Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I can’t be in labor.” The woman clutched the armrests so tightly that her knuckles went white. “My baby isn’t due for three more days.”

  Diane snorted, but the hippie quilter knelt on the floor beside the woman’s chair. “This is your first baby, isn’t it?” she asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “You’ve taken a prenatal class or two?”

  Another nod.

  “Then you know a baby is full term at thirty-seven weeks.” The hippie quilter smoothed the woman’s silky hair away from her face and took her hand. “Your baby’s coming.”

  The woman shook her head, tearful. “But I haven’t finished her quilt yet.”

  “The ambulance is on the way,” said Bonnie, hanging up the phone. “Judy, is there anyone else you’d like me to call?”

  “My husband.” Judy recited the digits between gasps. “That’s his cell phone number. He’s in Harrisburg covering the state senate hearings. Labor takes longer for first babies, right? He’ll make it in time?”

  “Traffic should be light at this time of day,” the hippie quilter replied.

  Diane exchanged a glance with Agnes and saw that she, too, realized the hippie quilter had not really answered Judy’s question. She strongly suspected that Judy had been in labor—and in denial—for hours already.

  “I left a message on your husband’s voicemail,” said Bonnie, hanging up the phone. “I gave him the shop’s number, too, in case you can’t answer your cell.”

  “He probably had to turn it off in the capitol building,” Judy said, her voice breaking. “I can’t believe this. The one day I really need him—”

  “Is there anyone else?” asked the hippie’s daughter. “Your mom, maybe?”

  Judy shook her head. “She’s in Philadelphia. Steve and I moved to Waterford only a few months ago. It’s just the two of us for hundreds of miles. If he misses the birth, I—I’ll—I don’t know—”

  “He’ll get the message,” the hippie mom said. “Just relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Together they kept Judy as calm and as comfortable as possible until the ambulance pulled up to the front of the shop in a frenzy of flashing lights and pealing sirens. The two paramedics cheerfully and reassuringly took Judy’s vital signs, radioed ahead to the Elm Creek Valley General Hospital, and escorted her outside.

  “Wait.” Judy threw a desperate look over her shoulder to the hippie quilter. “Come with me. Please? In case Steve doesn’t get back in time.”

  “Me?” The hippie quilter glanced at her daughter. “I don’t—”

  “Go ahead, Mom.” April (May? June? Diane couldn’t recall) scooped up Judy’s purse and passed it to her mother. “I’ll walk home. Let me know what happens.”

  “Let us all know,” Bonnie urged. “Call me at the shop as soon as you have any news, okay, Gwen? Judy, if your husband returns my message, I’ll send him straight to the hospital.”

  Judy and Gwen departed with the paramedics, and for a moment, the others stood watching in stunned silence.

  Then Bonnie sighed. “I’ll get the mop. Please watch your step.”

  “Too late,” Diane muttered under her breath, frowning at her ruined shoes.

  As Bonnie disappeared into a utility room at the back of the shop, Agnes shook her head worriedly. “I do hope she’ll be all right. The poor dear seemed so frightened. I hope her husband arrives before the baby does.”

  “My mom will take good care of her,” the auburn-haired teen said.

  Suddenly the phone rang, but only muffled clatters and thumps came from the back of the store. Diane shrugged, reached over the counter, and snatched up the phone. “Grandma’s Attic,” she said. It wasn’t Judy’s husband, just a customer inquiring about the brands of sewing machine needles the shop carried. Diane checked the shelves and read off the names, and she was just hanging up when Bonnie returned with a mop and a wheeled bucket of soapy water. “Sorry about that,” said Diane, indicating the phone. “I thought it might have been the father-to-be returning your call.”

  “No need to apologize,” said Bonnie. “You handled that like a pro. I should hire you.”

  Everyone chuckled except for Bonnie. “You’re not serious,” said Diane, stepping out of the way of the mop. “Are you really offering me a job?”

  “I could use some part-time help around here, and you’re one of my best customers.”

  “Would I get an employee discount?”

  Bonnie smiled, stuck the mop head into the wringer, and yanked the lever. “I think we could work something out.”

