The Way Home (42 page)

“I’m very particular — “

“Yes, I know. But this room isn’t your responsibility. It’s mine.”

Her tone was polite but implacable. Helen couldn’t have looked more shocked if the pillow had addressed her.

“I refuse to allow you to take on yet another chore,” Meg said, forcing a smile every bit as insincere as those her mother-in-law bestowed on her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to tend to.”

Helen McKendrick found herself standing in the hallway, staring at the closed door with no clear idea of how she’d come to be there.

Inside the room, Meg turned and stared at the newly unmade bed. Her breathing was too rapid and her hands were clenched into tight fists at her side. Frustration and anger boiled inside her, demanding action. Without giving herself a chance to think, she grabbed hold of the sheets and stripped them from the mattress with quick angry motions, bundling them together and then throwing them into a comer of the room.

Suddenly light-headed, she sank onto the bare mattress and sat there until her head stopped spinning.
Damn this weakness!
If only she didn’t feel so tired all the time, she’d be better able to cope with the constant barbs about her failure as a wife. If only she didn’t already more than half believe them, they wouldn’t sting quite so much.

Her hand was shaking as she lifted it to brush her hair back from her face. She forced herself to take deep, slow breaths, swallowing the sickness that rose in her throat, telling herself that it couldn’t be good for the baby for her to get so angry. She might as well just face the fact that there wasn’t anything she could do to change her mother-in-law’s opinion of her. She could scrub the house from top to bottom, bake blue-ribbon pies, and smile till her teeth ached and Ty’s mother would still find fault.

The only thing Helen McKendrick wanted was for her to get out of Ty’s life. If only she could be more sure that Ty didn’t wish the same thing, she thought.

Finding herself on the losing end of the only argument she’d ever managed to force Meg into did nothing to endear Meg to Helen. Having accepted that there was nothing she could do change the other woman’s opinion of her, Meg stopped trying. She spent more time in her room, quilting or reading or sometimes just staring out the window, watching for the first signs of spring.

A few days after Meg’s confrontation with her mother-in-law, the weather suddenly turned warm. It was as if winter had given way to spring overnight. Not that winter would really give in so easily, of course. March is a month marked by the tug-of-war between two seasons, with old man winter winning most of the early battles. But spring’s youthful vigor must always win out eventually. This year the first signs of that triumph gave Meg’s flagging spirits a sorely needed lift.

She’d planned to visit her mother, but looking at the clear blue arc of sky overhead, she hesitated for a moment, thinking that she’d much rather go into Regret and find a bench in the park to sit on and let the sun’s warmth sink into her bones. An immediate wave of guilt followed hard on the heels of that thought.

She’d had no contact with her mother since that terrible night when she’d run out into the rain, her only thought to reach Ty. Meg had written twice from California, short impersonal letters that said little beyond the fact that she was well. She hadn’t even told her mother that she was going to have a baby. It was time, and past, that she went to see her.

Ty had bought a battered truck for use on the farm. Since they’d sold her little Ford before leaving California, he’d left the keys to the roadster with her. Meg timed her visit carefully to minimize the possibility of running into her stepfather. She even slowed as she neared the hotel, looking to make sure that his car was there. It was and she drew a relieved breath as she passed.

As she turned into the drive, Meg was shocked to see how different her old home looked. She stopped the car but made no move to get out, staring instead at the white frame building, trying to place the changes. It crept over her slowly that it wasn’t the house that had changed — it was her.

She wasn’t the same frightened girl who’d run from this place all those weeks ago. She was a woman now, with a husband and a baby on the way. In her memory, the house had been bigger, more threatening. It had been darker, looming over everything around it. But she saw now that it was nothing more than a small wooden building, the paint starting to fade a little, the narrow flower beds that flanked the porch empty now, showing nothing of the color that would brighten them later in the year.

Meg got out of the car and walked slowly up to the house, her reluctance oddly reinforced by the changes she sensed in herself. She had the urge to turn and leave, but she could see the front door already opening and then her mother was pushing open the screen door and stepping out onto the porch. Meg stopped at the top of the steps, looking at her mother, seeing the changes in her. Or was it simply more evidence of how much she herself had changed?

“Hello, Mama.”

“Meg.” Ruth’s thin fingers pulled her sweater tighter around her narrow frame, her faded blue eyes sweeping over her youngest daughter. Meg wondered if there was any outward evidence of the changes she felt inside. And if there was, would her mother see it? “It’s cold out. Come inside” was all she offered by way of greeting.

Meg hesitated a moment before following her mother inside. She didn’t want to set foot in that house again, but that was absurd. She’d come to see her mother, and they could hardly stand on the porch and talk. Shivering a little, though not from the cold, Meg followed her mother inside, flinching as the door shut behind her.

Nothing had changed. Ruth led the way into the parlor. A fitful fire burned on the hearth, supplementing the stingy load of coal Harlan would have ordered last fall. There was a quilt stretched in the frame, a Trip Around the World done in rich pastels.

“Mrs. Stuart?” Meg asked, touching her fingertips to the quilt.

“I don’t think that woman knows another pattern,” Ruth said, by way of confirmation. She sank into her chair and picked up her needle to continue the line of quilting she’d begun.

Moving as if in a dream, Meg went to other side of the frame. Her thimble sat on top of the quilt, along with a packet of needles and a spool of thread. After sliding the needle into the fabric, she popped the knot at the end of the thread through the top, burying it in the cotton batt as she began stitching. Mrs. Stuart bought at least three quilts every year, always the same pattern, a series of arcs that covered the quilt top like rainbows.

The two women quilted in silence for a few minutes. Meg couldn’t even begin to guess how many hours they’d spent like this, rarely speaking, the stillness of the room broken only by the steady ticking of the clock on the mantel, their needles rocking in and out of the fabric in kind of harmony they’d never achieved anywhere else.

