“I knew,” Katie said. “Aunt Joan, I think I knew the whole time. When she said my name. She didn’t shake the can. Everybody always shakes the can.” She wiped her eyes. “I wanted to say something at the wedding. When you were by the punch bowl. But I couldn’t. Not with her right there. Not on my wedding day.”
“I know, honey.”
“Did you know?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I thought.”
She looked at the quilt in the plastic tub.
“I can’t keep it,” she said. “I can’t sleep under it. Tyler asked me why I keep folding it up and putting it in the closet. I told him I was afraid of getting it dirty.” She laughed through her tears. “That’s not why.”
She pushed the tub across the table toward me.
“I want to give it back,” she said. “Or give it to someone. Or put it in the raffle again. I don’t know. I just want to make it right.”
I looked at my niece. Twenty-three years old. Married eight weeks.
“Have you talked to your mother?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I’m scared to,” she said. “She’ll cry. She always cries. And then I’ll end up apologizing to her.”
Chapter Ten: Rhonda
Rhonda came on Monday.
I heard her car in the driveway at nine in the morning. Her white Buick, with the bumper sticker that says Proud Grandma of an Honor Student, even though she doesn’t have grandchildren yet. The car door slammed so hard I heard it in the kitchen.
She didn’t knock. She came right in the back door. Family does that.
She was holding a plastic tub. The same plastic tub. With my quilt in it.
“What did you say to her?” Rhonda said.
No hello. No good morning. She set the tub on my kitchen table so hard the salt shaker jumped.
“I didn’t say anything to her, Rhonda. She came to me.”
“She came to you with this.” She pointed at the tub. “And then you sent her home with it? And she comes to my house in tears and gives it to me and says she can’t keep it? Says she found something in my apron?”
“She did find something.”
“She found nothing!” Rhonda’s voice cracked. “A spare ticket! I wrote her name on an extra one because I was going to give it to her as a keepsake! For her scrapbook!”
I didn’t argue with her.
I’d learned that from Pearl. You don’t fix a crooked seam by yanking on it. You pick it out slow, one stitch at a time.
“Rhonda,” I said. “Sit down. I’ll make coffee.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“Sit down anyway.”
She stood there for a second, breathing hard. Then she sat. Right in Dale’s chair, at the head of the table. She always does that.
I made coffee. I set a cup in front of her. Two sugars and a splash of milk. She looked at it.
“You remember how I take it,” she said.
“Thirty-one years, Rhonda.”
I sat down across from her. I didn’t say anything. I let the quiet sit there.
It sat there a long time.
Rhonda picked up her cup. She held it with both hands. She didn’t drink.
“Mom never made me a quilt,” she said finally.
I looked at her.
“Did you know that?” She was looking at her coffee. “Dale’s and my mother. Viola. She made a quilt for every one of the grandkids. Every wedding. Every baby. She made one for Dale when he went to college. She made two for you.”
“I know.”
“She never made one for me,” Rhonda said. “Not one. Not for my wedding. Not for Katie when she was born. I asked her once. She said I’d only ruin it.”
I didn’t know that. In thirty-one years, I never knew that.
“She gave her quilts to you,” Rhonda said. “Her daughter-in-law. Not her daughter. She said you were the only one in the family who knew what they were worth.” She laughed, short and bitter. “When she died, she left you her quilting frame. And her patterns. And all her scraps. And me she left a set of Corelle dishes.”
“Rhonda…”
“So when you made that quilt for the raffle,” she said, “and hung it up on that wall, and everybody was standing around touching it, saying it was the prettiest thing they’d ever seen…” Her voice broke. “I just thought, that’s one more. One more quilt in this family that’ll never be for anybody of mine.”
She put her cup down. Her hands were shaking.
“I wrote her name on two tickets before the supper,” she said. “I put one in my apron. And when I reached in the can, I just held on to it.” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. Like my hand decided.”
Tears were running down her face now. Real ones. Not the ones she cries at funerals.
“And then I stood up there and said the Lord works in mysterious ways.” She shook her head. “In His own church. With the microphone.”
She put her face in her hands.
“And now my daughter won’t look at me,” she said through her fingers. “She says she can’t sleep under it. She says every time she sees it, she thinks of Pearl Wendt clapping from the back row.”
I reached across the table. I put my hand on her arm.
I’d been angry at Rhonda for eight months. I’d scrubbed the top of the refrigerator over Rhonda. I’d spent a whole winter sewing two thousand and four hexagons because of Rhonda.
But sitting at my kitchen table, crying into her coffee, she didn’t look like a cheat. She looked like a little girl who’d asked her mother for a quilt and been told she’d only ruin it.
“Rhonda,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
She lifted her face. Her mascara was running.
“I want to make it right,” she said. “I just don’t know how. Not without everybody knowing. Not without the whole church…”
“Then let’s think about it,” I said. “Together.”
Chapter Eleven: Making It Right
We sat at my kitchen table for three hours that morning. Rhonda and me.
Dale came in from chores at eleven. He stopped in the doorway when he saw us. He looked at the tub on the table. At his sister’s face. At mine.
He didn’t say a word. He just poured himself a cup of coffee and went to the front room and turned on the farm report.
