Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Of course.” Summer hadn’t meant to leave her out, just as her mother had not meant to miss Judy’s farewell party. “Would you like me to ask Anna to put several dozen blueberry muffins on tomorrow’s breakfast menu?”

  Sylvia thanked her, adding that they might need to send someone into Waterford for several packages of birthday candles. Summer offered to ask Jeremy to stop on the way. “It’s the least he can do to thank you for all the free meals,” she said, smiling.

  “On the contrary, we owe him,” said Sylvia. “Doesn’t he bring us our chef every day?”

  Not every day,Summer thought as she went downstairs to the kitchen. Sometimes Anna took the bus. She could just as easily get a ride with Diane and Agnes, but Anna lived in the apartment right across the hall from Jeremy, and it was no secret that he liked having an excuse to visit Summer. Not that an excuse was necessary, but Jeremy was busy with his dissertation, and Summer with Elm Creek Quilts and graduate school plans. If he didn’t go out of his way to see her mornings and evenings at the manor, they might not see each other for days at a time. It was almost as if they were gradually easing into a long-distance relationship to lessen the shock later, when they were finally parted.

  The next morning dawned cool and drizzly. When the campers gathered for breakfast, Sylvia drew the curtains on the storm just as the summer helpers entered the banquet hall bearing trays of blueberry muffins, each alight with a single tiny candle. The guests applauded as a muffin was set before each of them, and the white-haired guest of honor beamed as their voices rose in song. “Make a wish,” someone called out, so Vinnie closed her eyes and blew out her candle. All of the candles were immediately snuffed out, plunging the room into semidarkness just as a peal of thunder sounded. Someone shrieked, startled, and Summer quickly opened the curtains to the accompaniment of nervous laughter that quickly changed to true amusement. As the skies opened up and the rains descended, Summer looked around the gathering, her heart aching even as it lifted. She would miss these moments of unexpected delight. It was a comfort to know they would go on without her, that others would share in the happiness she had known within those gray stone walls. In that way, her own joy would endure.

  She had always known that Elm Creek Manor would only be a temporary home to her, a sheltering haven on the wayside of a longer journey. The time had come to move on.

  She made arrangements for Sarah to take over her classes on the upcoming Friday and Monday, and over dinner, she told Jeremy of her plans to travel to Chicago to find a place to live.

  “I thought you were going to wait until after the camp season,” he said.

  “I was.” Summer couldn’t explain her sudden urgency in a way that didn’t sound like she was eager to leave Waterford, to leave him. “The truth is, I shouldn’t have put it off this long. I have so much to do before the fall quarter begins, and if I can find a place this weekend, that will be one less thing to worry about.”

  Jeremy considered for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay, sure. I could use a road trip. When do we leave?”

  “Jeremy—” Summer hesitated. “You don’t have to drop everything because I changed plans at the last minute.”

  “I can afford to take a weekend off. I can make up the time later.”

  He would have a lot of empty hours to fill after she left, was what he meant. “What would your adviser say?”

  “He’d say he’s relieved I’m going now instead of after classes begin.” Jeremy savored another bite of Anna’s chicken cordon bleu. “Besides, how else were you planning to get to Chicago? It’s too late to buy an airline ticket unless you want to throw away a huge chunk of your fellowship stipend on it, and you don’t have a car.”

  “I thought I’d borrow my mom’s.”

  Jeremy grinned. “Summer, seriously, it’s not a problem. I’d like to go. I’ve been looking forward to spending some time together, and—I don’t know. It will be a little easier to think of you so far away if I can picture where you are—the rooms you live in, the streets you walk along.”

  “The library I’m going to haunt from dawn till dusk.”

  He nodded and looked away. They had met in a library. Summer had been researching the Bergstrom family’s early years in the Elm Creek Valley and Jeremy had sought a quiet place to study undisturbed. He had noticed her that first day, he later admitted, but he had needed a few days to work up the nerve to talk to her. Summer never told him that she hadn’t noticed him working away in his carrel, letting him believe that she had admired him from a distance, too. It wasn’t really deceiving him. She was sure she would have admired him had she not been so intent upon finding the information Sylvia sought.

