’ve come to think of as “the team,” Brad Skinner, Audrey LaFehr, Jill Grossjean, Nancy Berland, Adam Kortekas, and Sherry Kuehl.

  Prologue

  Evelyn Dixon

  One of my happiest memories is one of my mother’s worst.

  It was summer. I was five years old and would be starting kindergarten in a few weeks, so Mother decided to take me shopping for school shoes. She got behind the wheel of our Ford Fair-lane and cranked down the window so we wouldn’t be stifled by heat and the exhaled smoke of her cigarettes. I climbed into the front seat and off we went.

  The safety belt, an accessory made mandatory by the enlightened legislators of Wisconsin two years before, was wedged down a narrow crevasse between the seats, forgotten among the gas receipts, discarded gum wrappers, and a grainy mixture of sand and cookie crumbs—the debris of our annual vacation trip to the beaches of Door County. The idea of unearthing the belt and buckling it low and tight across my lap for our trip to the J. C. Penney department store never crossed my mother’s mind. It was 1963. There was less to be afraid of then.

  Penney’s had the only escalator in our town, a distinction it would claim for another eight years. Later, when someone built a big shopping center on the edge of town, J. C. Penney would desert its downtown store and move there, leaving Main Street with a full city block of darkened display windows and empty parking spaces. The new mall would have three escalators, a glass elevator with gold-tone trim and white marquee lights in the middle, and four stores with at least twice the square footage of our old J. C. Penney. But back in 1963, Penney’s was the biggest store in town, and I believed they carried at least one of every single thing that was offered for sale on the face of the earth.

  After we bought a pair of tan and white saddle shoes exactly like the pair I’d just outgrown, Mother decided she needed one of those new electric coffee percolators, so we rode the escalator upstairs to the housewares department.

  Normally, I stuck close to my mother’s side, so I don’t know what made me do it, but while she was trying to decide between an eight- or ten-cup model, I quietly slipped away to explore the bed and bath department.

  Walking between a valley of shelves piled high with sheets, I admired the delicate scallops and embroidery stitching on the edges of pillowcases, poking holes through the cellophane wrappings of the packages so my fingers could stroke the smooth, crisp sheeting inside, marveling as I considered the folded towers surrounding me and realized that white wasn’t just white but an enormous spectrum of whiteness from snow and alabaster to marshmallow and pearl. Amazing.

  Then I heard my mother’s voice calling, beckoning me with the calm, singsong “Eve-lyn” she used to summon me to supper every night, the first syllable accented and extended before dropping into a short, lower-toned chirrup at the end, a secret call between hen and chick. I began walking toward the sound of my mother’s voice, but when I turned a corner in the valley of sheets, I stopped, frozen and fascinated.

  My eyes rested upon midnight, then rolled skyward to navy, royal, cobalt, progressing to aqua, seafoam, avocado, moss, and forest, and then, reaching the ceiling, floated down a row of yellows, lemon to electric and every sunny tint between, then to the orange shades, peach to rust, before reaching the floor and beginning the journey again. It was an entire wall of towels, a delicious, soft rainbow that, as I drew closer, filled every inch of my field of vision and made me feel, for reasons I still cannot explain, simply and completely happy.

  I forgot all about my mother, didn’t hear her soft chirp rise in volume and intensity as a minute passed and then two with no answer from me. Wanting to take in the full perspective of what lay before me the way an art lover backs away from a canvas to experience the impact of a painting, I retreated a few steps until I backed into a cabinet holding a pile of shower curtains and sank down to the floor. I wrapped my arms around my knees and pulled them up under my chin, making myself very quiet and very small, hearing nothing, seeing only the colors displayed before me…for me.

  Until the day she died, whenever Mother told this story, relating her growing panic, the numbers of clerks and customers that combed the aisles, dressing rooms, and interiors of clothing racks searching for me, and the relief that actually made her dizzy when a dishwasher salesman finally found me, she instinctively clutched at her heart as if reliving the palpitations. Then she would shake her h
ead and say, “Evelyn, you were always such a good little girl. Whatever were you thinking of?”

  I never did find a way to explain it to her. For my mother, those fifteen minutes when I was “lost” were pure hell. For me, pure bliss.

