Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (10 page)

“Of course she’s going to worry,” said Sylvia, nodding thoughtfully. “Be sure to tell her you’re receiving excellent prenatal care, regular checkups, and all the rest. That will put her mind at ease.”

“I’ll do that,” Sarah agreed, but since the six campers seated at that table were listening in with eager curiosity, she quickly changed the subject. She didn’t mind talking about her pregnancy, but she had no desire whatsoever to bore everyone with an anti-Carol tirade. Sarah knew she always came off looking like an ungrateful daughter who should be more tolerant and forgiving of a concerned mother who, though perhaps somewhat overbearing, was actually quite harmless.

No one would find fault with Sarah if they knew the real Carol, or if they knew of her unfathomable dislike for Matt. Carol never failed to be on her best behavior on her rare visits to Elm Creek Manor. As far as the other Elm Creek Quilters knew, she had grown to respect her son-in-law, and she and Sarah could enjoy a warm relationship if only Sarah would stop dredging up slights and mistakes from years long past. They didn’t understand that after all these years, Carol still disapproved of Matt, but she had learned to hide it from people whom she wanted to think well of her. The only real change was that she had come to tolerate Matt as a permanent part of Sarah’s life that no complaining on her part would excise. Although this was a welcome improvement, Sarah longed for her complete, wholehearted acceptance. Matt had done nothing to earn his mother-in-law’s enmity. He was a good man and a faithful husband, and Sarah knew he would be a wonderful father. He was everything Sarah wanted in a husband and a friend. What more could Carol ask of him?

Although the aromas of Anna’s delicious chicken cordon bleu enticed her to take another bite, Sarah suddenly found herself without an appetite. What if Carol criticized Matt in front of the children? Or worse yet, what if her disapproval of Matt extended to her grandchildren? It was painful enough to have to defend her husband from her mother’s slights. Sarah couldn’t bear it if her mother disparaged the babies.

Carol’s restrained reaction to the news of Sarah’s pregnancy did not bode well.

Sarah set down her fork and took a quick drink of ice water, hoping no one would notice her hand trembling as she grasped the glass. Children deserved doting grandparents, but Sarah’s father had died when she was in high school and Matt’s mother had made herself scarce. Matt’s father had raised him on his own, and his sense of humor and patience would make him a wonderful grandpa—but rarely could he take time off from his contracting business, so visits would be few and precious. Of the twins’ two grandparents, Carol lived closer and had the most time to spend with the babies, but would she want to? And if she did, could Sarah trust her to have sense enough not to criticize Matt when they could overhear?

Surely Carol would muster up the same self-control in front of her grandchildren that she did for the Elm Creek Quilters. She had to know that the twins would only end up resenting her for speaking ill of their father. Then again, Carol did not seem to care how she angered Sarah with her unreasonable hostility toward Matt—or the many other friends and loved ones Sarah had unwittingly subjected to her mother’s scathing criticism through the years.

Even Sylvia had not escaped Carol’s withering judgment, although Sylvia did not know it. In the early years of Elm Creek Quilt Camp, Carol had offered dire, unsolicited predictions about the likelihood that the fledgling business would fail, and she had warned Sarah about the imprudence of trusting her future to the whims of an elderly eccentric. To Sarah’s relief, Carol had changed her mind entirely after coming to Elm Creek Manor and meeting Sylvia and the others, her worries no match for the Elm Creek Quilters’ generous welcome and unconditional acceptance.

If only that force of good had been in place on her eighth birthday, when her grandparents made the long drive to Pennsylvania to spend the weekend. Sarah much preferred to visit them in their small, cozy home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, especially in winter, at Christmastime. While her parents stayed indoors, Sarah and her grandparents would ice-skate on the pond, sled down a long, steep hill precariously dotted with pines, and build snowmen until they could bear the cold no longer. Inside, while Grandpa stoked the fireplace, Sarah would bundle up on the sofa under two or three of Grandma’s old quilts, munch cookies, sip hot chocolate, and watch through the window as snow blanketed the yard and the surrounding trees. But in May, Sarah had school and her parents had to work, so Grandma and Grandpa had come to them.

On the morning of Sarah’s birthday, Grandma couldn’t wait for the afternoon birthday party for her to open her gift, so while Sarah’s mother was busy in the kitchen frosting the cake, Grandma presented Sarah with a large, ribbon-tied box. When Sarah lifted the lid and saw a beautiful pink-and-white Sawtooth Star quilt nestled in tissue paper, she was almost afraid to touch it. “Is this for me?”

