A Thread of Truth (5 page)

A
champagne-colored sedan pulled up at the bus stop. It was raining so hard that, until I rolled down the window, I didn't realize the driver was Abigail.

“Ivy? What are you doing standing out here in this deluge?”

“My car broke down.”

“What? Again?” Abigail pursed her lips and clucked, as if my car breaking down had been a matter of extremely poor planning on my part. Much as I appreciated all Abigail had done for me, her high-handed manner could be irritating. It wasn't like I enjoyed standing at the bus stop in the pouring rain. Of course, it might have helped if, before I'd left the shop, I'd remembered that the buses only ran every forty minutes instead of every twenty after five-thirty. I'd have stayed inside a bit longer before venturing into the downpour.

“Well, don't just stand there,” Abigail ordered. “Get in. I'll drive you home. I've got a board meeting to attend at the Stanton Center.”

My sodden clothes and hair dripped a rivulet onto the seat. Abigail pursed her lips again, reached behind the seat, pulled out a towel, and handed it to me.

“Here. Franklin insists on bringing his dog, Tina, with us when we go on hikes. She's a big darling of a black Lab but she makes a mess of my upholstery. I started keeping a towel in the car to dry off her muddy feet. It's clean. Use it to dry off a bit.”

“Thanks,” I said, wrapping the towel around sections of my sopping hair and squeezing out the water. “Sorry about dripping on your upholstery.”

“That's all right. It's leather.” Abigail pulled into the road quickly, without bothering to use a turn signal, ignoring the protesting honk of a white SUV she'd just cut off, as if she were accustomed to living in a world where others yielded to her. Looking at her, with her perfectly coiffed hair the exact same shade as the string of pearls that circled her long, elegant neck and hung to rest above the pearl buttons of a powder-blue cashmere cardigan that probably cost more than my last paycheck, it was easy to believe that traffic—or crowds, or the seas—parted for her. Abigail, I was sure, had always had things her own way and probably always would.

I flexed my toes inside my shoes and felt water squish out of the stitching. Some people had everything handed to them, I thought. It wasn't fair.

Abigail pulled up to a stoplight, waiting for the signal to turn green, and looked at me curiously. “Where is your umbrella?”

“I don't have one!” I said, more sharply than I'd intended.

“Oh.” She lifted her chin as she made the turn. “I see.”

I sighed. “I'm sorry, Abigail. I've had a bad day. First the car wouldn't start, then I hurt my ankle running to the bus stop, and then I got caught in that downpour. Your coming along to offer me a ride is the first good thing that's happened to me since I woke up. Sorry I snapped at you.”

“That's all right. I wasn't trying to make you feel foolish. It just seemed odd to me that someone as bright as you are would have forgotten to bring her umbrella with her on a day when it's raining cats and dogs. It never occurred to me that you didn't own one.”

“Well, if you have to choose between buying school supplies for your daughter or an umbrella for yourself, school supplies win every time. Besides, when I left the apartment this morning, I hadn't figured I'd be taking the bus, so even if I had an umbrella, I probably wouldn't have brought it with me. See?” I said cheerfully, hoping to ease past the awkward moment. “I'm obviously not as bright as you thought.”

Abigail returned my smile, arching her eyebrows as she pressed her foot farther down on the gas now that we were in the less populated part of town where there were fewer police cruisers on the lookout for speeders. “Somehow I doubt that. Bethany is as bright as a new penny and, in my experience, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. In another situation, I might suppose she could have inherited that from her father. I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but I'm guessing he wasn't all that intelligent. If he was, you and the children wouldn't be here in New Bern, would you?”

I didn't respond. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss my invented past with Abigail. But I did appreciate her insight. For all her imposing, sometimes intimidating aura of self-certainty, she meant well. And she'd certainly been kind to the kids.

“I'm sorry you're having a bad day. My own hasn't been exactly red letter,” she said, launching into an explanation before giving me a chance to ask for one.

“I am
not
looking forward to this meeting. It's just going to be another exercise in futility, everyone sitting around the conference table grumbling and groaning about the need for more emergency and transitional housing to help women like you, and reaching no consensus about how to solve the problem. At the end of three hours, we'll be lucky if we've agreed on so much as when to hold our next meeting! And the whole time we sit there, drinking coffee and doing nothing, the waitlist of families needing our services grows longer. It's so frustrating!”

“Well,” I said slowly, not quite understanding why the solution to this problem wasn't obvious to Abigail, “why don't you get a new building? Something bigger.”

