Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  While her document printed, Sarah turned her attention to the second assignment Sylvia had given her. She took a deep breath and dialed her mother’s number.

  Carol answered on the fourth ring, just when Sarah had begun to hope for the answering machine. Not that she would have given her mother the big news on a recording, but an excuse to hang up and call back later would have been nice.

  “Sarah?” her mother said when she picked up, breathless. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Is something wrong there? You sound winded.”

  “I’m in the backyard working in the garden. Gardening is a relaxing hobby, you know.”

  Early in their relationship, Carol had referred to Matt as “that gardener” too often for Sarah to miss her underlying meaning: Gardening was meant to be a hobby, not a career, certainly not a respectable way for a man to support a family. Carol could not or would not understand that Matt, with his college degree in Landscape Architecture and responsibility for the entire Bergstrom estate, did not spend his days merely digging aimlessly in the dirt.

  “You don’t sound relaxed,” Sarah said, ignoring the barb, wondering if she should call back later. Then she imagined Sylvia’s disapproving frown and realized she’d never be able to invent an acceptable excuse for not sharing the news now that she finally had her mother on the phone.

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m on the cordless, and you know how that is. I can hear it ring, but I can only answer if I’m within ten feet of the base station. I saw your name in the caller ID and made a run for it.”

  Sarah, who often didn’t pick up when she saw her mother’s number in her own caller ID, felt a twinge of guilt, likely the first of many depending on the length of their conversation. “Sit down and catch your breath,” said Sarah. “I have some news.”

  “Why should I sit down? People only tell you to sit down when they have bad news.” Sarah heard the metallic scraping sound of a patio chair being dragged across concrete. “Is Sylvia all right? She didn’t have another stroke, did she?”

  Sarah held back the instinctive retort that any other worried mother would have asked first about her son-in-law, not her daughter’s friend and business partner, even one as dear as Sylvia. “Sylvia’s fine and so is Matt,” she said. “We’re all fine. In fact, Matt and I have great news.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  “I’m pregnant!”

  There was a pause. “Huh.”

  Sarah waited for more, but her mother was silent. “I tell you I’m pregnant and all you can say is ‘Huh’?”

  “Did the doctor tell you this or did you just take a home test?”

  “Mom, you’re a nurse. You know the home tests are as accurate as the ones the doctor offers.”

  “Yes, technically, but there’s always user error to consider.”

  “I think I know how to pee on a stick. Even if I could mess that up, the doctor confirmed it today. I’m definitely pregnant.” And her friends wondered why she had put off this call. “Honestly, Mom, I expected a much more enthusiastic response considering you’ve been warning me about my ticking biological clock for years.”

  “I have not.” Her mother inhaled deeply as if the news were an aroma of suspicious origin. “If I seem restrained, it’s just that I’ve been waiting for this news for so long that I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

  “Should I have waited to tell you until I was on my way to the hospital to deliver them?”

  “Of course not. I just need time for it to sink in.” She paused. “Did you say ‘to deliverthem ’?”

  “That’s why I thought you should sit down.”

  “Twins?”

  “We heard two heartbeats.”

  “Oh, no, Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” said Sarah, incredulous. “Matt and I are thrilled.” Maybe that was overstating it, but she was compelled to make up for her mother’s lack of enthusiasm, as if the babies had overheard their grandmother’s lament. “If one grandchild is wonderful, aren’t two even better?”

  “Certainly, if they’re spaced a few years apart. Twins will be so much harder, and the potential for complications is so much greater. I hope you won’t have to have a C-section.”

  Sarah winced. “Thanks for planting that worry in my head.”

  “It’s a very real possibility with multiple births. Surely your doctor mentioned it. Maybe I should call him and speak to him myself.”

  “He’s a she, and no, Mom, you are not speaking to my doctor.”

  “At least give me her name so I can check her out.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “There aren’t that many ob-gyns in that little town. I’m sure I could figure it out.”

  “I’m begging you not to try.” Sarah held the phone at arm’s length, closed her eyes, and counted to five before returning it to her ear. “This is how it’s supposed to go: I call you, I give you the happy news, you jump up and down for joy, you declare how happy you are, and you tell me everything’s going to be fine and not to worry.”