  “Hey.” She reached for his hand. “I’m not planning to meet some guy in the stacks of the Reg.”

  “I know.” He squeezed her hand once before letting go.

  She let the obvious hang unacknowledged in the air between them. No one ever planned to meet someone else. It just happened.

  A few days later, Summer mentioned the trip to her mother and was astonished to see her face fall in disappointment. “I assumed you and I would go together.”

  “You did?” Summer couldn’t admit that the idea had never occurred to her. “How could you get away, with camp still going on and the new semester starting next week?”

  “If we flew and made a quick weekend of it, I’d miss only two days of camp and nothing at all at the college.”

  Summer was torn between chagrin that she had not thought to ask her mother and exasperation that everyone seemed to be making assumptions about her plans instead of asking her directly. “Airfare’s too expensive at this late date, and there aren’t enough teachers to cover all of our classes at camp if we take off at the same time.” Summer hugged her mother. “Come out for a long visit instead, after I’m settled. By then I’ll know all the best places to show you.”

  “You’re right. That’s a better plan.” But her mother remained forlorn. “If I stay longer, I’ll have time to research the 1933 World’s Fair during my visit.”

  On impulse, Summer said, “Jeremy can help me find the apartment, and you can help me move in.”

  Gwen laughed. “Oh, great. Give me the job that requires actual work.” But she looked pleased, as if she thought she had been given the more important, more intimate role.

  On Friday morning, after Jeremy dropped off Anna, Summer threw her backpack into the trunk of his car and settled into the front passenger seat. “What’s that?” she asked, glancing at the cooler sitting on the backseat. “Did you pack snacks for the road?”

  “Anna did,” said Jeremy, starting the car. “She has a moral aversion to fast-food restaurants, and she wasn’t sure what vegetarian options we’d find on the toll road.”

  “Oh.” Summer paged through the maps and directions she had downloaded from the Internet. “That was nice of her.”

  “I contributed the drinks, but that didn’t require any skill.”

  “Some fast-food restaurants have salads.”

  “If you call wilted iceberg lettuce and a few mushy tomatoes a salad. Anything Anna makes would be better than that.”

  “You’re right.” Summer turned on the radio and fell silent as they drove through the woods surrounding the Bergstrom estate. “I hope she doesn’t feel responsible for every meal an Elm Creek Quilter eats. She did this on her own time and spent her own money. I know she’s new and she wants to make a good impression, but it really wasn’t necessary.”

  Jeremy shot her an incredulous look. “She didn’t do it because she had to. She did it because she’s our friend.”

  “Your friend,” Summer corrected. “I really don’t know her very well.”

  As the car bounded up a slight incline and emerged from the woods, Jeremy leaned forward and craned his neck, searching for oncoming cars before pulling onto the highway. “You’d like her if you knew her better.”

  “I like her now.” Summer hadn’t meant to suggest that she didn’t. Hadn
’t she been Anna’s strongest advocate during the hiring process? “We’re lucky to have her.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. I hope the other Elm Creek Quilters do, too.”

  An odd note in his voice alerted Summer. “What do you mean? Doesn’t Anna feel appreciated?”

  “It’s not that.” Jeremy weighed his words carefully before speaking. “You know how it is. You Elm Creek Quilters form a tight circle. It can be hard for someone new to break in, to really feel included.”

  Summer understood what he was saying, but the original Elm Creek Quilters had known one another for years and shared a bond of friendship tested by adversity. As welcoming as they had been to Anna—and Gretchen, too—they and the newcomers did not have a shared history, not yet. “It’ll take time, but everyone likes the new hires. It will happen.”

  Jeremy nodded, his eyes on the road. “That’s what I told Anna.”

  Summer had a sudden mental picture of Jeremy and Anna driving home from quilt camp, animatedly narrating the day’s events, analyzing conversations. It was strangely unsettling to think that she might have been the subject of one of those chats. “Do you want me to say something to Sarah?”