Grandma laughed. “Of course, darling. Do you see any other birthday girls here?”

Speechless with delight, Sarah flung her arms around her grandma, still holding fast to the beautiful quilt. It was warm and soft, just like its maker, and it smelled faintly of Grandma’s talcum powder.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Sarah’s mother said from the doorway, spatula in hand, the white rubber end covered in pink frosting. “I just bought her a new bedspread two months ago.”

“A granddaughter deserves a handmade quilt,” said Grandma. “It was a joy to make.”

“She’ll just spill something on it and ruin it.”

“No, I won’t,” Sarah piped up. “I promise.”

“Don’t you like the bedspread we picked out together?”

Her mother’s warning tone signaled that she was thinking back to their shopping trip, how her mother had patiently taken her from store to store in the shopping mall until Sarah decided on a pretty pastel-striped bedspread. Then her mother had agreed to backtrack to the far end of the shopping mall, where they remembered seeing pretty flower-shaped pillows that matched the bedspread perfectly. Afterward, they had enjoyed lunch at a fancy restaurant instead of grabbing fast food in the food court. It had been a rare, good day, just the two of them, with no disagreements or bickering to spoil everything.

Yet over her grandma’s murmured protests, her mother urged Sarah to say which she preferred, her grandmother’s quilt or the bedspread they had chosen together. Sarah hemmed and hawed, reluctant to hurt either of their feelings, unwilling to lie. When her mother would not relent, Sarah finally confessed that she liked the Sawtooth Star quilt best.

Sarah’s heart sank as her mother snatched up the quilt and returned it to the box. In a voice as taut as a wire, her mother promised Grandma that Sarah would take very good care of the quilt, and then she carried it from the room.

Sarah fervently willed another outcome, one in which her mother admired the quilt and prompted Sarah to thank her grandma for the lovely gift. It was her birthday, a day for wishes to be fulfilled, but the day passed without another glimpse of the quilt.

On the following evening, Sarah found the quilt folded at the foot of her bed. She yanked the comforter to the floor, spread the quilt in its place, and slept beneath it for the remaining nights of her grandparents’ visit. Upon their departure, her mother returned the quilt to the box and stored it, out of Sarah’s reach, on the floor of the master bedroom closet.

After that, Sarah was permitted to use the quilt only when her grandparents visited. They traveled to Pennsylvania less frequently as they aged, and often months passed without a glimpse of the pink-and-white patchwork. Now, with her grandparents long deceased and her mother’s house no longer her own, Sarah had not seen the quilt for years. For all she knew it remained wrapped in tissue paper in the box on the floor of her mother’s closet.

On those rare occasions when a certain shade of pink or a Sawtooth Star block in a camper’s quilt reminded her of her grandma’s gift, Sarah was tempted to ask her mother for it. The quilt was rightfully hers, a precious memento of her grandma’s love. Knowing how devoted Sarah was to the art of quilting, her mother should have voluntarily returned the quilt to her long ago. Perhaps she had given the quilt away or had discarded it. Perhaps she hoped that Sarah had forgotten it, because returning the quilt to Sarah now would prompt a deluge of questions Carol would certainly rather not answer: Why had she kept the quilt from Sarah for so long? Why had she twisted Grandma’s generous gift into a test of Sarah’s loyalty? At the time, Sarah had assumed that she had hurt her mother’s feelings by admitting that she preferred the quilt, and that her mother had withheld the quilt as punishment. Now she knew that nothing between mothers and daughters was ever so simple. And what was her grandmother’s role in the drama? Was she the innocent, generous gift-giver Sarah had always assumed her to be, or had Sarah missed some darker undercurrent, some conflict between the two older women? Did Carol scorn her mother’s handiwork, or had she always longed for a quilt of her own only to be refused? Had Sarah received the gift Carol had been denied? Had Grandma worked on the Sawtooth Star quilt for months, or had she begun to sew it only after Carol told her about their successful shopping trip? What had prompted Carol to leave the quilt on Sarah’s bed the next day without a word of explanation—a rebuke from Grandma, or something else?

The more Sarah mulled over those questions, the less certain she was that her mother had been solely in the wrong, and that was a difficult admission for her to make. She did not want to doubt her grandma, who had always showered her with kindness and affection, and she was reluctant to concede anything to Matt and Sylvia and others who were too quick to forgive her mother’s thoughtless malice. But her mother must have learned her coolly critical ways somewhere, from someone. Perhaps Sarah’s grandma had hidden a darker side from Sarah the way Carol hid hers from the Elm Creek Quilters.

