“A quilt is just a prayer you can sleep under,” she told me once. “Every stitch is a little wish for whoever’s going to use it.”
Around two in the morning, I got up.
I went downstairs in my robe and turned on the lamp in the front room. I went to the closet under the stairs and pulled out my scrap bins. Six big plastic tubs, full of fabric, sorted by color, the way my mother taught me.
I couldn’t undo the drawing. I couldn’t prove anything. I couldn’t make Rhonda shake the can.
But nobody could stop me making another quilt.
So I did.
Chapter Five: The Second Winter
I started the next night. After Dale went up to bed.
This time I made a Grandmother’s Flower Garden. It’s the oldest pattern I know. My grandmother made one. My mother made three. I’d never made one myself, because it takes forever.
It’s made of hexagons. Little six-sided pieces, each one about the size of a half dollar. You sew seven of them together into a flower: one in the center and six around it. Then you sew a ring of green hexagons around that, for the leaves. Then you sew the flowers together with white hexagons in between, like a garden path.
A queen-size Flower Garden takes about two thousand hexagons. Every one of them cut by hand and basted over a paper template and whipstitched to its neighbor.
One flower at a time.
I chose the colors carefully.
The petals were every color I had. Pinks and yellows and lavenders. Old feed sack prints from my mother’s scrap bins. A green check from a dress I wore in high school. A red calico from Dale’s mother’s apron. Little flowers from everybody’s life, all mixed together.
But the centers were all the same. Every single flower.
Blue. A soft, faded blue with a tiny white dot. It came from my mother’s old housedress. The one she wore every day in her kitchen for twenty years. The one she was wearing in the last picture I have of her, standing at her stove in Clarksville, laughing at something my father said.
After she died, I couldn’t throw it away. I’d kept it folded in my cedar chest for eleven years.
Now I cut it into hexagons. One for the heart of every flower.
Dale found me the first night. He came downstairs at midnight for a glass of water and saw the lamp on.
He stood in the doorway in his long underwear and looked at me in the rocker, with my lap full of paper hexagons and Mom’s thimble on my finger.
“Another one,” he said.
“Another one.”
He didn’t ask who it was for. He knew.
He went to the kitchen and filled his glass. On his way back through, he stopped and put more wood in the stove. Then he went up to bed.
He did that every night that winter. Put more wood in the stove on his way to bed. Never said a word about it.
The winter was long that year. It snowed the week before Thanksgiving and didn’t stop. By January, there were drifts against the machine shed higher than Dale’s head.
I sewed through all of it.
Some nights I’d do one flower. Some nights only half of one. My eyes aren’t what they were, and the hexagons are small, and my mother’s thimble was getting thin on top, just like hers had.
I counted them, the way she taught me. Stitches to the inch. Hexagons to the flower. Flowers to the row.
When I got to fifty flowers, I laid them out on the dining room table. Dale came in from chores and stood looking at them.
“That’s a lot of little pieces,” he said.
“Two thousand and four,” I said.
He whistled.
In December, the church council met to talk about the furnace.
The raffle had raised eleven hundred and forty-six dollars. With everything else, the bake sales and the free-will offerings and a gift from the Hoffman family, the furnace fund had about nine thousand dollars. Still almost six thousand short.
Kaufman Heating said they couldn’t hold the price past spring.
Dale was on the council that year. He came home from the meeting in a quiet mood. He hung his coat on the hook by the door and stood by the woodstove warming his hands.
“Rhonda gave a report,” he said. “On the raffle. She said it was the most successful fundraiser in church history.” He paused. “She thanked you three times.”
I didn’t look up from my hexagon.
“And she said,” Dale went on, “that Katie’s going to put the quilt on the gift table at the wedding. So everybody can see the beautiful prize she won.”
My needle stopped.
I didn’t say anything. I put three more stitches in. Then I set it down.
“Dale,” I said. “Do you know anything about Pearl Wendt’s house? The heat?”
He looked surprised. “Why?”
“I drove by on Tuesday. All her windows have plastic on them. And there’s frost on the inside of the front one.”
Dale was quiet for a moment.
“That’s Howard Brenner’s duplex,” he said. “Out of Cedar Falls. He doesn’t fix anything. Folks say that furnace has been on its last legs for years.”
I picked up my needle again.
“Somebody should look at it,” I said.
Chapter Six: The Wedding
Katie Pfeiffer married Tyler Brandt on the second Saturday in June. At Grace Lutheran. With the reception afterward in the fellowship hall.
The same fellowship hall. The same folding tables. The same coffee urn.
We went, of course. Dale is her uncle. He wore his good suit and I wore my blue dress and we sat on the bride’s side, three rows back. Rhonda cried through the whole ceremony. Katie looked beautiful.
I want to say that clearly. She looked beautiful. She’s a sweet girl, Katie. She always has been. She used to follow me around my kitchen when she was little, asking to lick the beaters.
At the reception, the gift table was set up along the back wall. Right where the clothesline had been in October.
My quilt was on it.
Folded on top, with a little card propped in front of it, written in Rhonda’s curly handwriting.