“Of course, that's what we'd like to do. We've discussed it at excruciating length, but it isn't as easy as just digging a foundation and putting up walls. To begin with, there's the question of money. The kind of facility we'd need would cost millions, perhaps tens of millions. I'd be perfectly willing to pay for it through the Wynne Family Foundation. But Donna Walsh, the director, feels very strongly that it must be a community-wide fund-raising effort, something that people in town could all get behind. If I just swooped in and paid for it, Donna thinks it could start a backlash against the very families we're trying to help.” Abigail drew her eyebrows together thoughtfully.

“I suppose there's something to that,” she mused. “We don't want people to start looking at the shelter residents as an alien population that has been imposed upon them without their input or consent. But a big fund-raising effort can take years to mount. We've got people knocking on our door who need help now, not ten years from now!”

“I can see why you're frustrated.”

“And that's not the half of it. Even if we had the money in hand today, I'm not sure where we'd find land in a location that would be suitable for a project of this size. We need space to house at least ten families. And in a central location, somewhere close to schools, community services, and public transportation.”

This subject hit too close to home. My resolution to say as little as possible melted like an ice cream cone on a summer day.

“You can say that again!” I huffed. “Don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful that we were able to move into the Stanton Center, but it would sure make things easier if it weren't so far off the beaten path.

“Take today; when my car wouldn't start I had to jog a mile to catch a bus and ended up late for work. Evelyn's a good boss—she understands that things happen—but someone else's employer might not. Being late to work even once might cost a woman her job. After housing, transportation is the biggest problem most of us face. We simply can't afford to buy reliable cars, not to mention the gas, insurance, and maintenance to keep them running. If we could live closer in and on the bus line, I'd get rid of my car tomorrow! Everything in New Bern is so close that I could walk to most of the stores. If I didn't have the expense of owning a car, it would make it much easier to save money.”

Abigail nodded firmly as she made a hard right into the parking lot of the Stanton Center. “You're right. Absolutely right. But that's the problem. New Bern is an old New England town and all the in town lots of any size were built on decades ago. The only available building lots around here are either too small for our purposes, or even farther off the beaten path than what we have now. I've racked my brain, but I can't see a solution to this. Not a good one, anyway.”

She spied an empty parking spot between two cars, wedged her sedan between them at an alarming speed, and set her parking brake, stomping on the pedal as if it were some sort of poisonous insect. “I'm simply out of ideas.”

“It's too bad some of those big mansions in New Bern, you know, those giant places over on Proctor, aren't for sale,” I said jokingly. “A couple of weeks ago, we went for a walk down that street. Those houses sure are something. One of those places would be big enough to hold ten families.”

I smiled, remembering the day. The calendar had only just turned to spring. Crocuses were blooming in the flower beds that had been covered with snow only a few days before. At one house, the crocuses were sprouting at odd spots all through the lawn, as if they'd just sprung up on their own, like wildflowers in a field, though I doubted that was the case. I couldn't see people in this neighborhood just letting any old flower pop up in their lawn. Probably someone had planted them there to give the impression of wildness, but that was all right. They were pretty, no matter how they'd gotten there.

The sun was warm. Bobby kept pulling off his hat, a knitted stocking cap with two brown and white ovals that made him look like a teddy bear. He looked so cute, but I knew that by this time next year, he'd balk at being seen wearing a teddy-bear hat, just like he was beginning to balk at riding in the stroller. When I was little, my dad used to joke that he was going to put me in a pickle barrel to keep me from getting any bigger. Now I understood what he was talking about. My baby was almost a little boy and my little girl halfway to grown. Make that three quarters.

She'd insisted on being the one to push Bobby's stroller, walking behind it like a miniature mother as we ooohed and ahhhed over the enormous mansions and talked about which houses we'd like to live in if we were ever rich.

My favorite was a sprawling white colonial with black shutters and six dormers tucked into the roofline. The main part of the house was huge to begin with, but it was clear that, over the years, people had added on to the original structure, tacking on a solarium here or a library there as their needs and taste in architecture had changed. It wasn't necessarily the prettiest house on the street, but something about the evolution of this home appealed to me, maybe because I liked to see how each generation built upon the foundation of the one that came before. The roofline was slightly bowed, and yet it looked like it had always been there and always would be.

“You'd never run out of guest rooms in a house like that,” I said to Bethany. “On the other hand, maybe you'd have a hard time getting the guests to go home. And of course, there'd be all those bathrooms to clean. Still,” I said wistfully, “it would sure be something to live in a house like that, don't you think so, peanut?”

Bethany nodded noncommittally, obviously not as enamored with the house as I was. “I like that one,” she said, pointing off to the far right.

