The Christmas Boutique

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  She was grown, married, and the mother of two before the urge to learn seized her. One summer day, Agnes, a childhood babysitter who had become a dear friend, invited Diane to accompany her to the Waterford Summer Quilt Festival. Michael and Todd, eleven and nine, were off at day camp, so she was free to accept.

  In the sunny atrium of the Waterford College library, quilts of all descriptions hung in neat rows from tall wooden stands. Quilters and quilt lovers alike strolled the aisles, admiring patchwork and appliquéd pieces both large and small, in every attractive color combination imaginable, and a few that Diane thought should have been left to the imagination. She and Agnes paused before nearly every quilt on display, reading the program for the artists’ names and their thoughts on their work. Docents wearing spotless white gloves mingled with the crowd, ready to turn over an edge of a quilt so onlookers could examine the backing, where the fine quilting stitches appeared more distinctly than on the patterned top.

  Agnes, a master quilter herself although she was too modest to say so, had accumulated an impressive store of knowledge about her beloved art, and whenever Diane admired an especially striking work, Agnes provided a tactful, quiet analysis of its pattern, design elements, and construction techniques. With her help, Diane learned to distinguish between a truly challenging pattern that tested the maker’s skills and one that merely appeared difficult, but could be assembled rather easily if one knew the technique. Diane discovered how subtle variations in color and contrast added intriguing complexity to relatively basic patterns, and how uninspired fabric choices detracted from otherwise technically masterful quilts.

  As they were turning the corner into a new aisle, Diane suddenly stopped short, captivated by a stunning quilt given pride of place at the end. It was a simple arrangement of twenty-four blocks in six rows of four, with a narrow blue inner border framed by a scrappy-pieced outer border. She did not recognize the pattern, which resembled a star with a square in the center overlying a cross. The horizontal and vertical crossbars seemed to create a woven net that captured the sparkling stars. What charmed her most were the quilt’s colors, which at first glance appeared to be true reds, blues, and greens, but actually ranged in a narrow spectrum around the pure hues. The subtle variations of the colors were restful to look upon, as if the quilt knew a reassuring secret that it meant to share.

  “It’s simply gorgeous,” said Diane, soaking in the peaceful feelings of contentment the quilt inspired.

  “It certainly deserves that ribbon,” Agnes remarked.

  Diane tore her gaze from the quilt and let it fall upon the purple “Viewer’s Choice” ribbon affixed to the tall post supporting the quilt stand. Above it was the placard announcing the title and maker of the quilt.

  Springtime in Waterford by Mary Beth Callahan.

  Diane felt her breath catch in her throat. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she croaked.

  “What?” Agnes peered at her, concerned. “What’s the matter?”

  Diane could only shake her head. How could the world’s most annoying next-door neighbor have created such a warm, charming quilt? “Someone mixed up the signs,” she managed to say. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Agnes. “They take good care to make sure mistakes like that don’t happen. Even if they had, by now someone would have noticed and corrected it.”

  Diane stared at Mary Beth Callahan’s name for a moment in utter disbelief before stalking off down the next aisle. “She only won that ribbon because she’s popular,” she muttered, even though she knew it wasn’t true. “Notice how the quilt didn’t win any technical awards?”

  Agnes hurried to keep up with her. “That’s quite enough,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “The artist or her best friend or her mother might have been standing right behind you. You sweeten your sour temperament or we’re going home.”

  Diane was tempted to remind Agnes that she wasn’t her babysitter anymore, but she hated to see her longtime friend so distressed, so she promised to keep her editorial comments to herself. But the lovely quilt lingered in her thoughts, baffling her with the incongruity of its beauty and its maker’s unpleasantness.

  A few days later, Diane was in her backyard moving the sprinklers when Mary Beth stepped out onto her deck to refill her bird feeders. “Hello,” Diane called after sparing a moment for risk assessment.

  Her neighbor eyed her warily and offered a nod in reply.