Sarah rested her hand on her abdomen and hoped that she would be different, that she would teach her children another way.

Determined to enjoy the evening program, Sarah put aside her mother’s cautionary words as well as thoughts of the pink-and-white Sawtooth Star quilt and the uncomfortable questions it raised. The sun was just beginning to set when she joined the other Elm Creek Quilters in the ballroom to prepare for the scavenger hunt. Diane had insisted upon making a last-minute change to the list of items, so as they waited for her to return with new printouts, the Elm Creek Quilters entertained the campers with anecdotes about camp life behind the scenes. Gwen had cleverly implied that details in their stories would help the campers as they searched the estate—which very well could turn out to be true and sounded much better than confessing that they were merely filling time. At last Diane rushed in and distributed the lists to the campers, who had already divided themselves into teams of four. Sarah searched the crowd for shy Marcia and was pleased to find her standing with the Flying Saucer Sisters. The three original ladies had exchanged their fuchsia T-shirts for butter yellow and Marcia had donned a polo top in a slightly lighter shade. Even though Sarah had done nothing to help Marcia find her way into a welcoming circle of quilters, she felt vindicated, as if the celebrated hospitality of Elm Creek Manor had won the day.

When Sylvia announced the hunt was on, the campers raced off laughing and shouting to search Elm Creek Manor and the estate grounds. Diane’s list included twenty items the campers might find anywhere on the estate, but they were strictly forbidden to take anything from their own stashes, suitcases, or sewing baskets. They
were
permitted to borrow things from campers on other teams, however, so teams often formed tentative alliances with competitors, swapping a particular square of fabric for an unusual notion or trading a spool of thread for a newly pieced quilt block. The first team to meet the Elm Creek Quilters on the verandah with as many of the twenty unusual items they could find would win Elm Creek Quilts pins, the most coveted prize at camp.

As the campers dispersed through the estate, Sarah and Summer went to the kitchen to help Anna carry refreshments outdoors. “I remember that recipe,” said Sarah, spying two platters of sugar cookies decorated to resemble quilt blocks. Anna had brought a batch to her interview earlier that summer, and although she had not known the head chef job was available and had applied for a teaching position, after sampling her tasty treats, the Elm Creek Quilters were eager to welcome her to their staff. “I hope you made enough for your hungry coworkers, too.”

Summer hefted a pitcher of lemonade in one hand and iced tea in the other. “Help yourself. You’re eating for two now.”

“Three,” said Sarah, shaking her head in disbelief as she stacked napkins and plates in a basket.

“Three,” echoed Anna with a laugh as she followed Sarah and Summer out of the kitchen, balancing a cookie platter on each palm without dropping a single crumb. “Let me know if you have any special cravings. When the babies are old enough, I’ll show you how to make your own baby food from organic fruits and vegetables.”

“You do understand that you can’t ever leave, don’t you?” Sarah asked her. Then she glanced at Summer and wished she could make the same teasing demand of her.

Teams of campers hurried past as Sarah, Summer, and Anna carried the treats back through the manor and outside to the front veranda. The other Elm Creek Quilters and the three husbands living in the manor—Matt, Andrew, and now Gretchen’s husband, Joe—had settled into Adirondack chairs and were observing the scavenger hunt with speculative amusement, pretending to place bets on favorites and calling out encouragement to teams that had fallen behind. Only then did Sarah learn that Diane had played a naughty trick on Andrew: Item number 14 on the list read “A kiss from Andrew.” After the first quilt camper planted a smooch on his cheek and demanded one in return, Andrew looked only mildly surprised. Three kisses later, his expression had changed to baffled alarm. When a half-dozen determined quilters charged the veranda, he scrambled from his chair, snatched Matt’s familiar baseball cap from his blond curls, planted it on his own thinning gray hair, and pulled the brim low over his eyes in a vain attempt at disguise. When Andrew’s cheeks were as red from lipstick smudges as from embarrassment, Diane took pity on him and handed him a bag of chocolate kisses. Relieved but still wary, Andrew tossed the foil-wrapped candies to any quilter who approached the veranda long before they came within arm’s reach. “I’m a happily married man,” he reproached Diane, lofting a chocolate over the balcony railing as his friends laughed. As his happily married wife, Sylvia laughed as merrily as anyone.