  “No,” said Jeremy, emphatic. “It’s not a problem. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. In a few months, I’m sure all this initial awkwardness will fade and Anna will feel like she fits in. In the meantime…try to be understanding if she overcompensates.”

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the cooler filled with what was surely a picnic lunch fit for a two-page spread in a gourmet cooking magazine.

  “Got it,” replied Summer, and found herself quite unexpectedly wishing that Anna had confided in her rather than Jeremy.

  They drove on, stopping for gas or to stretch their legs or switch drivers, but mostly driving straight through, digging into the cooler when they got hungry, spinning the radio dial when the signal broke up. Sometimes they talked about how to spend Summer’s last few weeks in Waterford or their plans for their separate upcoming academic years, but mostly they rode along in companionable silence. Jeremy did not seem surprised when she told him her mother planned to accompany her to Chicago to help her move in, nor did he seem disappointed that Summer had not asked him. Instead, he teased, “Are you planning to take your fabric stash? I think you need a special license to drive a truck big enough.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” said Summer. She might pack a few works-in-progress and her sewing machine, but the rest of her fabric and all of her pattern books would probably be better off stored at her mother’s house. “I don’t think I’m going to have much time for quilting once the quarter begins. I’ve seen how grad school is for you. I might not be able to quilt except for the absolute minimum amount required to maintain my sanity.”

  Jeremy grinned. “I think I had hobbies before graduate school, but I’ve forgotten what they were.”

  Summer managed a smile, though she found his words jarring. Quilting was so much more than a hobby for her. Didn’t he get that? Had he learned nothing from her and from his almost daily visits to quilt camp? Quilting was her means of artistic expression and a binding thread that defined her relationships with nearly all of the women in her life. It was unthinkable to brand something so potent and so full of meaning with the deprecating label of hobby.

  She remembered learning to read, to write, to ride a bike, but her history with quilting stretched back even further, into the dim predawn before her conscious memories. It seemed she had always put needle to fabric, matched squares to triangles, arranged colored shapes until they suddenly fell into an unexpected and delightful pattern.

  Her earliest memories of quilting blended in a colorful mist from which a handful of distinct images emerged: attending a quilt show in Kentucky with her grandmother, helping her mother select fabric at an Ithaca quilt shop, coloring quietly in the back of the room while her mother attended a meeting of the Tompkins County Quilters Guild, begging to be allowed to assemble a stash of her own. She still kept the Jack in the Pulpit quilt her grandmother had made as a gift for her third birthday, now lovingly folded and tucked away for safekeeping so that someday it might grace her own child’s toddler bed.

  Her first solo project was a lap quilt made in the Rail Fence pattern from bright Amish solids that had caught her eye and captivated her imagination on a research trip with her mother to St. Lawrence County in upstate New York. Summer pieced the first fifteen blocks by hand but, impatient to see her top grow, she asked her mother to let her use her sewing machine. “When you’re older,” her mother promised, and although this seemed an unjust and arbitrary ruling to Summer, no argument she made altered her mother’s opinion that she was incapable of running a sewing machine without burning out the motor or sewing through her own finger.

  Since Gwen had always told Summer she could do anything she set her mind to—and Summer had on many occasions proved it—it was annoying to have the stumbling block of her mother’s worry suddenly thrown in her path. Her mother had always praised her intelligence and self-sufficiency. Wasn’t she, at age ten, responsible enough to walk home from school, let herself into the apartment, fix a snack, and settle down to her homework without any prompting or supervision? Sometimes she even started supper if her mother had a late class or a meeting with her thesis adviser. Summer could do all that, and yet she couldn’t be trusted to flip a switch and press a foot pedal without injuring herself or making the sewing machine burst into flames. It was stupid and unfair.