  “Let me think about that.” Diane would need to work around the boys’ schedules, but why not? It might be fun. She imagined Mary Beth’s reaction on her next shopping trip when she discovered Diane behind the cutting table, wielding the rotary cutter deftly, dispensing sage advice to novice quilters and experts alike. Yes, she thought, working at Grandma’s Attic sounded like a wonderful idea.

  “She’s waiting until you finish cleaning up that mess before she signs on,” said Agnes.

  “I am not,” Diane retorted over the others’ laughter. “I was just mulling it over. Besides, Bonnie’s almost done.”

  “At least Judy hit the linoleum instead of the carpet,” said Bonnie with a sigh, wheeling mop and bucket back to the utility room.

  “Oh my gosh, you guys, look,” said the hippie girl, pointing to a forlorn bundle of fabric on the floor beside the cutting table. “She forgot her quilt.”

  Agnes gingerly reached for it, pinching two adjacent corners with thumbs and forefingers and holding the crib-size top out at arm’s length. Diane recognized the pattern, for Agnes had made one of her granddaughters a Baby Bunting quilt several years earlier. It reminded Diane of the Grandmother’s Fan block, with a quarter-circle wedge in one corner and four fan blades radiating outward, but the blocks were arranged so that one fan curved into the next, creating a winding design over the entire surface of the quilt. The clear, bright colors reminded Diane of a bowl of fresh berries—reds, purples, greens, blues, and golden yellows. The curved pieces made it a more complex pattern than any Diane had ever attempted, so Judy obviously knew her way around a needle. Then Diane spotted the soiled blocks along the bottom edge, and she groaned.

  Agnes looked as dismayed as Diane felt. “Do you suppose this will come out in the wash?”

  “I doubt it,” said Bonnie, returning to the cutting table, where she folded Judy’s cut yardage, set the pieces aside, and placed the bolts on a cart for reshelving. “What a shame to see such lovely handiwork ruined.”

  “It looks salvageable to me,” said Agnes. “Only those three blocks in the lower corner and those little sections of the border are stained. I’m sure Judy’s skilled enough to manage the repairs.”

  The hippie girl brightened, but Diane shook her head. “It’s not a question of skill. She’s a new mother. It would have been difficult enough for her to finish a perfect quilt top with a newborn baby to care for. Trust me, picking out stitches and redoing blocks will fall to the bottom of her list of priorities.”

  “We could do it for her,” the hippie girl said. When the older quilters exchanged dubious looks, she persisted, “Why not? If you each make one block, I can do the border, and if my mom were here, I know she’d volunteer to machine quilt it.”

  “Heirloom baby quilts should be quilted by hand,” said Diane, without thinking that it might commit her to the project.

  “If you insist.” The hippie girl smiled and jerked her thumb in the direction of the classroom at the back of the store. “We can use the store’s standing frame instead. Right, Bonnie? It’s a small quilt. We could finish it in an afternoon.”

  “I suppose so,” said Bonnie. “Judy bought the fabric for the top from Grandma’s Attic, and I know I have some yardage left over I’d be happy to donate.”

  “And I can donate the batting,” Agnes declared. “Count me in for a block, and save me a seat at the quilting bee.”

  “Bet
ter make that two,” said Diane. “One for you and one for me. There’s no way I’m going to spoil this quilt with my first attempt at this pattern. I’ve had a lot of practice picking out stitches. That’ll be my job.”

  And so it began.

  Bonnie rinsed the lower half of the quilt top in the utility room sink, and while it dried, Agnes, Diane, and Summer—for that was her name, not a month but a whole season—searched the aisle for the fabrics Judy had used. While Diane carefully picked out the stitches with a new seam ripper Bonnie donated to the cause, Agnes created templates by placing tracing paper over one of Judy’s finished blocks and transferring the penciled outlines to sturdy card stock. They worked in the classroom at the back of the shop, chatting and sharing quilting tips, with Bonnie occasionally bounding from her seat to assist a customer. Once, when she was busy ringing up purchases at the cash register, Diane smoothly stepped in to cut yardage for another customer. “You’re hired,” Bonnie said as they both returned to the classroom. Diane accepted, figuring they could sort out the details about wages and work schedules after the crisis had passed.