  Those rich, rolling gradations of color spoke to me, like finding the end of the rainbow and walking into it, reaching out with both hands and discovering that which had, from a distance, seemed no more substantial than vapor, refracted light, and hope had heft, and texture, and substance if you drew close. I found comfort in the predictability and measured pace of the spectrum as it progressed from blue to green to yellow to red and back to blue again, excitement and unbounded promise as I considered the infinite number of patterns and expressions that could be achieved simply by lifting one color, or two, or twenty from their natural context and placing them somewhere else in the column. For a five-year-old in 1963, a time when Crayolas came twenty-four to a box, it was an astounding revelation.

  I never knew how to explain the importance of that moment to my mother, though later I would come to understand what it meant to her. For Mother, my disappearance was a reminder that in the time it takes to decide between eight cups and ten, or to turn your back, or take a breath, the things you love most can be lost, perhaps forever. Between one breath and the next, your whole world can change.

  One morning, you may wake up on a sunny day in early spring, happy, your mind filled with nothing weightier than the thought of what you’ll put in your garden this year or what fabrics should go into your next quilt. And then a conversation begins, or the telephone rings, or the lab report arrives, and everything you thought you knew for certain is suddenly called into question.

  It’s a lesson I’ve learned from personal experience, and, for a time, the weight of that lesson almost sank me. But then I learned something else: the pendulum swings both ways.

  One moment you may be trapped in a maze of despair so thick there seems to be no hope of ever finding your way back to the place where you were happy, or at least happy enough, and then you stumble around a corner and find yourself in a different world. Taking one step down a cobblestone path that looks like a blind alley, and then another, going forward not from any sense of expectation or faith but only because there is nowhere else to go, you suddenly and surprisingly find yourself in a wide, sunny place where potted geraniums bloom in scarlet mounds and dormant dreams lie behind wooden doors with chipped paint and rusting hinges, waiting. From one breath to the next, everything changes.

  Life is as terrible and wonderful as all that. I know from experience.

  1

  Evelyn Dixon

  Later I would learn that that particular stretch of Interstate 84, crossing from New York into Connecticut, is usually choked with traffic. But at one in the morning with only fifty miles to my destination, mine was the only car in sight, and I sailed down the empty lanes. It wasn’t until he pulled up behind me that I saw the state trooper and looked down at my speedometer.

  Ninety. He had me. I called myself a name, shifted my foot from the accelerator to the brake, and started to pull over even before the pulsating strobe of colored lights filled my rearview mirror.

  The patrolman was a nice-looking young man. If he had smiled he would have looked a lot like Garrett, but his expression was stony. Strange to be face-to-face with an authority figure young enough to be my son, but when he asked for my license and registration I obediently handed them over.

  “Ms. Dixon, do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

  “About ninety,” I said honestly. There was no point in lying when I already knew he knew the truth; besides, I’m a terrible liar. “I started out in Nashville this morning and decided to drive straight through to New Bern, but I wasn’t deliberately speeding. The road was clear, and I guess I just got lost in my thoughts. I didn’t realize how fast I was going until I saw you.”

  He looked at my license. “You’re from Texas? And you’re driving all the way to New Bern by yourself?” I nodded.

  “What brings you here?” he asked.

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  Three days before, I’d had no more thought of driving to New England than of becoming an astronaut and taking a trip to the International Space Station.

  When the doorbell rang at exactly ten-thirty that morning, I knew who it was: Mr. Lindsay from Elite Moving and Storage. Rob’s secretary had left a message the day before saying that a Mr. Lindsay would be coming to give me an estimate and a date to pack my furniture and move it out of the house I’d called home for the last twenty years.

  Mr. Lindsay was wearing a pair of polished brown Justin cowboy boots just like Rob’s. He smiled broadly as he sat at down at my kitchen table, pulled a clipboard out of his briefcase, and started filling out paperwork. I disliked him instantly.

  “And what address will we be delivering to?” he asked without looking up.

  “I don’t know.”