Here’s what we decided.
First, Rhonda would go see Pastor Dahl. Privately. And tell him the truth. All of it. She was scared to death, but she agreed. Pastor Dahl has been at Grace Lutheran for sixteen years. He’s buried most of our parents. He keeps things to himself.
Second, Rhonda would give back what the raffle cost Pearl. Not sixty dollars. More. She’d pay Pearl’s sixty out of her own pocket, and then match every dollar of it to the furnace fund.
Third, the Double Wedding Ring would go back in the raffle. At the fall supper. This October. And this time, somebody else would draw.
“Who?” Rhonda asked. “Who draws?”
I thought about it.
“Pearl,” I said.
Rhonda looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded slowly.
“Pearl,” she agreed.
Rhonda saw Pastor Dahl on Wednesday. She told him everything. She told me afterward that he listened without saying a single word, and when she was done, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie.
“Rhonda,” he said, “I’ve been a pastor for thirty-one years. I’ve heard people confess things that would curl your hair. Robbing banks. Leaving spouses. You know what’s the hardest thing to confess?”
She shook her head.
“The small ones,” he said. “Because we tell ourselves they don’t count.”
He didn’t make her stand up in church. He didn’t tell the council. He said that what was between Rhonda and God was between Rhonda and God.
But he did one thing. He called Kaufman’s Heating himself, that afternoon.
Pearl’s furnace got replaced the second week of May.
Dale’s friend from Kaufman’s came out to look at it. A man named Gary Lutz, who’s been fixing furnaces in Bremer County for forty years. He took one look at the old unit in Pearl’s basement and shook his head.
“Cracked heat exchanger,” he said. “This thing’s been leaking carbon monoxide. Probably for a couple years. It’s a miracle she’s still alive.”
Pearl, standing on the basement stairs in her coat, went white.
Howard Brenner, the landlord in Cedar Falls, didn’t want to pay for a new one. Gary told him what Iowa law says about landlords and furnaces and carbon monoxide. Then Pastor Dahl called him too. Then Dale did.
Then I sat down at my kitchen table with the county assessor’s website and Pearl’s lease and the phone number for Legal Aid in Waterloo. I keep books. I know how to find the wrong number.
Howard Brenner paid for the furnace. Four thousand, one hundred and seventy dollars. Installed in two days.
And while we were at it, I helped Pearl fill out the application for the Iowa energy assistance program. She’d never heard of it. She qualified for help with her heating bills every winter. She’d been eligible since Vern died.
Nine years of winters in her coat. And nobody ever told her.
The church furnace got its money too.
Rhonda wrote a check to the furnace fund for sixty dollars, and then another for six hundred. She said it was ten for every one. She never told anybody why. She just put it in the offering plate in an envelope with no name on it.
But the furnace fund was still short. Kaufman’s needed the money by June first, or the price would go up.
Pastor Dahl announced it at church on the last Sunday in May. Five thousand, two hundred dollars still to go.
The next Sunday, there was an envelope in the offering plate. A plain white one, with no name.
Inside was a cashier’s check from the Bremer County Bank for five thousand, two hundred dollars.
Nobody ever found out who it was from. Pastor Dahl wouldn’t say.
But when I looked over at Rhonda in her pew that morning, she was looking straight ahead at the altar with her chin up. And Dale, sitting next to me, squeezed my hand.
Rhonda had cashed in a CD. I found out years later. The one her mother left her. The money that came with the Corelle dishes.
Chapter Twelve: The Can
The fall supper was the second Saturday in October again. A year to the day.
Same fellowship hall. Same folding tables. Same coffee urn. Same meatloaf and scalloped corn and seven kinds of pie.
The new furnace was running in the basement. You could hear it hum. For the first time in sixty-four years, the fellowship hall was warm in October without anybody having to start it with a prayer.
The Double Wedding Ring hung on the clothesline again. Right where it had been.
People came up to touch it, just like before. Some of them gave me looks. Little sideways looks, like they wanted to ask something and didn’t know how.
Katie stood next to it most of the evening. She told anybody who asked that she’d decided to give it back to the raffle. “It belongs to the church,” she said. “I want somebody else to have a chance.”
Tyler stood next to her with his arm around her. He didn’t ask why.
Rhonda sold the tickets again. At the card table by the door. Two dollars a ticket, three for five.
When Pearl came to the table, Rhonda looked up at her for a long time.
Pearl was wearing a new coat. A red wool one. I’d bought it for her at the Younkers in Waterloo in September, and she’d argued with me for twenty minutes in the parking lot about it. She’d lost.
Pearl opened her cloth coin purse.
Rhonda put her hand over it.
“Not this year, Pearl,” Rhonda said quietly. “This year, your tickets are on me.”
She tore off a long strip of tickets. She didn’t count them. She folded them carefully and put them in Pearl’s hand.
Pearl looked at her. Rhonda looked back.
Neither one said anything. They didn’t need to.
After the pie, Rhonda stood up at the little podium at the front of the fellowship hall. She had the red Folgers can in her hand. The same can.
She didn’t take the microphone this time. She just stood there.