  Her mother had often read to her from Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., so Summer understood well that when confronted with an unjust law, it was her duty to disobey. It was just a sewing machine, after all; she wasn’t going to jail for refusing to pay taxes to fund an illegal war or something. So, having quelled her guilt and convinced herself that historical moral authorities would have sided with her, she began borrowing time at her mother’s sewing machine while Gwen was on the Cornell campus, studying or meeting with her adviser. Summer had seen her mother sew so often that she wound the bobbin, threaded the needle, and sent the needle whirring through her first seam without a moment’s hesitation. After that, she couldn’t imagine ever returning to the slow, meticulous process of hand-sewing—except in the evenings when her mother was nearby, taking note of her progress.

  For weeks after her homework was done, she filled those precious few hours alone in the house before her mother’s return with the cheerful, industrious whir of the sewing machine. Rail Fence blocks came together quickly, almost effortlessly. She would turn up the radio to disguise the sound from neighbors on the other side of the too-thin walls, and the time checks announced the moment when she must scramble to restore the sewing table to its prior state, sweeping bits of thread into the trash, hiding her finished blocks in her bedroom. When her mother’s key turned in the lock, Summer would be setting the table in the dinette or sprawled out on the sofa reading a book.

  Then came a day when she was so engrossed in piecing her last few Rail Fence blocks that she lost track of time. At the sound of a throat clearing, Summer brought the sewing machine to an abrupt halt and turned to find her mother standing in the doorway. “Your quilt’s really coming along,” her mother remarked drily. “Now I understand why I haven’t seen you working on your blocks for a while.”

  “Mom—” Hastily Summer switched off the machine and scrambled to her feet. “I can explain.”

  “Trust me, this scene is completely self-explanatory.” Gwen crossed the room, her beaded necklaces clicking softly. She picked up one of the Rail Fence blocks, flipped it over to examine the stitching, then set it down and took up another.

  “I was very, very careful,” Summer assured her, drawing closer. “I didn’t sew over any pins.” When her mother continued to study her finished blocks in silence, Summer added, “I didn’t see any logical reason why I couldn’t use the sewing machine.”

  “I told you not to. That should have been reason enoug
h.”

  “But it isn’t. You just told me I was too young, but these blocks prove I’m not too young. Don’t they look as good as what some of the women in your quilt guild would make?”

  “Not quite.” Gwen showed her the underside of one of the blocks where the seam allowances were sewed down helter-skelter. “These blocks won’t lie flat. You skipped an important step. You should have pressed the seams before sewing these sections together.”

  In a small voice, Summer said, “You told me not to use the iron.”

  Gwen burst out laughing. “You follow my directions regarding a ten-dollar iron, but not a two-hundred-dollar sewing machine?”

  “I’ve burned myself on the iron before,” Summer countered. She had the fading scars to prove it. “In that case, your rule made sense, so I listened.”

  Gwen shook her head, eyeing Summer with—could it be?—something remarkably like admiration. “I have to admit, you make a fairly good case. Your blocksare just as good as those some of my friends might have made.”

  “Then can I keep using your sewing machine?”

  Gwen muffled a groan and ran a hand across her brow. “I’m tempted to say no, just because you didn’t listen to me. You should have waited for me to show you how to properly use it. On the other hand, you did some fine work here, so you’re obviously ready after all.”

  Summer waited for her mother to deliver the verdict, resisting the temptation to point out that her mother had, in fact, shown her how to use the machine, for whenever she sewed, Summer had stood nearby, watching eagerly, absorbing every unintended lesson. At last her mother granted her permission to use the machine, but with a few conditions: Summer would take care of the machine properly, oiling it as needed and keeping the bobbin case free of lint, and more important, she would promise never to sneak around behind her mother’s back again. “If you’re going to disregard one of my rules because you think it’s foolish, tell me first,” Gwen said firmly. “Give me a chance to talk you out of it. Maybe after listening to what I have to say, you might decide that my advice is sound after all. Or perhaps you’ll convince me that the time has come to amend a rule. It’s just the two of us, kiddo. We have to be honest with each other, even if it means one of us doesn’t get to have our own way. I need to know that I can trust you.”