  He lifted his head, his eyebrows rising to arcs of annoyance. “Mrs. Dixon, I can’t very well estimate the price for your move if I don’t know how far we’re moving you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that, Mr. Lindsay, but I simply don’t know yet!” I snapped. “And if that is inconvenient for you, or Elite Moving and Storage, or Rob Dixon…well, I frankly don’t give a damn. It isn’t like I invited you to come over here!”

  This outburst was so unlike me. For the last several weeks all I’d been able to do was cry; now here I was cursing at a complete stranger. I was shocked, but Mr. Lindsay didn’t appear to be. Putting two and two together, his brows lowered and his face became a mask of practiced, utterly unconvincing sympathy. He had seen this all before.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dixon. I wasn’t aware of the circumstances of your move. I know how hard this must be for you; divorce always is. But please understand, I’m just trying to help you. Now, it’s my understanding that the new owners are planning on moving in on the fifth, so that means you’ll need to be out of here by the end of next month. When do you think you’ll finalize your plans?” His voice was smooth and unflappable.

  I sighed. “I’m looking at several condos in the area, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Not that it really makes much difference. They all look the same—fake granite countertops in tiny kitchens, white paint, four walls, sliding glass doors looking out onto a sad five-by-five square of concrete they call a patio. Each one is just as depressing as the one before.”

  “You know, there is a complex we’ve moved several ladies in your situation to, and they’ve been very happy,” he said brightly.

  “I see. You mean there’s a central depot for storing discarded wives these days? Someplace where they warehouse the women who’ve passed their sell-by date and been replaced with newer models? How convenient.” There was no point in taking my anger out on this man, but I couldn’t help myself. It didn’t seem to bother him though. He ignored my sarcasm and kept talking.

  “My sister-in-law works in the sales office. Have you seen Rolling Hills at River’s Edge? If you’d like, I could give Beverly a call and—”

  I shook my head. “You mean the place over on Alamo Drive? The place with no hills and no river? No thanks.”

  “Well,” Mr. Lindsay chuckled, “they might have been taking a little bit of literary license with the name, I’ll give you that. There aren’t any real hills between here and Austin, but there will be a river. Beverly told me that they’re starting on the excavation next week.”

  “A fake river?” I laughed. “Thanks, Mr. Lindsay, but I’m up to here with that sort of thing—plastic flowers, simulated wood-grain cabinets, planned communities, absent friends, false promises, broken homes. I want something real. I’ve had enough of counterfeits, and, for that matter, I’ve had enough of this conversation.” The legs of the chair made a scraping sound against the laminate wood flooring as I got to my feet. Mr. Lindsay looked surprised and a little confused.

  “Mrs. Dixon, I know you’re
upset, but we really do have to make some decisions here—”

  “No.” I shook my head. “We don’t have to do anything. And I’m not going to. Not today. I’m sorry that you came out here for nothing, Mr. Lindsay, but this is still my home.” I could feel tears pooling in my eyes, but my voice sounded strong in my ears. “You need to leave.”

  As I walked him to the front door and opened it, it occurred to me that I needed to do the same.

  The next thing I knew, I was in the front seat of my car, heading northeast, and my suitcase was in the back. I really didn’t know where I was going, only that I was. But by the time I neared the city limits, I decided I’d better tell someone that I was leaving. I called his office in Seattle.

  “Claremont Solutions. This is Garrett.”

  “Hi, honey. It’s Mom.”

  “Hi, Mom. Are you all right?” Garrett is my only child. He’s a good son and has always been protective of me, even more so since the divorce.

  “I’m fine, sweetheart. I’ve just decided to go on a trip, and I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Well, that’s great,” he said cautiously. “I’ve been telling you to take a vacation for months now—anything besides sitting around the house and moping—but this is kind of sudden, isn’t it? Where are you going?”

  And suddenly I knew. “To New England. To see the fall colors. I’ve wanted to go for years, but your dad never would. His idea of a vacation has always involved sitting on a beach and baking to a golden brown, even if that meant I had to spend the whole time hiding under an umbrella.”

  My complexion has always been fair. Twenty minutes in strong sun can leave me with a nasty burn. But even after the dermatologist removed a malignant mole from my shoulder a few years ago, Rob continued booking our vacations in tropical locales. I knew I shouldn’t subject Garrett to my acrimonious memories of his father, but sometimes it was impossible to swallow back the anger.