  Judy’s husband never returned Bonnie’s message, but Gwen called shortly before the shop closed to report that Judy was dilated to ten centimeters and Steve was by her side, holding her hand. “That’s wonderful,” said Bonnie, quickly repeating the news to the others. “Please tell Judy our thoughts are with her. Do you want to speak to Summer?”

  Everyone heard Gwen’s exclamation of surprise upon learning that her daughter was still hanging out at the quilt shop. Summer quickly got on the line and told Gwen about their aspirations to finish the Baby Bunting quilt before Judy left the hospital. “You’re assembling the top, Mom,” she told her mother cheerfully. “I’ll meet you at home with the blocks and the borders.”

  “I’ll send you home with some spare fabric, just in case,” Bonnie called out.

  Summer’s eyebrows rose. “Seriously? If you keep giving everything away, you’re going to go bankrupt.”

  Everyone laughed—even Summer’s mother on the other end of the line—because it was unfathomable that Grandma’s Attic would not always be a haven for quilters throughout the Elm Creek Valley.

  Working on Judy’s project had kept Bonnie from her usual duties, so Diane, Agnes, and Summer helped her tidy up and race through her closing tasks. She flipped the sign in the window toCLOSED and locked the door only ten minutes late, and then she bade them good-bye, inviting them to meet her back at the shop at noon the following day. Bonnie and Agnes had finished their blocks, so Summer tucked them carefully into a Grandma’s Attic shopping bag with the border section she had pieced and the undamaged section of the quilt top. “My mom and I will put the top together tonight,” she called over her shoulder as she hurried off down Main Street. “See you tomorrow.”

  The next day, Diane and Agnes returned to Grandma’s Attic to find the quilt frame set up in the back of the store, backing fabric and batting already in place. Soon Gwen and Summer arrived with the finished quilt top—the repairs indistinguishable from Judy’s handiwork—and the happy news that Judy had given birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl. The joyful announcement lifted their hearts and invigorated their hands, so their needles swiftly flew over the Baby Bunting quilt, silver flashes darting swiftly in and out of the soft cotton, threads drawing the layers together, giving depth and dimension to the meandering patchwork paths. Their conversation, too, darted from one topic to another as shared interests emerged, the distances between strangers bridged. Diane was pleasantly surprised to discover how much she had in common with each of the other women—even Gwen, who turned out to be fairly reasonable for a left-wing wacko, and an exceptional quilter who graciously shared her knowledge. She imagined Gwen was mulling over similar revisions to presumptions about her.

  Several hours later, after the last quilting stitch was tied off and the quilted top removed from the frame, the quilters broke for supper at the Bistro, a popular restaurant a few blocks down Main Street, to rest their hands before binding the quilt. As they ate, they debated how to deliver the finished quilt to Judy. Summer and Gwen wanted to take it to her at the hospital, so Judy could cuddle the newborn in its soft folds on the trip home. Bonnie pointed out that the baby would probably not be bundled up in a quilt, but rather buckled into a car seat, and Agnes thought they ought to wait a week and deliver the quilt to Judy’s home after she and the baby had settled in. Diane recommended wrapping up the quilt and leaving it anonymously on Judy’s doorstep, in case she didn’t like what they had done to her quilt. “That way she won’t know whom to blame.”

  Everyone laughed, and Gwen intoned, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice how to reveal that we took over another quilter’s project without her permission.” They all laughed again, but the cheerful sound quickly faded. None of them had considered that perhaps Judy would have preferred to finish her first child’s crib quilt entirely on her own, regardless of how long it took.

  “Maybe we should have stopped with taking out the ruined parts,” said Summer.

  “It’s too late now,” said Diane, sipping her iced tea. “Anyone want to second my motion that we leave it on her doorstep at night when no one’s watching?”