  Emboldened, Diane shut off the hose and drew closer to the invisible but inviolable line that marked the boundary between their yards. “I saw your quilt at the Waterford Summer Quilt Festival. It was beautiful. Congratulations on winning a ribbon.”

  “Thanks,” said Mary Beth warily, as if waiting for the punch line of a nasty joke.

  “What’s the name of the block you used? I never saw my mom or her friends make anything like it. I wish I could.”

  “You?” Mary Beth burst out laughing. “Oh, Diane. If your mother quilted, you must have learned from observing her what it takes to be a quilter. You must realize that you aren’t cut out for it, no pun intended.”

  “And why is that, exactly?”

  “It takes patience and perseverance to be a quilter. Attention to detail too, and let’s face it, you’re practically allergic to details. But it’s more than that. Those things can be learned with practice and willpower. You also need . . .” Mary Beth gazed speculatively somewhere past Diane’s shoulder. “The soul of an artist.”

  “And you think I don’t have one,” said Diane tightly. “That soul-of-an-artist thing.”

  Mary Beth fixed her with a sorrowful, condescending smile. “Exactly.”

  Dumbfounded, Diane stood there gaping as Mary Beth walked around the side yard and disappeared into her garage. She was jarred out of her stunned outrage only when a gust of wind dashed her with cold spray from the sprinkler. Storming into the house, she kicked off her wet shoes in the foyer and padded to the phone in her bare feet. She dialed Agnes’s number, and before her friend could begin the usual exchange of pleasantries, Diane begged her to teach her to quilt. She’d show Mary Beth who had the soul of an artist. She’d learn to sew circles around that wretched woman. She used to teach sixth grade. If she didn’t know patience and perseverance, she never would have made it through a single semester.

  Agnes was so delighted by Diane’s request for lessons that she didn’t ask why she suddenly, urgently needed to learn to quilt. Agnes probably assumed that she had been inspired by the glorious display at the quilt show, and in a manner of speaking, that was true. Diane didn’t dare reveal her true purpose. Agnes strongly disapproved of the ongoing battle of wills between the two neighbors, and she might have ended the lessons rather than contribute to the tension.

  Diane soon discovered that anger could sustain her only so long. Under Agnes’s gentle but steadfast tutelage, Diane’s hunger to prove herself better than Mary Beth disappeared, to be replaced by a genuine love for the traditional art form. The infinite possible combinations of color, pattern, and arrangement appealed to her craving for variety, and Agnes charmed her with folk tales about block patterns and their intriguing names. As she gradually mastered piecing and quilting by hand, she finished a small sampler wall hanging and one quilt apiece for the boys’ beds.

  One September day two years after she had begun her quilting lessons, she was contemplating her next project when she remembered Mary Beth’s gorgeous quilt. While paging through Agnes’s quilt books, she had stumbled upon the block her neighbor had chosen—Providence. A traditional pattern based on a five-by-five grid, it was comprised of simple geometric shapes assembled with a basic running stitch, with no curved seams or setting-in of pieces required. Wouldn’t it be the ideal test of Diane’s skills to attempt the pattern that had inspired her to take up quilting? And by completing it, what better way to disprove Mary Beth’s disparaging assessment of her character?

  The leaves had only just beg
un to turn and the days remained pleasantly mild, but Diane looked ahead to the holidays and decided to make her own Providence quilt in colors and prints suitable for the season. She chose reds of varying shades for the narrow pentagons that lay along the horizontal and vertical centers, green for the wider pentagons that fell on the diagonals. For the star points and the central squares, she selected rich golds and bronzes.

  As autumn waned and winter approached, she finished twenty-four blocks, and by Thanksgiving, she had sewed them into six rows of four blocks each. She added an inner border of ivory, and then an outer border of the same width comprised of half-square triangles. When she put the last stitch in the top on a snowy day in mid-December, she was so pleased and proud of herself that she almost laughed aloud. She had done it. It had taken her two and a half years, but she had proven to herself and to her spiteful next-door neighbor that she too could create a masterpiece.

