Threading the Needle

by Marie Bostwick

  I quickly took a bite of my dinner, hoping that would be the end of it, but Jake looked at me with an expression that invited elaboration. Fair enough. After all the things I’d said to him that night in the van, I owed him that.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking about what you said about me being selfish and self-absorbed. You’re right. I am. It’s all about me, isn’t it? It always has been. My comfort, my needs, my desperate compulsion to gather up enough, and more than enough, of anything—things, men, money, possessions. . . .”

  Jake didn’t contradict me, but his teasing expression was replaced by sympathy. “There were reasons for that. As a kid, you had to be selfish to just survive. Nobody was watching out for you. Edna sure didn’t. And you had no one to teach you differently.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “I had my dad, for a while anyway. He taught me about love, and loyalty, and selflessness. But after he died, I forgot.

  “However,” I said with a rueful smile, “your somewhat blunt assessment of my character made me start to think about him and wonder if he’d have thought you were right about me. I decided he probably would have. That made me feel even worse than I had before, which I honestly hadn’t imagined was possible. But you know what they say about hitting rock bottom. . . .”

  Jake winked. “You’ve got nowhere to go but up?”

  “That’s right. So, the long and short of it is, I decided to give your advice a try. The next morning I got up and started looking around for ways to make other people happy. You know something? It worked.

  “Seeing Tessa’s face light up when I embellished her quilt, or how something as simple as cooking dinner can encourage someone who has had a hard day, made me feel better than I had in a long while. And it made me think that . . . maybe I have something to offer the world.”

  I ducked my head, feeling a little funny about saying that out loud. “Nothing huge, you know. I know I’m no Rhodes Scholar or anything. . . .”

  “So what?” he said. “Neither am I. But everybody can do something for somebody else.”

  “Like fixing their roof?”

  Jake didn’t say anything to that, just dipped his head slightly. “Or baking some muffins. Or making a quilt. Or whatever. The point is, everybody has something to offer. Even broken-down, recovering, one-eyed hardware guys.”

  I dipped another piece of tuna into my soy sauce, being careful not to overdo it this time.

  “You know something? I’m really excited about the inn. I mean, it’s still an economic necessity for me, a way to make a living. But I’m starting to think it could also be a new beginning.

  “I want to bring new people, and a new history, to that old house. Think about all the different kinds of people who might show up at my door! Honeymooners, exhausted parents, empty-nesters trying to rekindle romance, girlfriends looking for a weekend away, people who just want to sit on my front porch and do absolutely nothing—I might have an opportunity to do some real good in this town!”

  “You could,” Jake agreed.

  Jake sorted through the rest of his tempura, kept the shrimp, carrots, and sweet potatoes, and then, after looking at me with raised brows to gauge my interest, placed the eggplant and mushrooms on my plate.

  I ate a mushroom and then another piece of tuna. My eyes began to fill again and my nose started to run. I sniffled. Jake looked up and shoved his water glass toward me.

  “Too much wasabi?”

  I wiped my eyes with my napkin and shook my head.

  “Jake, why are you so nice to me?”

  He grinned and shrugged. “I’m a hardware guy. When I see something broken, I fix it. Can’t help myself.”

  38

  Tessa

  The Christmas shopping season had brought an increase in business, but more the ebb and flow of an unpredictable tide than the tsunami of commerce I’d hoped for. Exactly one week before Thanksgiving, my traffic was more a dead calm than anything else, emphasis on the word “dead.” So when Lee dropped by the shop unexpectedly, I was even more than usually glad to see him.

  “This is a nice surprise,” I said, coming out from behind the counter.

  “I had to drop off Charlie’s microgreen order at the Grill, so I thought I’d drop by and say hello.” He kissed me. “Hello.”

  “Hello yourself.”

  “About Thanksgiving,” he said as though we’d just been discussing the subject. “We should get a bigger bird than last year, enough so we’ll have some leftovers. I was thinking around twenty pounds.”

