The Giving Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  By midafternoon, she had completed the center of the quilt top and had only to add borders to finish it off, but her legs were stiff from sitting so long and the back of her neck ached from her tendency to draw her shoulders up to her ears when she concentrated. A break was definitely in order.

  She gathered her things and tidied up in case another camper needed to use the sewing machine, and then joined her sister at the fireplace on the other side of the ballroom. Several chairs had been arranged in two concentric arcs around the hearth, where a lively blaze gave off warmth and light and a cheerful crackle of sparks. Nearly all of the chairs were occupied with a camper reading as Mona was, sewing quilt pieces together by hand, or dozing.

  “I need to stretch my legs,” Linnea said, resting a hand on the back of her sister’s chair. “Want to go for a little walk?”

  Mona read to the end of the line before pausing to smile up at her. “Another walk? You must not have noticed the snow flurries. Are you sure your Southern California constitution can handle it?”

  Linnea shook her head, patiently exasperated. Sometimes Mona deliberately forgot that Linnea had grown up in Minnesota the same as she had and knew quite a lot about enduring winter weather. “Those few little flakes aren’t much, and anyway, I’m staying indoors. I thought I might search out the library.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Mona marked her place with a finger, closed her book, and rose, yawning and stretching. “You go on. I’m happy with the book I have right here.”

  “You don’t want to explore?”

  “I do, but not as much as I want to stay warm and cozy by the fire.” Mona smiled an indolent apology, sat back down with her legs tucked to one side, and opened her book on her lap.

  Mona did look much more relaxed, as if the cares and woes of her workplace had been forgotten, or at least tucked out of sight where they would not trouble her for a little while. For more than a year, ever since the new governor had been elected and had launched a merciless campaign to abolish all collective bargaining rights for state workers, Mona had been under tremendous stress—first because of the threat to her job as an office manager for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and second because of her prominent position as vice president of her labor union. Not only did she have to worry about impending pay cuts and the loss of her own benefits, she had to worry on behalf of the thousands of other workers relying upon her to advocate for them. If spending less than twenty-four hours at Elm Creek Manor could work such miraculous cures, maybe Linnea and Mona should have booked two weeks. Maybe Linnea should have brought her husband along too.

  With a sudden pang of longing, she bade Mona good-bye and hurried out to the foyer to call him. He answered on the second ring. “Hey, sweetheart,” Kevin greeted her, forewarned by the caller ID that this was not the call from a potential employer he had been praying for. “How are you? How’s your sister? How’s quilt camp?”

  Linnea smiled, warmed by the sound of his voice. “We’re all fine.” She told Kevin about her day and asked about his. Although it was three hours earlier in Conejo Hills, California, he had already been quite productive. On his way to join the president of the Friends of the Library and a few other like-minded citizens for coffee, he had stopped by the post office and mailed ten updated résumés and two follow-up letters. Later that afternoon, he planned to meet a former coworker at the driving range. Kevin didn’t know whether his former colleague was hiring, but if he wasn’t, he might be aware of someone who was—and if he did, he would surely recommend Kevin. For five years they had worked together in the marketing department of a European luxury car manufacturer’s West Coast division, but eighteen months earlier, the four branches spread throughout the Los Angeles region had been consolidated into one central office. Kevin’s friend had been transferred there and promoted to assistant vice president. Kevin’s job had been eliminated entirely.

  “This is what I get for taking a job with a foreign car company,” Kevin had said on that first demoralizing evening after the rumors that had been circulating for months were finally confirmed by an unceremonious summons to his supervisor’s office and a terse dismissal. “My father probably rolled over in his grave the day I went to work for them. Maybe now he can rest in peace.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Linnea had replied. “Your father would have done the same in your place.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Kevin’s father had worked on the line for General Motors for more than forty years. He had bought a house in a modest Detroit suburb and had put three kids through college with his earnings, fair wages secured for him by his union. His favorite prank was to secretly paste BUY AMERICAN bumper stickers on his neighbors’ Toyotas and Hondas. But for all his staunch pride, first and foremost he had been a loving father, and Linnea knew he wouldn’t have blamed Kevin for taking a job with a foreign car company considering that General Motors had laid him off and no other American companies had hired him. Kevin’s father had understood and respected a man’s right to support his family through honest work—as long as that man didn’t cross a picket line to take a loyal union man’s job. He wouldn’t have wanted Kevin to decline honest work just to make a point.

  Ever since Kevin had become unemployed for the second time in twelve years, he had searched in vain for another position, but as the months dragged on, he had begun to suspect that often he was eliminated on paper before anyone bothered to meet him. At fifty-six, with decades of employment and countless successful marketing campaigns to his credit, he was usually more educated, experienced, and qualified than the people who were doing the hiring. Bewilderingly, these very factors had somehow become liabilities. Even when Kevin assured the interviewers that he was aware the position he had applied for was entry-level and absolutely did not expect anything remotely close to his former salary, they didn’t believe him, and they rejected him as too expensive. Even when he assured them he was certain he would find the job fulfilling, rewarding, and challenging, they suspected that he would start looking for another, more interesting job the minute they hired him.