Handmade Double Wedding Ring Quilt. Won by the bride at the Grace Lutheran Fall Raffle! Made by her Aunt Joan. A sign from above!
People stopped to look at it all evening. Women ran their fingers along the binding.
“Isn’t that the luckiest thing,” I heard Doris Engel say. “A wedding ring quilt, for a wedding.”
“I always say the Lord has a sense of humor,” somebody else said.
I stood by the punch bowl and smiled.
Across the room, I saw Pearl. She was sitting at a table by herself in the corner, in a flowered dress that must have been thirty years old. She had a piece of wedding cake in front of her. She hadn’t touched it.
She was looking at the gift table. At my quilt.
Then she looked away.
Halfway through the dancing, Katie found me by the punch bowl.
She was flushed and happy, with her veil off and her shoes in her hand. She hugged me hard.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the quilt. I’m going to keep it forever. I mean it.”
“I’m glad you like it, honey.”
She pulled back and looked at me. Something moved across her face. Just for a second.
“Aunt Joan,” she said, quieter. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She opened her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder. Rhonda was across the room, laughing with the Lutheran Women, looking our way.
Katie closed her mouth.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’ll ask you sometime.”
She went back to the dance floor.
Dale drove us home that night. In the dark, with the window cracked.
“She knows,” he said, just past the Mueller place.
“Who?”
“Katie. She knows. I watched her face when she was talking to you.”
I looked out the window.
“Maybe,” I said.
I finished the Flower Garden in March. On the first warm day of the year, with the windows open for the first time since October.
I put in the last stitch of the binding at four-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Then I took it out to the clothesline in the backyard and hung it up in the sunshine, the way my mother always did with a new quilt. Let the air through it. Let it breathe.
Dale came around the corner of the barn and stopped.
He stood there for a long time in his work boots, looking at it. Two thousand and four hexagons. Every flower a different color, every heart the same faded blue.
“Your mother’s dress,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
He walked over and put his hand flat on one of the blue centers. Gently. Like he was touching her.
“She’d have liked that,” he said.
Chapter Seven: The Storm Door
In April I folded it into a pillowcase.
A plain white one, ironed, from my linen closet. I folded the quilt in thirds and then in thirds again and slid it in carefully, the way you’d put a baby in a bassinet.
I drove to Pearl’s side of town on a Wednesday afternoon. Third Street. The little white duplex by the grain elevator.
The plastic was still on the windows. Grayer now, after a whole winter. Peeling at one corner.
Her storm door didn’t quite latch. I could see that from the sidewalk. It hung open about an inch, and the wind pushed it back and forth, so it tapped against the frame. Tap. Tap.
I went up the sagging porch steps. I stood there with the pillowcase under my arm.
My heart was going like I was walking into a job interview. I don’t know why. She was just an old woman. Just a widow from church.
I knocked.
I heard her coming. Slow. A shuffle, then a pause, then another shuffle. One hand along the wall. I could hear her fingers brushing the wallpaper.
The latch turned.
The inside door opened a few inches. Pearl looked out through the gap. She was wearing a gray cardigan buttoned wrong and two pairs of socks and the same navy coat she wore to church. Indoors.
The air that came out the door was cold. Not cool. Cold. Colder than the April afternoon outside.
“Joan Hartwig,” she said. She blinked at me. “Is something wrong? Is it Dale?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong. Can I come in, Pearl?”
She opened the door the rest of the way.
Her half of the duplex was small. A front room, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom. Neat as a pin. A little television. A recliner with a crocheted afghan over the back. A picture of Vern on the wall, in his seed corn cap, squinting into the sun.
And a space heater. A little electric one, plugged in by the recliner, with its coils glowing orange. It was the only warm thing in the room.
“Pearl,” I said. “Is your furnace working?”
She looked embarrassed.
“It works some,” she said. “Some days. Mr. Brenner says he’ll get somebody out. He’s been saying it since Thanksgiving.” She waved her hand. “I’ve got my heater. And my coat. I’m fine.”
I didn’t argue. Not yet.
I held out the pillowcase.
“I made you something,” I said.
She looked at it. Then at me. She didn’t take it.
“Joan,” she said. “What is this?”
“Open it and see.”
She took it to the kitchen table. She set it down very carefully, like it might break. She untucked the end of the pillowcase.
She pulled out the corner of the quilt. Just the corner. Three flowers. A pink one, a yellow one, a lavender one. Each with a faded blue heart.
Her hands stopped.
She stood there at her kitchen table in her coat, holding the corner of that quilt. She didn’t move for a long time.
Then she pulled the rest of it out. Slowly. Unfolding it. She held it up against herself, the way Katie had held up the Double Wedding Ring at the raffle.
It went all the way down to the floor.
“This is new,” she whispered.
“Brand new,” I said. “Every stitch.”
“Who made it?”
“I did. This winter.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were very wet.
“For who?”
“For you, Pearl,” I said. “Only ever for you.”
Chapter Eight: What Pearl Saw
She sat down at her kitchen table with the quilt in her lap. She ran her hand over it, flower by flower. She touched every blue center like she was counting them.