  I stared at him, waiting for the punch line, but he seemed serious. “Twenty pounds? Unless you’re planning on eating turkey soup and turkey hash every night between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that seems a bit extreme. With just the two of us, it’d really be more practical to roast a chicken instead.”

  Lee had been fiddling with some of the tester bottles, nodding absently while I spoke. Now he opened a jar of lemon beeswax hand balm and sniffed it before rubbing some onto his calloused hands.

  “Yeah, except it’s not going to be just the two of us. I saw Jake over at the hardware store and invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. And Matt too.”

  “Matt?”

  “Yeah, Matt. Jake’s clerk, you remember. He was looking a little glum. He just broke up with his girlfriend and he doesn’t have any family in town. And then I saw Charlie at the Grill and invited him and Evelyn. Oh, and Evelyn’s mother, too, Virginia. That’s her name, right? And I was thinking you could invite Madelyn too.”

  He finished rubbing in the hand balm and flexed his fingers a couple of times, as if testing them out. “Huh. This is pretty good stuff.”

  I shook my head, not quite sure I’d heard him right. “Wait a minute. Lee? Are you telling me that we’re going to have seven people over for Thanksgiving dinner?”

  He looked at the ceiling, tallying the numbers in his head. “Eight if you count Madelyn. But I was thinking, why don’t we invite a few more? What about that new friend of yours, Margot? And anybody else you can think of who doesn’t have plans for the holiday. I mean, if we’re going to invite eight we might as well invite sixteen, right?”

  “Sixteen? But, Lee . . .” I spread out my hands and paused, waiting for him to draw the obvious inference.

  “What?” he asked, mirroring my expression. “You’ve been moping around for days about your empty nest and how pathetic Thanksgiving will be with just the two of us. . . .”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. It was written all over your face. Look, I know how you love having family around during the holidays. So I figured, let’s invite some. I mean, they’re not our family but they’re somebody’s. Right? Why don’t you invite the quilt circle? You’re always saying you want me to meet them.”

  I had said exactly that on a number of occasions, but I never supposed Lee would take me up on it.

  “Well, why not invite them?” he asked. “It doesn’t cost any more effort to cook a twenty-pound bird than it does a twelve-pounder, does it?”

  “Not really, but it’s not extra work I’m concerned about, it’s extra money.”

  “We don’t need money,” he replied. “We’ve got a farm, remember? The hens aren’t laying as much right now as they were before, but if we skip our breakfast omelets this week, we’ll have enough to make deviled eggs for appetizers. We can do a nice microgreen salad with candied walnuts, beets, and goat cheese. The root cellar is loaded with potatoes, squash, and onions. We’ve got pumpkins and apples for pies. Charlie offered to bring a few bottles of wine. We can bake some loaves of bread over the weekend and let them dry out for the stuffing, and we’ve got plenty of herbs for seasoning.” Lee grinned proudly.

  “Do you realize,” he continued, “that we can just about feed ourselves right off the farm? We may be broke, babe, but we’re not poor. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. We’ve had some setbacks, but I feel pretty good about what we’ve accomplished. Thankful. I’d like this Thanks
giving dinner to reflect that and I’d like to share it with others.”

  Lee moved toward me, backing me up against the counter and looping his arms around my waist.

  “This might be the best Thanksgiving we’ve ever had. It’ll certainly be the most authentic. The only thing we’ll have to buy is some cranberry sauce for the turkey.”

  “Well, what about the turkey? We don’t raise turkeys.”

  “Kevin Heath does. We’re going to do a little bartering—apples, greens, and cheese in exchange for one of his birds. So? What do you say, babe?”

  I wrapped my hands around the small of Lee’s back. “I say the Woodruffs are going to have a Thanksgiving to remember.”

  And it was.

  When we sat down for dinner a week later, our numbers included the original eight invitees plus Margot; Ivy and her two children, Bethany and Bobby; Gibb Rainey, an elderly gentleman who held court in a lawn chair outside the New Bern post office every day except Sunday and was well-known to everyone in New Bern and was a particular friend of Virginia’s; as well as Dana, the first woman who’d completed her New Beginnings internship at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, now a full-fledged employee; and Wendy Perkins. We were fifteen in all. If Abigail, Franklin, and Evelyn’s son, Garrett, hadn’t flown to Chicago to spend the holiday with Liza, Abigail’s niece and Garrett’s girlfriend, we might have been eighteen.