It was as if nothing had changed, Meg thought, almost hypnotized by the rhythmic movement of her needle. As if everything were just as it had been, as if it would continue in the same way all the days of her life.

Only everything had changed. Nothing was the way it had been. Her old life was gone forever. And it was a sad realization that there’d been so little in it to regret losing. Not even these quiet moments. She’d liked to think that she and her mother were close at times like this, that the quilting brought them together.

But she realized now that the closeness had been an illusion. All the hours they’d spent sitting across a quilting frame from each other and she couldn’t have said, with honesty, that she knew her mother as well as she knew Millie Marquez. She didn’t know if Ruth had hopes or dreams; whether she ever longed to escape the life she’d built; whether she thought of anything beyond getting through each day as it came.

Trembling, Meg put her needle down and slipped the familiar thimble from her finger.

“I’m going to have a baby, Mama.” She lifted her head as she spoke, looking across the frame at her mother. Ruth’s hand faltered for a moment and then picked up the rhythm of the quilting again.

“Are you happy?” she asked without looking up.

Happy? Meg didn’t know how to answer that question. She was married to a man she loved more than life itself. She carried his child. Yet how could she be happy knowing Ty didn’t love her the way she loved him?

“Yes,” she answered at last, knowing it was only a partial truth.

“I knew the McKendrick boy would take care of you,” Ruth said, sounding satisfied.

But wasn’t there more to a marriage than just being taken care of?
Meg longed to ask.
What about building a future together? What about love?

But she didn’t ask any of those questions. She realized suddenly that her mother’s whole life had been built around choices made in the hopes that she could find someone to take care of her. It struck Meg as indescribably sad that her mother should want something so simple and have failed so miserably to grasp even an edge of that dream.

“How are you, Mama?” she asked softly.

Ruth’s fingers trembled and she let her hands rest on the quilt top. “The hotel’s failing,” she said slowly, not lifting her eyes to Meg’s face. “Harlan isn’t taking it well.”

The mention of her stepfather’s name sent a shiver up Meg’s spine. As far as she was concerned, if the hotel were to collapse around him, it would be no more than he deserved, but there was worry in her mother’s voice. Still, it was more than Meg could do to express sympathy for Harlan Davis’s troubles. She was silent, tracing her fingertip along a row of pink squares, noticing how neatly the seam matched.

“He blames your husband for what’s happened,” Ruth said abruptly.

“Why?” Meg’s eyes shot across the quilt, and this time Ruth was looking at her, her face creased with anxious lines. “We haven’t even been in the same state.”

“Harlan thinks the McKendricks are telling people to stay away, that they’re discouraging business.”

“Maybe it’s the fact that people have no money that’s discouraging business,” Meg said sharply. “Or hasn’t he heard that there’s a depression going on?”

“I know that, but when a man sees everything he’s worked for suddenly slipping away from him, he needs somewhere to lay the blame.”

“Well, he can just find somewhere else to lay it,” Meg snapped. “Maybe he should look to himself for a change. If he wasn’t such a skinflint and spent a little of his precious money on repairs for that old place, maybe people would want to go there.”

“You shouldn’t speak so harshly of him,” Ruth said automatically. “He’s not — ” She caught her daughter’s look and broke off abruptly, perhaps realizing the irony of telling Meg that Harlan Davis was not a bad man.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, but the earlier sense of familiarity was gone. Meg stirred restlessly, thinking it was time she left. She didn’t know what she’d hoped for from this visit. Maybe what she’d always hoped for when it came to her mother, a feeling of closeness, a feeling of connection. That feeling had eluded her all her life, and it seemed as if nothing had changed.

“I should be going,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing up.

“Wait. I have something I wanted to give you.” Ruth rose and walked from the room, leaving Meg alone. She waited impatiently, suddenly anxious to be gone. She didn’t like being here.

“I’d planned to give this to you when you got married,” Ruth said as she came back into the room.

Meg had been looking out the window, but at her mother’s words she turned, her eyes dropping to the quilt Ruth carried draped across her arms.

“That’s Grandma’s wedding quilt,” she said, startled. She had never met her maternal grandmother, but she knew the quilt well. Stylized red and green tulips were appliqued in the center while a green vine with red flowers and perfectly round red berries twined around the border. The white background had been heavily quilted with feathered wreaths and diagonal cross-hatching so that there was not an inch left unstitched.

The quilt was, as far as Meg knew, the only thing her mother had brought to her first marriage other than the clothes on her back. It had always been kept well wrapped in a sheet, brought out on rare occasions when she and Patsy had been allowed to touch the stuffed berries and marvel at the perfection of the work. It was her mother’s most prized possession, the one treasure she’d held on to no matter what.

“You can’t give me Grandma’s quilt,” Meg protested, putting her hands behind her back like a child resisting temptation in a candy store.

“I’d always planned to give it to you,” Ruth repeated. Her worn fingers stroked bright tulip. “Your great-grandmother gave this to my mother on her wedding day, and she passed it on to me when I married your father. She told me I was making a mistake,” she said, half to herself. “But she said the quilt was mine, mistake or no. I’d’ve given it to Patsy but she doesn’t care much for such things. I never could teach her to quilt properly, and she’d just as soon have something store bought.”

She stopped and sighed, her hand trembling a little as she cradled the quilt. “Things didn’t work out quite the way either of us might have wished, but I’d still like you to have this.”

“I can’t, Mama. It’s your best quilt.”

“I want you to have it,” Ruth repeated. She looked at Meg, her eyes pleading. “You take it and give it to your daughter someday and you tell her where it came from, how it’s been passed down through the family.”