  “Everythingis going to be fine,” her mother said. “And I’m very happy. I don’t know why you think I’m not.”

  “The ‘huh’ remark was something of a clue.”

  “Sarah, I know you’re hormonal but there’s no need to be snippy. I already explained that I was surprised. It’s such good news that I can hardly believe it.”

  “Great. I’m glad.”

  “You don’t sound like you mean it.”

  She didn’t. “I’ll call you this weekend after we have the ultrasound, okay? Maybe I’ll know if you’ll have granddaughters or grandsons or one of each.”

  “I’m rooting for two granddaughters,” her mother said, “and I hope they’re exactly like you were when you were a child.”

  “Yeah, that’ll show me. Thanks, Mom,” said Sarah, and hung up the phone.

  Sarah had suspected her mother would find a way to sour her good news, and sure enough, she had. She hadn’t even wished Sarah and Matt a happy anniversary, not that Sarah could complain after forgetting the date herself. The only good to come of the phone call was that at supper Sarah was able to tell Sylvia that she had fulfilled her filial duty. “What did your mother say?” Sylvia asked, passing Sarah the basket of warm, flaky rolls seasoned with rosemary. “I imagine she was speechless with delight.”

  If Carol had been speechless, that would indeed have been a delight. Sarah didn’t want to spoil her appetite for Anna’s marvelous cooking, so she told Sylvia that her mother had been surprised but happy, and that as a medical professional she was mindful of potential complications with multiple births.

  “Of course she’s going to worry,” said Sylvia, nodding thoughtfully. “Be sure to tell her you’re receiving excellent prenatal care, regular checkups, and all the rest. That will put her mind at ease.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sarah agreed, but since the six campers seated at that table were listening in with eager curiosity, she quickly changed the subject. She didn’t mind talking about her pregnancy, but she had no desire whatsoever to bore everyone with an anti-Carol tirade. Sarah knew she always came off looking like an ungrateful daughter who should be more tolerant and forgiving of a concerned mother who, though perhaps somewhat overbearing, was actually quite harmless.

  No one would find fault with Sarah if they knew the real Carol, or if they knew of her unfathomable dislike for Matt. Carol never failed to be on her best behavior on her rare visits to Elm Creek Manor. As far as the other Elm Creek Quilters knew, she had grown to respect her son-in-law, and she and Sarah could enjoy a warm relationship if only Sarah would stop dredging up slights and mistakes from years long past. They didn’t understand that after all these years, Carol still disapproved of Matt, but she had learned to hide it from people whom she wanted to think well of her. The only real change was that she had come to tolerate Matt as a permanent part of Sarah’s life that no complaining on her part would excise. Although this was a welcome impro
vement, Sarah longed for her complete, wholehearted acceptance. Matt had done nothing to earn his mother-in-law’s enmity. He was a good man and a faithful husband, and Sarah knew he would be a wonderful father. He was everything Sarah wanted in a husband and a friend. What more could Carol ask of him?

  Although the aromas of Anna’s delicious chicken cordon bleu enticed her to take another bite, Sarah suddenly found herself without an appetite. What if Carol criticized Matt in front of the children? Or worse yet, what if her disapproval of Matt extended to her grandchildren? It was painful enough to have to defend her husband from her mother’s slights. Sarah couldn’t bear it if her mother disparaged the babies.

  Carol’s restrained reaction to the news of Sarah’s pregnancy did not bode well.

  Sarah set down her fork and took a quick drink of ice water, hoping no one would notice her hand trembling as she grasped the glass. Children deserved doting grandparents, but Sarah’s father had died when she was in high school and Matt’s mother had made herself scarce. Matt’s father had raised him on his own, and his sense of humor and patience would make him a wonderful grandpa—but rarely could he take time off from his contracting business, so visits would be few and precious. Of the twins’ two grandparents, Carol lived closer and had the most time to spend with the babies, but would she want to? And if she did, could Sarah trust her to have sense enough not to criticize Matt when they could overhear?