  My dining room table only accommodates eight, but Lee took the guest room door off its hinges, set it atop two sawhorses he brought in from the barn, and voila! Instant table! With a white tablecloth, some candles, and a basket filled to overflowing with ornamental squash, you couldn’t tell it from the real thing.

  Dinner was delicious, though I suspect that may have had more to do with the ingredients than any sudden improvement in my culinary skills. Have you ever had a fresh turkey? If not, you should. One bite and you’ll never settle for frozen again.

  I did have to buy a few things at the market. Besides cranberry sauce I bought butter, sugar, and flour, and some canned goods. Even so, we fed fifteen people an enormous repast for twenty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents. Not bad.

  Amazing what a year can bring. A year ago, Lee and I barely knew a soul in this town, and now? We had to turn doors into tables to find places enough for our friends.

  If Josh had been there, it would have been a perfect holiday, but he called at about ten o’clock that morning with a question that brought a smile to my face.

  “Mom? You know that green bean casserole? How do you make that?”

  Ah, the ubiquitous green bean casserole. It’s as much a part of Thanksgiving as the turkey. My mother made the green bean casserole every Thanksgiving, just as her mother did before and I did after. And now the torch had passed to Josh.

  “I don’t want to show up empty-handed at Ted’s place, so I thought I’d bring the casserole. I’m standing here in the kitchen. I’ve got cans of green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and some of those French fried onion thingies. What do I do now?” I laughed because at that moment, I, too, was in the kitchen, looking at that exact same lineup of ingredients. Personally, I detest green bean casserole, but some holiday traditions just refuse to die, and that’s probably a good thing.

  For the next thirty minutes, Josh and I rolled up our sleeves and donned our aprons and worked side by side, albeit long distance. It was nice. Not quite as nice as it would have been to have him home, but nice.

  And I learned a few things cooking with Josh long distance that I probably wouldn’t have if he’d been home for the holiday. Though Josh was far from home, he still valued our family traditions and my advice. Also, at least some of the lessons I’d tried to pound into him over the years had stuck—he remembered that you never come to someone’s home empty-handed. And, in a way, talking him step by step through that awful recipe made me feel closer to him than ever. He would always be my child, but now he was becoming my friend, too, someone I would have been happy to invite to dinner even if we weren’t related.

  I was proud of him. We had a nice Thanksgiving together.

  But the best part came at the end of the day, as I looked down the table, the groaning board, past nearly empty bowls of potatoes and squash and creamed onions and green bean casserole and jellied rubies of cranberry sauce, the bread plates decorated with a confetti of crumbs and brush-stroke smears of butter, beyond the carcass of the noble bird, the bones picked clean, to the head of the table where the head of my heart, my beloved, my husband sat smiling, laughing, attending his guests, presiding over this banquet he had labored to provide and then offered with open hands.

  Lee was happy again. That was the best part, the answer to my prayers and the reason for my gratitude, the picture I’ll never forget.

  39

  Madelyn

  January 2010

  The doorbell rang at ten and, for a moment, I panicked. She wasn’t supposed to arrive until four!

  I still had to put sheets on the beds and dust upstairs. There were no flowers in the vases, no muffins in the oven, and no curtains at the windows. I wasn’t ready!

  There was no help for it now. I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down. I couldn’t very well leave my guest standing on the porch. Ready or not, the Beecher Cottage Inn was officially in business.

  I smiled and opened the front door. “Welcome!”

  Margot and Evelyn burst into a rousing, loud, and partially on-key rendition of “Happy Opening to You!” Margot had a beautiful voice. Evelyn, not so much.

  Evelyn thrust a bottle of champagne toward me. “We come bearing gifts.”

  “And good wishes!” Margot chirped.