  But had she?

  Doubt crept in as she draped the finished top over the daybed and stepped back to study it as objectively as she could. For a novice, it was indeed fine work. The blocks seemed all the same size, the points met properly, the quilt lay flat and even. And yet, when she looked closely, she detected small variations in the width of one red pentagon and its counterpart in an adjacent block, several triangles that were a degree or two off from a perfect right angle, and something about the sawtooth border that seemed out of balance, as if it were too narrow for the proportions of the quilt blocks it surrounded. She was sure Mary Beth had used a border exactly like this one, but Diane had worked from memory and might have gotten something wrong.

  She frowned, thinking—and suddenly she realized exactly what was missing.

  There was almost nothing of herself in the quilt.

  She had chosen red, green, and gold focus fabrics instead of red, green, and blue, but otherwise she had put none of her own preferences or personality into the quilt. Christmas in Waterford was pretty, even striking, but it was a mediocre imitation of the original work of a more accomplished quilter. Even the title was derivative.

  It was some consolation to know that only someone with the soul of an artist would have perceived this fatal flaw.

  Blinking away tears, she folded the pretty quilt top and clutched it to her chest, a hug that failed to comfort. She told herself that it was better she had figured this out now rather than after she quilted and bound it and showed it off to her quilting friends. Mary Beth’s quilt was too breathtaking, her “Viewer’s Choice” triumph too recent, for any local quilter not to immediately guess where Diane had found her inspiration. Her heart plummeted when she realized that everyone who had seen both quilts could not help comparing hers unfavorably to her rival’s.

  That was the realization that had compelled Diane, years before, to put the unfinished Christmas in Waterford quilt on a shelf in her sewing room, the first of a pile that had accumulated slowly and steadily through the years. She had hoped that it would remain her secret, but it was a lovely quilt, if not as perfect as the one that had inspired her. The Elm Creek Quilters needed holiday quilts, and Diane had one. Perhaps enough time had passed and memories had faded sufficiently that no one would ridicule her for essentially copying another quilter’s pattern. Didn’t apprentice painters learn their craft by imitating the works of the great masters? Diane had done much the same thing, but with variations to the borders and colors. As long as she did not attempt to pass the quilt off as her own original design, it would be unfair to accuse her of plagiarism, or whatever the sewing equivalent was.

  But Diane would go one step further. If she spotted a Christmas Boutique customer admiring her quilt top, she would approach them and explain that it was an adaptation of an original design by Mary Beth Callahan. Better yet, she would post a small sign on the wall identifying Mary Beth as the designer.

  But she could do that only if she finished quilting and binding the top in time for the opening of the boutique, scarcely eighteen hours away. That was impossible, she knew. Even if she quilted at top speed through the night, she would never finish in time.

  She sat down on the daybed and rested her hand on the quilt top, heart heavy. She had promised her friends she would contribute to the decorations. They were counting on her and she was about to let them down. It would not be the first time and they would forgive her, but she hated to seem irresponsible or indifferent when the truth was that she cared very much. She was sorry to disappoint the other Elm Creek Quilters, and sorrier still that she had not finished her projects, but she would never regret starting them. Each was a milestone on her journey, a measure of her progress as a quilter and a person.

  Incomplete was better than never attempted—and her friends would understand that more than anyone.

  Quickly she rose and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Taking scissors from the basket of tools on her desk, she carefully trimmed loose threads from the unfinished edge of Christmas in Waterford, rolled it up, and tucked it neatly into a tote bag. After a moment’s hesitation, she did the same with the red-and-white Dolley Madison’s Star quilt and the Snow Crystals. So they weren’t quite finished. What did it really matter? They were still pretty, and they still evoked the spirit of the festive season. She would take them to Elm Creek Manor and let the decorating crew decide if they were good enough to display at the Christmas Boutique. After they were hung high upon the ballroom walls, perhaps no one would notice that they were still works-in-progress.