  Surely Carol would muster up the same self-control in front of her grandchildren that she did for the Elm Creek Quilters. She had to know that the twins would only end up resenting her for speaking ill of their father. Then again, Carol did not seem to care how she angered Sarah with her unreasonable hostility toward Matt—or the many other friends and loved ones Sarah had unwittingly subjected to her mother’s scathing criticism through the years.

  Even Sylvia had not escaped Carol’s withering judgment, although Sylvia did not know it. In the early years of Elm Creek Quilt Camp, Carol had offered dire, unsolicited predictions about the likelihood that the fledgling business would fail, and she had warned Sarah about the imprudence of trusting her future to the whims of an elderly eccentric. To Sarah’s relief, Carol had changed her mind entirely after coming to Elm Creek Manor and meeting Sylvia and the others, her worries no match for the Elm Creek Quilters’ generous welcome and unconditional acceptance.

  If only that force of good had been in place on her eighth birthday, when her grandparents made the long drive to Pennsylvania to spend the weekend. Sarah much preferred to visit them in their small, cozy home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, especially in winter, at Christmastime. While her parents stayed indoors, Sarah and her grandparents would ice-skate on the pond, sled down a long, steep hill precariously dotted with pines, and build snowmen until they could bear the cold no longer. Inside, while Grandpa stoked the fireplace, Sarah would bundle up on the sofa under two or three of Grandma’s old quilts, munch cookies, sip hot chocolate, and watch through the window as snow blanketed the yard and the surrounding trees. But in May, Sarah had school and her parents had to work, so Grandma and Grandpa had come to them.

  On the morning of Sarah’s birthday, Grandma couldn’t wait for the afternoon birthday party for her to open her gift, so while Sarah’s mother was busy in the kitchen frosting the cake, Grandma presented Sarah with a large, ribbon-tied box. When Sarah lifted the lid and saw a beautiful pink-and-white Sawtooth Star quilt nestled in tissue paper, she was almost afraid to touch it. “Is this for me?”

  Grandma laughed. “Of course, darling. Do you see any other birthday girls here?”

  Speechless with delight, Sarah flung her arms around her grandma, still holding fast to the beautiful quilt. It was warm and soft, just like its maker, and it smelled faintly of Grandma’s talcum powder.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” Sarah’s mother said from the doorway, spatula in hand, the white rubber end covered in pink frosting. “I just bought her a new bedspread two months ago.”

  “A granddaughter deserves a handmade quilt,” said Grandma. “It was a joy to make.”

  “She’ll just spill something on it and ruin it.”

  “No, I won’t,” Sarah piped up. “I promise.”

  “Don’t you like the bedspread we picked out together?”

  Her mother’s warning tone signaled that she was thinking back to their shopping trip, how her mother had patiently taken her from store to store in the shopping mall until Sarah decided on a pretty pastel-striped bedspread. Then her mother had agreed to backtrack to the far end of the shopping mall, where they remembered seeing pretty flower-shaped pillows that matched the bedspread perfectly. Afterward, they had enjoyed lunch at a fancy restaurant instead of grabbing fast food in the food court. It had been a rare, good day, just the two of them, with no disagreements or bickering to spoil everything.

  Yet over her grandma’s murmured protests, her mother urged Sarah to say which she preferred, her grandmother’s quilt or the bedspread they had chosen together. Sarah hemmed and hawed, reluctant to hurt either of their feelings, unwilling to lie. When her mother would not relent, Sarah finally confessed that she liked the Sawtooth Star quilt best.

  Sarah’s heart sank as her mother snatched up the quilt and returned it to the box. In a voice as taut as a wire, her mother promised Grandma that Sarah would take very good care of the quilt, and then she carried it from the room.

  Sarah fervently willed another outcome, one in which her mother admired the quilt and prompted Sarah to thank her grandma for the lovely gift. It was her birthday, a day for wishes to be fulfilled, but the day passed without another glimpse of the quilt.

  On the following evening, Sarah found the quilt folded at the foot of her bed. She yanked the comforter to the floor, spread the quilt in its place, and slept beneath it for the remaining nights of her grandparents’ visit. Upon their departure, her mother returned the quilt to the box and stored it, out of Sarah’s reach, on the floor of the master bedroom closet.