“Joan,” she said. “Why?”
I didn’t know how to answer at first. I pulled out the other chair and sat down across from her.
“Because you bought sixty dollars of tickets,” I said. “In quarters. And you said you’d never owned a quilt somebody made new.”
She looked down at her hands.
“And because you didn’t win,” I said quietly. “And I didn’t think that was right.”
Pearl was quiet for a long time. The space heater ticked. Outside, a grain truck rumbled past toward the elevator.
“You know,” she said finally. “Don’t you? About the drawing.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
“I was in the back row,” Pearl said. “I could see her hands. I’ve got good eyes for an old woman. Vern always said I could spot a weed in a bean field from the road.”
She looked up at me.
“She reached in her apron pocket,” Pearl said. “Before she reached in the can. Just for a second. Her right hand. Then into the can, and out.”
My breath stopped.
“I saw it,” Pearl said simply. “Plain as day.”
“Pearl,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something?”
She smiled. A small, tired smile.
“Who would I say it to? Rhonda? Pastor Dahl? The whole fellowship hall?” She shook her head. “I’m an eighty-one-year-old widow who rents half a house from a man in Cedar Falls. Rhonda’s been running that church kitchen for twenty years. Who do you think they’d believe?”
“I would have believed you.”
“I know you would,” she said. “I watched your face by the coffee urn. You smiled the way I smiled at Vern’s funeral.”
She folded her hands on top of the quilt.
“And if I’d said something,” she said, “then you’d have had to choose. You and Dale. Between his sister and the truth. In front of the whole church.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen a church split, Joan. In 1997. Over carpet. I wasn’t going to be the reason it happened again. Not over sixty dollars.”
“It wasn’t just sixty dollars, Pearl. I saw you at the Casey’s. With the cans.”
She went red. She looked away.
“Well,” she said. “It’s honest money.”
“That’s twelve hundred cans.”
“Fourteen hundred,” she said. “Some of them were bottles. Those are bigger.” She almost laughed. “And I didn’t buy those tickets to win, Joan. Not really. I bought them for the furnace.”
I didn’t understand.
“The church furnace,” Pearl said. “You know where I go on Wednesday afternoons? When it’s cold?”
I shook my head.
“The church,” she said. “The fellowship hall. I go sit in there and read. Pastor Dahl leaves the side door unlocked for me. He knows. He’s the only one who knows.” She looked at her space heater. “It’s warmer than here. When the church furnace works.”
She smoothed the quilt over her knees.
“Last January it quit,” she said. “During the Christmas program. And I thought, if it goes, I lose my Wednesdays. So I bought sixty dollars of tickets. For the furnace.” She smiled. “The quilt was just a bonus. A dream. I didn’t really think I’d win it.”
Chapter Nine: Katie
I stayed at Pearl’s for two hours that afternoon. She made coffee on her stove, which still worked, thank God. We drank it at her kitchen table with the Flower Garden spread across both of our laps.
She told me about Vern. How they met at a barn dance in Tripoli in 1961. How he proposed in a hayloft. How he always wore that seed corn cap, even to church, until the pastor made him take it off.
I told her about my mother. About the treadle machine and the coffee cans of scraps. About the blue housedress.
“Every heart,” Pearl said, touching a blue center. “Every single one.”
“Every one,” I said.
“So your mother’s in every flower.”
I couldn’t answer. I just nodded.
When I left, I made her promise she’d call Dale if the furnace went out again. She promised. I didn’t believe her.
I drove home and found Dale in the machine shed, working on the baler. I told him about the cold. About the frost on the inside of the window. About the space heater.
He put down his wrench.
“How old’s that furnace?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Pearl said Mr. Brenner bought the duplex in 1994. It was there before that.”
Dale wiped his hands on a rag. He was quiet for a long time.
“I know a guy at Kaufman’s,” he said.
But before Dale could call Kaufman’s, someone knocked on our door.
It was a Saturday morning, three days later. I was in the kitchen making bread. Dale was out with the cows. I wiped my hands on my apron and opened the door.
Katie was standing on our porch.
She was holding a big plastic tub. The kind you keep sweaters in. And inside it, folded, was my Double Wedding Ring.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Can I come in?”
I let her in. She set the tub on the kitchen table. She didn’t sit down.
She was crying already. Not loud. Just tears running down her face that she kept wiping away with the back of her hand.
“I found the stub,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“In Mom’s apron,” she said. “The orange one she wore at the supper. She asked me to wash it last week, because she was helping me move into our new apartment and didn’t have time.” She took a breath. “I went through the pockets. Like you’re supposed to. And there it was. A raffle ticket. Folded up small. With my name on it.”
She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a little stub. Red. Folded in quarters.
She set it on the table next to the tub.
“It wasn’t the one she drew,” Katie said. “That one she gave to me. I’ve got it in my wedding scrapbook. This was a second one. Like a spare.” Her voice broke. “In case the first one fell out of her hand or something.”
I sat down. I picked up the stub and unfolded it.
Katie Pfeiffer. In Rhonda’s curly handwriting.