  “Oh! Thank you. What a nice surprise.”

  “But wait! There’s more!” Margot said with all the gusto of an infomercial pitchman before bending down and picking up one of two large Cobbled Court Quilt Shop shopping bags from the porch. Evelyn grabbed the other bag. I stepped back so they could carry their cargo into the foyer.

  “Don’t worry. We’re not going to stay,” Margot assured me. “We just wanted to drop these off. Happy grand opening from the Cobbled Court Quilt Circle!”

  Her announcement pretty much gave the gift away, but even so, when Margot and Evelyn pulled out two beautiful pink and blue quilts on a white background, I was completely taken aback.

  “Don’t cry,” Evelyn instructed. “Your mascara will run.”

  Good point. I didn’t have time to redo my makeup, so I blinked a few times and took a few deep breaths to calm myself.

  “Well. I . . . Thank you. They’ll be perfect for Room Three. It has twin beds. The walls are all white, but the floor has a blue braided rug I found in the attic. It’s just that color. I can’t believe you went to all this trouble.”

  “The pattern isn’t as hard as it looks. A lot of quilters stay away from the Carolina lily block because of the Y-seams, but I’ve got a special technique that eliminates that step. Appliquéing the stems takes a little extra effort, but Virginia is a whiz at all kinds of hand work.”

  I smiled and nodded as Evelyn spoke, trying to pretend I understood but, in truth, she could have been speaking Turkish for all I knew. What I did know was that the quilts, with bouquets of pink lilies bowing gracefully over the edge of sky blue baskets, were beautiful.

  “I am so touched. Please tell everyone I said thank you and that as soon as I get a moment to come up for air, I’m going to drop by on a Friday night with a plate of muffins.”

  Margot cast a delighted glance in Evelyn’s direction. “Told you!”

  “Margot!” Evelyn chided.

  Margot blushed and ducked her head. “Sorry.”

  “Told her what?” I asked.

  A guilty smile tugged at the corner of Evelyn’s mouth. “The quilts are gifts,” she assured me, “no strings attached. We just wanted to get you off to a good start. After all, yours is the first new business to open in New Bern in more than a year. If things work out for you, it could bring more tourists, m
ore shoppers, maybe even more jobs.”

  “We could sure use a few of those,” Margot added.

  “But,” Evelyn continued, “neighborliness aside, we were sort of hoping you might reconsider our invitation to be part of the quilt circle.”

  I launched into my list of legitimate excuses, but Evelyn stopped me before I could get very far.

  “I know. I know,” she said sincerely. “You don’t have time to take up quilting right now. And I completely understand. But there’s a lot more to quilting than actual quilting, you know. It’s about camaraderie as much as making quilts, making connections and friends.

  “When I was growing up in Wisconsin, my mother, Virginia, and her quilting buddies got together every Tuesday for almost thirty years. They were beginners when they started, but by the time I was in high school, every one of them was an expert quilter—everyone but Louise.”

  “What was wrong with Louise?”

  “Nothing,” Evelyn answered. “Except Louise didn’t quilt. Not a stitch. She liked the women in the circle, and she liked getting together with them every week, and she liked watching the others work on their quilts, but she had absolutely no interest in making a quilt for herself. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. The women in Mom’s circle were avid quilters. But after a while, they started to run out of beds to put their quilts on, so, like many quilters, they tended to give them away as gifts—often to Louise.”

  Evelyn spread out her hands. “Look, I know you’re too busy to take up quilting right now and I know I don’t know you very well, not yet. But I’d like to. We all would. So, what do you say? Would you like to be our Louise? We’ve got plenty more quilts where those came from.”

  She gave an exaggerated wink, making the bribe obvious, and I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Evelyn and I didn’t know each other well, but I liked her already.

  Margot’s blue eyes sparkled and she clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “Does that mean you’ll come?”

  “It means I’ll think about it.”

  “Fair enough,” said Evelyn, raising her hands. “That will do for now. In the meantime, we’ll clear out and let you get ready for your guest. Good luck!”