  Gwen, who knew Judy better than any of them thanks to their bonding moments in the hospital, assured them that Judy didn’t seem the type to rage because they had violated her artistic integrity. The quilters eventually decided to deliver the quilt to her in person the following afternoon and accept whatever thanks or blame they deserved.

  Sitting in a rocking chair near the window, her precious daughter slumbering in her arms, Judy looked up in astonishment when the quilters she had scarcely known two days before rapped softly on the open door. She beckoned them inside and, in whispers, introduced them to her husband, sleeping on the sofa, and her daughter, Emily, a beautiful girl with delicate features and a shock of silky black hair. Gwen eagerly offered to hold Emily while Judy opened her gift—and to Diane’s eternal relief, Judy gasped with delight, her eyes filling with tears, as she unfolded the lovely quilt. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured, embracing each of them in turn. “It’s the most wonderful gift I’ve ever received. I don’t know how to thank you—for this, for everything.”

  If Diane had known that she was surrounded by the women who would become her most cherished friends, she would have kept a souvenir of the occasion: her hospital visitor name tag, perhaps, or a group photograph. But none of them suspected that they would greet one another like long-lost friends at the next quilt guild meeting, or that Summer would join Bonnie and Diane on the staff of Grandma’s Attic, or that they would form a quilting bee called the Tangled Web Quilters inspired by Gwen’s remark over dinner at the Bistro, or that a few years later, they would quit the Waterford Quilting Guild as a show of support for Diane, one of their own. How could they have known they were living one of the most important days of their lives, that they had just met the women whose friendships would help shape the women they would become?

  Sometimes Diane wondered where she would be if Agnes had not invited her fabric shopping that morning, or if Gwen and Summer had left Grandma’s Attic before their arrival, or if Judy had gone into labor any other day. She would be bereft of the most important friendships of her life, and she would never know it. Elm Creek Quilts might still have been created, but Diane would not have been a part of it. What if she had never learned to quilt? What if she had missed the aisle where Mary Beth’s quilt proudly hung at the Waterford Summer Quilt Festival, or what if she and Mary Beth had been cordial neighbors instead of bitter enemies? Diane might have admired the lovely quilt, paid her neighbor a few friendly compliments over the forsythia bushes, and forgotten it a few days later. She certainly would not have been driven to learn to quilt, in which case she would not have asked Agnes for lessons, would not have joined the guild, and would not have been in Grandma’s Attic that day helping Agnes choose fabric for the charity raffle quilt.


  In a sense so true it pained Diane to consider it, she owed Mary Beth a deep debt of gratitude for all the good that had ever come to her through quilting.

  The undeniable truth of her debt nagged her all the way home. She passed the two desiccated newspapers at the end of Mary Beth’s driveway on the way into her own garage. She collected the mail, went inside, checked the answering machine, put dinner on. Soon Todd came home from shooting hoops with a friend, Tim from his lab in the Nadelfrau Hall of Science. Over chicken cacciatore, they discussed their upcoming road trip to Princeton, why Todd was only halfway finished with his packing, and what Diane still needed to rush out and buy before they loaded up the car. It was a conversation like so many others, written in the family shorthand of wisecracks and inside jokes, and Diane blinked away tears even as she teased and laughed, knowing it would never be this way, exactly like this, ever again.

  After supper, she cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, then went outside to pull weeds from the beds in the front yard and water the hostas. The sun was setting as a car pulled into the Callahans’ driveway and disappeared into the garage. A few moments later, Mary Beth walked slowly down the driveway, platinum pageboy haircut windblown, legs stiff from hours in the car. Diane watched from the corner of her eye as her neighbor retrieved a few envelopes from the mailbox and stooped to pick up the newspapers.

  “Back from vacation?” Diane called, twisting the nozzle of the garden hose to adjust the spray to a fine mist.

  Mary Beth halted, arms full of sun-yellowed paper, her expression wan. “No, from taking Brent to school.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Diane had wondered why she hadn’t seen him and Will serving lunch earlier that day. “Penn State follows the same schedule as Waterford College.”

  Mary Beth slowly flipped through her mail. “Actually, Waterford College follows the same schedule as Penn State.”