  After far too many promising leads sent him careening headlong into brick walls of disappointment, Kevin, whom Linnea had once considered capable of selling ice to penguins, had ruefully remarked that he must not be cut out for marketing after all, since he apparently couldn’t successfully market himself. Maybe his former employers had been right to lay him off.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Linnea had retorted. “It’s not you. It’s them, and it’s the economy. Things will turn around. Things will get better. They always have.”

  But even Linnea knew that that didn’t mean they always would.

  Kevin didn’t usually need lots of reassurance. He was by nature optimistic, and even in the bleakest of times, he retained his sense of humor. Linnea’s salary and benefits would keep them from losing their house, the kids’ college funds, and their health care, and after years of wishing for more of it, he finally had ample time to spend with his family and to take care of the many home-repair chores he had been putting off indefinitely. He took over the housecleaning and the laundry, and he cooked supper almost every night, firing up the grill and learning to prepare just about anything on it. “We do have a stove, you know,” Linnea reminded him with amusement when she came home from the library one evening to find him outside on the porch preparing Tex-Mex Four-Alarm Chili in a Dutch oven.

  “The grill is more manly,” Kevin pointed out, his mouth involuntarily quirking into a smile. Linnea smiled back, thankful beyond measure that she had married a resilient man. He would not slip into depression and insecurity as so many other men and women who had lost their jobs in the downturn of the economy had done. Kevin would never give up, and even in the midst of his struggles he would never lose sight of his many blessings.

  Linnea tried to follow his example and keep a positive outlook on the future, but som
etimes she felt as if they were precariously seated on a broken, teetering, three-legged chair. By working together they could keep their balance, but if something came along to knock one of the remaining legs out from beneath them, they would come crashing down.

  Linnea felt that precarious uncertainty anew as she held the phone to her ear, yearning to offer her husband that one elusive, essential piece of advice that would help him find work. But when no wisdom came to mind, she instead told him again that she loved him, and she wished him good luck with his coffee shop gathering and at the driving range later. They both knew she wasn’t referring to his stroke.

  After they hung up, Linnea stood alone in the foyer, thinking of Kevin and wishing she could devise some ingenious plan to land him the job of his dreams—but lately it was all she could do to cling to her own job and to remember the dreams and hopes that had set her upon the path she had chosen.

  Neither she, nor Kevin, nor Mona had expected their livelihoods to be on such shaky ground at that point in their careers. They had expected to be settled, stable, and working steadily toward the retirements they were carefully and frugally saving for. They had not counted on recessions or politics to throw everything into upheaval.

  The sudden appearance of three quilt campers laughing and chatting as they descended the grand staircase roused Linnea from her reverie, and she needed a moment to remember why she had been standing alone in the foyer.

  The library. Of course. She had heard that the manor boasted a glorious library, but it was not included on the maps distributed at registration. Soon after her arrival the previous day, Linnea had wandered into the parlor and had found a small bookcase stuffed with well-read novels and paperbacks previous campers had left behind. A note card on the top shelf encouraged visitors to borrow books during their stay or take one and leave one of their own in trade. While this was a pleasant amenity, it could not possibly be the magnificent library full of antique treasures Kevin’s distant cousin had raved about at the last Nelson family reunion.

  Linnea pushed her worries about Kevin back into the far reaches of her mind and set off in search of the library. She passed guest suites and storage closets, the laundry room and the kitchen, and she even discovered an unlikely door that led outside to a gray stone patio, perhaps the one she, Mona, and Pauline had passed on their walk that morning. As she wandered, she began to suspect that the west wing of the manor was decades older than the elegantly appointed, expansive south wing. The rooms in the west wing were more modest in size, the ceilings lower, the windows smaller. Perhaps the west wing was the original residence built by Sylvia Bergstrom Compson Cooper’s first ancestors to come to America, and their descendants had added the south wing after the family prospered. It did have a certain Gilded Age look about it.

  But none of her speculation brought her any closer to finding the library. Eventually she concluded that the library, if it existed, could not be on the first floor. She decided to head upstairs to her suite for her registration packet and search the map of Elm Creek Manor for a library-sized blank portion, perhaps labeled “Here there be books.”

  She doubled back to the foyer and was about to set foot on the bottom step when suddenly two young children came bounding down the staircase, alternately shrieking with laughter and shushing each other. Instinctively Linnea stood fast, ready to break their fall if they should stumble. She was standing there yet when the children reached the bottom. The boy, faster and a few steps ahead, plowed into Linnea, while the girl had time and the presence of mind to seize the banister and bring herself to an abrupt halt. Linnea stumbled backward, trying to keep her feet and keep the boy on his so that neither of them would crash painfully to the cold marble floor.

  “Are you okay?” she asked the boy as they steadied themselves.