“Before we draw,” she said, and her voice was shaking a little, “I want to ask somebody else to do it this year. I’ve been doing it for eleven years. It’s time somebody else had a turn.”
She looked toward the back row.
“Pearl,” she said. “Would you come up?”
The room went quiet.
Pearl stood up slowly. She came up the center aisle between the folding tables in her new red coat. One hand on the backs of the chairs, the way she walks along her walls at home.
When she got to the podium, Rhonda handed her the can.
Pearl held it for a moment. She looked down into it. Five hundred and some stubs, folded small.
Then she looked straight back at me. By the coffee urn. With a dish towel on my shoulder.
Pearl lifted that Folgers can over her head. As high as an eighty-two-year-old woman can lift anything.
And she shook it.
She shook it hard. Like she was mixing paint. Like Ruth Kessler used to do. Like she was shaking a whole year out of it.
The stubs rattled and rattled inside that can. Somebody in the back laughed. Then somebody else. Then the whole fellowship hall was laughing and clapping while an eighty-two-year-old widow in a red coat shook a coffee can over her head for a full fifteen seconds.
Then she closed her eyes. And she reached in.
She unfolded the stub. She held it out at arm’s length, because she’d left her reading glasses on the table.
“Well,” she said. “Would you look at that.”
She read the name out loud.
“Lisa Kowalski.”
Nobody knew who that was.
Then, at the very back table, a young woman stood up. She was maybe twenty-five, with a baby on her hip and a toddler holding on to her jeans. She’d moved to Belden in August. Her husband worked nights at the ethanol plant. She’d come to the supper because she saw the sign at the Casey’s and couldn’t afford to cook that night.
She’d bought one ticket. Two dollars.
She stood there with her baby, her mouth open, staring at the quilt on the wall.
“Me?” she said. “Really?”
“Really,” Pearl said. “Come on up, honey. It’s yours.”
The whole room clapped. Really clapped this time. Not the polite kind.
Lisa Kowalski came up the aisle with her baby on her hip. Katie took down the quilt from the clothesline and folded it and put it in her arms. Lisa started crying. Then Katie started crying. Then Rhonda.
Then me, by the coffee urn. I couldn’t help it.
When it was all over, and the tables were folded and the coffee urn was empty and the furnace was humming in the basement, Katie found me in the church kitchen.
I was washing cups. She picked up a dish towel and started drying.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you what, honey?”
“To quilt,” she said. “I want to learn. The real way. By hand.”
I turned off the water. I dried my hands on my apron.
Then I reached up to the windowsill above the sink, where I’d set my mother’s silver thimble while I washed. Worn thin on top. From her forty years, and my thirty.
I held it out to Katie.
She looked at it. Then at me.
“Your mother’s thimble?”
“It’s yours now,” I said. “If you want it. It’s a family thimble. And you’re family.”
She took it. She slid it onto her middle finger. It fit.
That was three years ago.
Katie comes out to the farm every Tuesday night. She sits in the rocker by the woodstove, and I sit in Dale’s chair, and we sew. She’s made two quilts so far. A simple Nine Patch and a Log Cabin. Her stitches are crooked. Seven to the inch, maybe six.
She’ll get there. I didn’t get to ten until I was forty.
Rhonda comes sometimes too. She doesn’t sew. She just sits with us and drinks coffee and tells stories about her mother. Some of them are even nice.
Pearl died last winter, in January. Eighty-four years old. In her sleep, in her bed, in the east half of the little white duplex on Third Street.
The house was warm when they found her. The new furnace was running. And she was lying under the Grandmother’s Flower Garden. Two thousand and four hexagons. Every heart the same faded blue.
The coroner said she looked peaceful. Like she’d just decided to take a rest.
At her funeral, Grace Lutheran was full. Every pew. People standing in the back. Men from the elevator, women from the Lutheran Women, the man from Kaufman’s, Lisa Kowalski with her two little ones.
Rhonda did the funeral lunch. Ham sandwiches, scalloped corn, seven kinds of bars. She didn’t sit down once. When I tried to help her, she shooed me out of the kitchen.
“Go sit with Dale,” she said. “This one’s mine.”
Pearl had no family left. No children. No nieces or nephews. Just a note in her nightstand drawer, in shaky handwriting, addressed to Pastor Dahl.
Bury me with Vern in the Tripoli cemetery. Give my good dishes to the church kitchen. And please give the quilt back to Joan Hartwig. She’ll know who needs it next.
It’s in my cedar chest now. Folded in thirds, and then in thirds again, in a plain white pillowcase.
I don’t know who it’s for yet. I’m waiting.
But on Tuesday nights, when Katie and I are sewing by the woodstove and Dale’s asleep in his chair, I sometimes get up and open that chest. And I unfold just the corner. Three flowers. A pink one, a yellow one, a lavender one.
Each with a faded blue heart.
I touch them, one at a time.
Then I fold it back up and close the lid. And I go back to my rocker. And I pick up my needle, and I watch my niece push hers through the cotton with my mother’s thimble on her finger.
And I don’t say anything at all.
There’s nothing that needs saying. It’s all in the stitches. Every one a little wish for whoever’s going to need it next.