  After that, Sarah was permitted to use the quilt only when her grandparents visited. They traveled to Pennsylvania less frequently as they aged, and often months passed without a glimpse of the pink-and-white patchwork. Now, with her grandparents long deceased and her mother’s house no longer her own, Sarah had not seen the quilt for years. For all she knew it remained wrapped in tissue paper in the box on the floor of her mother’s closet.

  On those rare occasions when a certain shade of pink or a Sawtooth Star block in a camper’s quilt reminded her of her grandma’s gift, Sarah was tempted to ask her mother for it. The quilt was rightfully hers, a precious memento of her grandma’s love. Knowing how devoted Sarah was to the art of quilting, her mother should have voluntarily returned the quilt to her long ago. Perhaps she had given the quilt away or had discarded it. Perhaps she hoped that Sarah had forgotten it, because returning the quilt to Sarah now would prompt a deluge of questions Carol would certainly rather not answer: Why had she kept the quilt from Sarah for so long? Why had she twisted Grandma’s generous gift into a test of Sarah’s loyalty? At the time, Sarah had assumed that she had hurt her mother’s feelings by admitting that she preferred the quilt, and that her mother had withheld the quilt as punishment. Now she knew that nothing between mothers and daughters was ever so simple. And what was her grandmother’s role in the drama? Was she the innocent, generous gift-giver Sarah had always assumed her to be, or had Sarah missed some darker undercurrent, some conflict between the two older women? Did Carol scorn her mother’s handiwork, or had she always longed for a quilt of her own only to be refused? Had Sarah received the gift Carol had been denied? Had Grandma worked on the Sawtooth Star quilt for months, or had she begun to sew it only after Carol told her about their successful shopping trip? What had prompted Carol to leave the quilt on Sarah’s bed the next day without a word of explanation—a rebuke from Grandma, or something else?

  The more Sarah mulled over those questions, the less certain she was that her mother had been sole
ly in the wrong, and that was a difficult admission for her to make. She did not want to doubt her grandma, who had always showered her with kindness and affection, and she was reluctant to concede anything to Matt and Sylvia and others who were too quick to forgive her mother’s thoughtless malice. But her mother must have learned her coolly critical ways somewhere, from someone. Perhaps Sarah’s grandma had hidden a darker side from Sarah the way Carol hid hers from the Elm Creek Quilters.

  Sarah rested her hand on her abdomen and hoped that she would be different, that she would teach her children another way.

  Determined to enjoy the evening program, Sarah put aside her mother’s cautionary words as well as thoughts of the pink-and-white Sawtooth Star quilt and the uncomfortable questions it raised. The sun was just beginning to set when she joined the other Elm Creek Quilters in the ballroom to prepare for the scavenger hunt. Diane had insisted upon making a last-minute change to the list of items, so as they waited for her to return with new printouts, the Elm Creek Quilters entertained the campers with anecdotes about camp life behind the scenes. Gwen had cleverly implied that details in their stories would help the campers as they searched the estate—which very well could turn out to be true and sounded much better than confessing that they were merely filling time. At last Diane rushed in and distributed the lists to the campers, who had already divided themselves into teams of four. Sarah searched the crowd for shy Marcia and was pleased to find her standing with the Flying Saucer Sisters. The three original ladies had exchanged their fuchsia T-shirts for butter yellow and Marcia had donned a polo top in a slightly lighter shade. Even though Sarah had done nothing to help Marcia find her way into a welcoming circle of quilters, she felt vindicated, as if the celebrated hospitality of Elm Creek Manor had won the day.

  When Sylvia announced the hunt was on, the campers raced off laughing and shouting to search Elm Creek Manor and the estate grounds. Diane’s list included twenty items the campers might find anywhere on the estate, but they were strictly forbidden to take anything from their own stashes, suitcases, or sewing baskets. Theywere permitted to borrow things from campers on other teams, however, so teams often formed tentative alliances with competitors, swapping a particular square of fabric for an unusual notion or trading a spool of thread for a newly pieced quilt block. The first team to meet the Elm Creek Quilters on the verandah with as many of the twenty unusual items they could find would win Elm Creek Quilts pins, the most coveted prize at camp.