  He nodded and gulped, catching his breath. “I’m really, really sorry,” he said. His thick, brown hair had glints of red and gold in it. Linnea would have trimmed it shorter were he her child, but she could understand his mother’s reluctance.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” Linnea assured him, “although I don’t think your parents would be happy to see you zooming down the stairs like that, do you?”

  “You should be more careful,” remarked the girl as she gracefully stepped down upon the marble floor, as if she had slowly and serenely descended the two dozen or so stairs instead of hurling herself down them as heedlessly as her brother had.

  The boy scowled. “You were running too.”

  The girl’s mouth fell upon in a wordless protest, but Linnea raised her hand. “I was here and I saw the whole thing. Both of you were running, and impressively fast too.”

  The girl’s pretty features twisted in worry beneath her cap of tousled blond curls. “Are you going to tell on us?”

  Linnea pretended to mull it over. “Well, no one was hurt, and I believe you’ll be more careful in the future, right?” The children nodded vigorously. “In that case, I think we can keep this off your permanent record.”

  The boy heaved a sigh of relief, while the girl, who had straightened as if an electric shock had passed through her at the phrase “permanent record,” murmured a soft, “Thank you.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Linnea mused, going down on one knee to condense her generous height to something closer to their own, “I’m glad I ran into you.”

  “I ran into you,” the boy corrected her.

  “You’re absolutely right, and as it turns out, I’m glad you did. I need a guide—actually, I think this job requires two guides, because it’s quite challenging. I don’t suppose you two know your way around Elm Creek Manor?”

  “Of course we do,” said the boy. “We live here.”

  “This is our house,” the girl added, just in case Linnea required additional clarification. “Our mama is Sarah McClure and our daddy is Matt McClure.”

  “And Miss Sylvia is our great-grandma except not really,” said the boy.

  “Oh, of course,” said Linnea. “Then you must be James, and you must be Caroline.”

  The twins nodded when she spoke their names, looking not the least bit surprised that she knew them.

  “Excellent.” Linnea clasped her hands and rubbed them together. “This must be my lucky day. I can’t imagine any two guides more qualified to take me to the library.”

  The twins exchanged a look. “We can’t drive,” Caroline said carefully, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether the strange lady before her was teasing her or was simply not very smart.

  “No, no, honey, not the public library, although I’m sure it’s very nice. I mean the library here in the manor. I’ve heard there’s a wonderful library somewhere on the premises, and as a librarian myself, I would love to have a look at it.”

  Linnea waited while a swift, wordless exchange passed between the twins. Then James shrugged, and Caroline said, “We can show you where the best books are, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Linnea, holding out her hands for the twins to take. With James on her left and Caroline on her right, they made their way up both flights of stairs to the third floor, evoking smiles from the few quilt campers they passed along the way. They turned left and headed down the hallway, past closed doors that Linnea surmised led to other guest suites, which were probably unoccupied during the smaller Quiltsgiving session but full of quilt campers in the summer.

  They came to a halt at a single door at the far end of the hallway. “Here it is,” said Caroline grandly as she opened the door and led the way inside. Linnea followed the children into a spacious playroom bathed in afternoon sunshine. Snug nests of pillows and quilts had been carelessly fashioned upon the window seats, and toys and games were scattered about the room in happy, haphazard fashion.

  James seized Linnea’s hand and tugged her toward the southernmost wall, where two bookcases flanked an e
mpty fireplace that looked as if it had not seen a pile of logs, burning or not, in ages. When James gazed proudly at the books upon the shelves, Linnea scanned the titles on the spines and saw that she was in the presence of all the childhood classics she had adored as a schoolgirl and many of the same wonderful new stories she loved to press into the hands of the children who visited her library. Then she understood. This was where the best books were, according to her guides—and could she really say they were wrong?

  “I love this story,” Linnea said, sitting cross-legged upon the braided rag rug and taking a battered copy of Half Magic from a shelf. “Have you read it?”

  “Not yet,” said James.

  “He can’t read,” said Caroline, with all the pity of one who could and understood the deprivation he suffered better than he did.

  James flushed. “I can too.” He seized a copy of Go, Dog, Go! from the other bookcase and began to recite it from memory, the speed with which he turned the pages not quite keeping pace with his words.

  “Very good,” said Linnea, who understood that this was indeed reading of a sort, a very important precursor to what was more commonly understood as reading.

  “Mama read Half Magic to us,” James explained.

  “I could read it all by myself if I wanted to,” said Caroline, “but it’s more fun when Mama reads to us.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” Linnea returned her gaze to the bookcases, admiring their collection. “I wonder if you have . . . I’m sure such a well-stocked library must—” Her gaze lit upon a familiar title on a well-worn spine, and she plucked down the book with delight. “Have you ever read—or heard—Magic by the Lake?” The twins shook their heads. “Then you’re in for a treat. This story is by the same author who wrote Half Magic, Edward Eager, and it’s about the same four children—Jane, Mark, Katherine, and Martha. Would you like me to read it to you?”