“Which one?” I tried to track my eyes in the direction she was pointing.

“There,” she said, stabbing the air with her finger. “That little white one next door—that happy house. See? It's smiling!”

I looked again and laughed. She was pointing to a smaller building. Two six-over-six windows sat on either side and slightly above a red front door with three bull's-eye glass panes across the top. The second story had narrow eyebrow windows arranged in perfect symmetry over larger six-by-sixes on the main floor. I saw what Bethany meant; if you used your imagination, the door looked like an open, laughing red mouth and the windows like smiling eyes. “You're right. It's a happy house.”

Bethany pointed to the big white mansion next door. “Do you think the people who live here are happy, too?”

“Well, if they're not, they ought to be. I could sure be happy living in a place like this.”

“But maybe not,” Bethany said sagely. “We lived in a big house before and we weren't happy there, were we, Mommy?”

“No,” I whispered, remembering the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch house in an upscale suburban neighborhood where we'd lived for eight years; the house where I'd become an expert in the art of using foundation and concealer to mask my latest bruises because I didn't want the neighbors to know that our house wasn't as happy as it looked from the outside. “No, we weren't.”

“I like where we live now,” Bethany said, referring to our tiny apartment. “But it would be nice to live in a house that smiles.”

 

Abigail smacked the dashboard with her hand, startling me out of my reverie. “That's it!” she exclaimed. “The perfect solution! Why didn't I think of it before?”

“Think of what before?”

“A Proctor Street house! You're right: If it was modeled into separate apartments, it could easily house ten families. The neighborhood is quiet, within walking distance to schools and the downtown area where most jobs are, and it's just two blocks from the bus line! Brilliant idea!”

Beaming, Abigail unbuckled her seat belt and practically leapt out of the car. “Just lock the doors, would you? I've got to run to my meeting. I can't wait to tell Donna about this! It's the absolutely perfect solution to all our problems. Must run. Tell Bethany and Bobby I said hello. Thank you so much, Ivy!”

She slammed the door shut and scurried toward the front door without an umbrella, her high heels echoing definitively against the sidewalk, seemingly unaware that she was getting soaked.

I got out of the car. “You're welcome,” I called after her, though I didn't see what I'd said that was so helpful.

“A
ll right, Wendy. The total is $126.75.”

Wendy opened her eyes wider and pushed her rhinestone-encrusted glasses up on her nose. “Really?”

“Well, that does include the forty-five-dollar class fee as well as your fabric. But, I understand. It does add up.”

“Could be worse.” Wendy shrugged as she riffled through her enormous handbag looking for her checkbook. “My ex-husband's hobby was drinking and chasing women. Sweetie, compared to that, quilting is a bargain!” Wendy wrinkled up her nose, squashed her lips into an open
O
, and snorted with laughter, her tongue pushing out between the circle of her lips with each snort. I joined in. Wendy's laugh was so unique and so comical that it was impossible not to.

“So, how are things going around here, Evelyn?” she asked as she bent over her checkbook. “How're you feeling these days?”

“Couldn't be better. I just saw my doctor last week. No signs of cancer anywhere. Of course, I'll have to keep going back for regular checkups, but the doctor thinks I'm fine.”

“That's great! Wonderful! And the shop? How's business been?”

“Not bad. Not booming, but every month is a little better than the one before. Our Internet business is good and we're getting more walk-in traffic, too. Somebody must be spreading the word. This week I had a group of three customers who were driving from Rhode Island to New York and took a ninety-minute detour just to check us out. Not everyone would go so far out of their way to visit a new shop, but if the word is getting out among the hard-core quilters, it's a good sign.”

“That's terrific,” Wendy commented, and handed me her check. “You've come a long way in two years. Remember when you found this place? I'd been going through the longest dry spell, hadn't gotten a commission check in I don't know how long, and there I was, getting ready to close up for the night and thinking that I'd just wasted another day of my life in the real estate business when the phone rang. It was you, saying you wanted to lease this old wreck of a building and would be over in five minutes to sign the papers. I was so shocked I didn't know what to think! It had been so long since anyone had asked about this place that I had to dig through the archived files to find out what they wanted to rent it for. The paperwork was dated something like 1982! Back in the days when I still had all my own teeth!”
Snort! Snort!

I put the check in the register and handed Wendy her receipt. “Remember how you tried to talk me out of taking out the lease? Some Realtor you are.”

“Well, I was worried about you. You'd just been through a divorce. I thought maybe this was your way of going on the rebound. That instead of taking up with another miserable man who would burn through your money and break your heart, you decided to do the same thing except with a quilt shop!”
Snort!