  Her remorse dissipated as she pulled on her coat and boots, slung the strap of her tote over her shoulder, grabbed her purse, and headed out to the garage. As she backed out onto the driveway, she saw the Callahans’ garage door rising. Something compelled her to pause with her foot on the brake, and as she watched the house next door, she observed Mary Beth loading three large shopping bags into the trunk of her car. She closed it and turned around, and when she did, she spotted Diane watching her through the windshield. Mary Beth hesitated, wrung her gloved hands, and seemed to steel herself before crossing her own driveway to meet Diane in hers.

  Diane rolled down her window. “Hey, how are you?” she asked warily. Mary Beth looked like she was on a mission, and that could mean anything.

  “Will you be stopping by Elm Creek Manor any time soon?” Mary Beth asked.

  “Yes, in fact, I’m on my way there now.”

  Mary Beth heaved a sigh of relief. “Would you be willing to drop off my contributions for the Christmas Boutique?”

  “I’d be happy to.” Diane popped open her trunk, shut down the engine, and got out of the car. “I’ll help you load.”

  Mary Beth thanked her, and within minutes they had transferred her bags of quilts for the market to Diane’s car. “I really appreciate this,” said Mary Beth, strangely agitated, as Diane closed the trunk. “I can’t bear to show my face at Elm Creek Manor, not with all the Christmas Boutique volunteers working so hard.”

  “Why not?” asked Diane, bewildered. “You’ve been to the manor twice since the end of summer, and Sylvia said you were welcome back any time. Is this because of what Brent and his friends did? Bonnie forgave them, and she’s in Hawaii so you don’t have to worry about seeing her—”

  “No, no, this has nothing to do with all that.” Mary Beth shook her head, distressed. “They don’t blame me but I blame myself. Nancy and Melanie and the others have been so nice, so understanding, but I still can’t face them. I quit the facilities committee. I can’t even bring myself to go back to church.”

  “You mean—” Understanding struck so suddenly that Diane took a half-step backward. “You were the . . .” She paused, thoughts racing. “Listen, everyone knows you didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “I certainly hope so. What kind of horrible person would deliberately destroy a church hall and jeopardize a fund-raiser for a food pantry?” Mary Beth laughed a bit frantically, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “I’ll tell you who. The mother of a boy who vandalized a quilt shop. I know what everyone is th
inking: It runs in the family.”

  “No one is thinking that.”

  “I feel so stupid, and after trying so hard to do everything right, to make up for—” She closed her eyes and shook her head again. “I volunteered to work at the boutique throughout the weekend, but I can’t do it. I just can’t. Will you tell Nancy I’m sorry?”

  “Mary Beth, listen to me.” Diane grasped her by the shoulders. “You have to stop blaming yourself. No one else does. Anyone could have made that mistake. We need you at the boutique. You have to work your shifts.”

  Mary Beth sniffled and eyed her, taken aback by the urgency in her tone. “What if . . . what if people tell me to go away?”

  “No one would, and I dare them to try. Sylvia would send them packing instead. She doesn’t tolerate bullies.” Diane held her gaze, determined, and even gave her a little shake. “Promise me you’ll work your shifts. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation. We need you. And there’s something I want to show you at the manor.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to tell you now. What other leverage do I have to get you to show up tomorrow?”

  Surprised, Mary Beth choked out a laugh. “I—I guess—I’ll think about it.”

  “Think fast. Friday morning will be here before you know it.” Diane climbed back into her car. “I’ll see you tomorrow, if not sooner.”

  She shut the door. Mary Beth nodded bleakly, turned away, and trudged back across the driveway and the strip of snow-covered lawn marking the property line, and disappeared into her garage.

  Diane took a deep, shaky breath, started the car again, and headed off to Elm Creek Manor. It had been Mary Beth all along, but it was clear she felt deeply remorseful. The damage done to the community hall had resulted not from malice but from a stupid mistake, of the sort Diane made all too often. She or any of her friends could have made the same careless error in a moment of stress, and she knew how she would want them to be treated in the aftermath.