“I didn't see how you could make a go of it, not in this location, but I was dead wrong. Forgive me for doubting you.”

“That's all right, Wendy. It isn't like you were the only one who felt that way. Do you have your punch card with you? You get a fifteen-dollar gift certificate for every three hundred dollars you spend. You must be pretty close by now.”

“Hold on,” Wendy said, digging through her voluminous handbag. “It's in here somewhere.”

The front door jingled. I looked up to see Abigail and Franklin enter with Liza following close behind. “Liza!” I ran out from behind the counter to give her a hug. “I didn't know you were coming home this weekend! Does Garrett know?”

She looked wonderful. She'd gone back to her natural hair color, a deep chestnut brown with some reddish undertones. It was much more becoming than the dye she'd used when we first met. So much had changed since that day when she dragged Abigail into my first Quilt Pink event. The sullen, angry teenager, the girl with the darting eyes, slumped shoulders, and all-black wardrobe had been replaced by a smiling and confident young woman. Of course, she was still our Liza, artistic, a little edgy, blunt, and just as strong-willed as her aunt Abigail. The two of them could go ten rounds over the silliest things, but these days it was more just for her own entertainment than from any desire to really hurt Abigail. She still liked to wear clothing that got attention, mostly of her own design, like the black jean jacket she was wearing today, embellished with a line of bottle caps she'd grommeted to the shoulders like epaulettes on the uniform of a four-star general. It was an original, just like Liza.

“I didn't have a chance to call him,” she said, hugging me back. “My Friday sculpture class was canceled, so on a whim I just hopped the next train headed north.”

“
And
she forgot her cell phone in the dorm,” Abigail interrupted. “Thank heaven there was a pay phone at the station and that I was home when she called to ask Franklin and me to pick her up. Otherwise, she'd have spent the weekend standing on the platform at the Waterbury train depot. Really, Liza, you must start planning ahead a little. What if I hadn't been home? What if I'd decided to go out of town for the weekend?”

“Then I'd have called a cab to take me to New Bern, found the spare key you have ‘hidden' under the flowerpot even though everyone in town knows exactly where you keep it, let myself in, and spent the weekend eating your food and swimming in your pool. Oh. And I'd have called Garrett to come over and spend the weekend with me so we could do a little passionate necking on your sofa. Right before we emptied out your liquor cabinet.” Liza rolled her eyes. “Really, Abigail. Do you think I'm ten years old or something? If you'd been gone, I'd have worked something out. Besides, I knew you'd be home. It's Quilt Circle night. You wouldn't miss out on that unless you'd gotten a better offer, like dinner at the White House.”

The look on Abigail's face told me she was ready to launch into a full-scale argument with her niece but, thankfully, Wendy interrupted. “Evelyn, I've got to get back to the office and I can't find that silly card anywhere. It must be in my other pocketbook.”

“That's fine,” I said. “Save the receipt and when you find the card, bring it in and I'll punch it for you.”

Wendy scurried out the front door just as Garrett came out of the back office. “I was on the phone with a customer, but did I hear somebody say something about passionate necking? Count me in.” He winked at Abigail before crossing the room to give Liza a kiss. “I didn't think you'd be here until next weekend. Why the surprise? Did you miss me? So much you decided to come up here to buy me dinner?”

Smiling, Liza reached up, grabbed a piece of Garrett's hair, and yanked it playfully. “You wish. Actually, I came up here to come to my quilt-circle meeting. I may live in Manhattan, but I'm still an affiliate member, you know. However, if you play your cards right, I'll let
you
buy
me
dinner on Saturday night.”

“Hmmm. What about the passionate necking part? Do we still get to do that?”

“Maybe,” Liza said casually. “If you play your cards right.”

“All right, you two,” I said. “Enough flirting. Go tell Margot it's quitting time. If she hasn't been able to get the accounts to balance by now, it'll just have to wait until Monday.” I walked to the front, turned the closed sign face out, and opened the door. “Franklin, Garrett, nothing personal, but—clear out. This meeting is for members only.”

Franklin kissed Abigail on the cheek and then turned to Garrett. “They want us to leave.”

“Do you think?” Garrett looked at me as I stood holding the knob of the open door.

“Well, fine,” he harrumphed. “I can take a hint. I've been thrown out of better places than this. Come on, Franklin. Let's go to the Grill and have a beer. I'll buy.”

Franklin shook his head. “Sorry, but I can't. I'm headed over to Ivy's to babysit. She doesn't know it yet, but she's about to be inducted as a full member of the Cobbled Court Quilt Circle, with all the rights and privileges herein.”

“Rights and privileges? Such as?”

“Such as having Uncle Franklin babysit Bethany and Bobby on Friday nights so she can have an evening out with the girls and do some quilting. At least, that's what they say they do up there. I'm not convinced there's as much quilting as gabbing going on.”

“Abigail talked you into babysitting Ivy's kids every Friday night? Wow. You're either the nicest guy or the biggest sucker in the world, you know that?”

Franklin's eyes twinkled as he gave Abigail a glance. “My boy, you don't know the half of it. Why don't you come to Ivy's with me? We can make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, play Candy Land, and I can tell you about the price of loving a beautiful woman.”

Franklin put his arm across Garrett's shoulders and, like Rick and Louis in the final scene in
Casablanca,
the two men walked out into the shadowy evening and into the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I closed the door. Liza laughed. “What do you want to bet that Ivy comes home tonight to find those two passed out on the sofa asleep, with their fingernails painted red, and the kids still awake, watching TV and eating chocolate ice cream out of the container?”

“I wouldn't want to give you odds on it,” I said, “but that's all right, chocolate washes out.” I locked the door of the shop.

“Ladies, let's call this meeting to order. It's time to welcome a new quilter into our ranks.”

The word “meeting” projects a much more formal, organized gathering than the reality of the weekly gathering of the Cobbled Court Quilt Circle. That's not to say that those kinds of groups don't exist; there are quilt circles and guilds that have roll calls and rosters, agendas and officers, guest books and guest speakers. Over the years and in various locations, I've belonged to such groups and enjoyed them.

But our little circle is as much about companionship as it is about learning the oldest, or latest, or fastest quilting techniques, probably more so.

The Cobbled Court Quilt Circle has just four members: Margot, Abigail, Liza, and me. I started it as a means of thanking the others for supporting me through my breast cancer treatment, but in the end I think I've gotten as much out of it as they have.

These Friday evenings are a welcome break at the end of a long week, something we all look forward to; a safe, private space where we can talk, or laugh, or cry with friends or, if quiet is what we are most craving, just sit and focus our attention on the quilting, working in companionable silence with people who know our stories and understand our stillness. Sometimes our meetings are peaceful and calm, marked by low voices, the metallic snip of scissors, and the soft whir of sewing machines. Other nights they are punctuated by raucous, uncontrollable laughter, and the giddy sound of female voices interrupting one another, jockeying to take over the role of narrator for a story they can't wait to tell.

I love Friday nights.

When I was going through my cancer battle, those few hours on Friday were the only times I really felt like myself. For that thin slice of the week, I forgot about the disease that had invaded my body, or if I couldn't forget about it, at least lived with it, embraced by the warmth of good women whose kindness and determination to see me through my darkest hours gave me hope that, one way or another, everything would be all right. And, in the end, it was. Not that I don't still need them, or they me. The scars of my surgery have faded considerably but not completely, and the others all carry their own kinds of scars, healing at their own, individual rates. That's the point of Friday nights. The scars don't appear as terrible, or take as long to heal, when you're safe inside the circle of friends. For a while there, Friday nights were the only times I felt lucky.

That's why I wanted Ivy to join our circle. I thought that she needed us.

Ivy has a quick wit but, more often than not, the laughs come at her own expense, poking fun at her own weaknesses with a regularity and fierceness that makes me wonder if she's really joking at all.

I really don't know much about Ivy, but there's something about her, a sadness that lurks behind her ready smile and goes down to the bone. She tries to mask it, but it's there, sadness and something else harder to name. Determination, perhaps.

I saw it clearly one night during the log cabin class at the Stanton Center as she sat at her sewing machine, holding her quilt block in her two hands as silent tears tracked slowly down her cheeks. Seeing her crying, I started to go over and comfort her, but she saw me looking at her and nodded to let me know she was all right, or would be. Ivy is quiet and careful, but she's also strong. Given what she's been through, I guess she'd have to be.

Since she lives at the Stanton Center, we know she was married to an abusive man, a man who Abigail told me was killed in some sort of construction accident and left Ivy and the children without a dime to live on, but she never speaks of him or of how she ended up in New Bern. I think she's from somewhere in Pennsylvania originally, but I don't know for certain.

Not that she has to share any of that with us, not at all. Our quilt circle isn't a place for gossip, it's a place for honesty. It might take some time, but I think that's what Ivy needs: a safe place where she can be herself, and with a group of friends who will love and accept her for exactly who she is.