The Giving Quilt (11 page)

All at once, she was struck by the realization that she didn't want to anymore.

Jeanette took in the whole sorry tale, and when it was over, she took a deep breath, puffed out her cheeks as she exhaled, and said, “Look, you need to talk to Daria.”

“I sent her an e-mail. She said she would call. But really, I think the damage has been done.” Pauline steeled herself. “Brenda's right about one thing. I should step down as treasurer.”

Jeanette put a hand on her arm. “Oh, no, Pauline, please don't make any rash decisions when you're upset. You're the best treasurer we've ever had. You're the most organized person I've ever met. I've never heard anything but praise for you and the job you're doing.”

“You must not have included Brenda in your poll.”

“Before you make any decisions, talk to Daria. I think you'll find she has similar stories to tell.”

And Daria did.

After a few days of playing phone tag, Pauline learned that Daria's experience with Brenda mirrored her own. Brenda had paid all her fees late, if she paid at all; she had ignored Daria's increasingly tentative reminders; and she generally had made Daria's tenure as treasurer miserable, driving her to quit and pass the job, gratefully and guiltily, to Pauline. “I should have warned you what you'd be dealing with.”

“It's okay,” Pauline told her. “I would have thought you were exaggerating, and I would have accepted the job anyway.” She had enjoyed being treasurer, and if not for Brenda, she would enjoy it still. She was good at the job and she liked making an important contribution to the guild.

Brenda had taken all that away.

Daria sighed. “I was in office three months before guilt got the better of Katie and she confessed that her husband had made her quit.”

“What?”

“It's true. When Brenda's payments were overdue, Katie would charge them to her credit card, and she often didn't get reimbursed in time to pay off the bill. Her husband got so fed up with all the late fees that he finally put his foot down and said that if she wanted to stay in the guild, she couldn't be the treasurer anymore.”

“Wow.” Pauline tried to imagine Ray ever ordering her to do anything and failed. “I guess he's the boss of her?”

“He had good reason to be upset.”

Pauline couldn't deny that.

Daria had more stories that echoed Pauline's own experiences, and she predicted that Brenda would pay the day before the Château Élan's deadline arrived. She would pay at the last minute and not a second sooner because she wanted to make a point, because she could, because it would drive Pauline crazy, and because it was as far as she could go without inflicting any lasting harm upon the guild and turning the others against her.

And so she did.

Pauline couldn't figure out how Brenda had been allowed to get away with her behavior so long. She had been the bane of many a guild treasurer, compelling two that Pauline knew of to step down, and yet no one had held her accountable. No one had been willing to confront her or tell her that her behavior was unacceptable—no one except Pauline. But Pauline didn't want to engage in pointless squabbling or browbeat Brenda into following the guild rules. Brenda was an adult; she ought to be able to do what was right and follow the guild rules just like everyone else.

Pauline hoped that resigning from the treasurer's position would alleviate the knot of tension that tightened in her gut every time she thought of Brenda and the Cherokee Rose Quilters, but it didn't. Tensions grew as Jeanette and Daria told other members about the conflict, forwarding e-mails and repeating conversations and sharing their own Brenda stories.

The growing divide in the guild dismayed Pauline, but she couldn't see any way to stop it from widening. She skipped the next monthly meeting, unwilling to go through the motions of the evening's business as if nothing had happened. She also doubted her ability to get through the meeting without telling Brenda, in front of God and the Cherokee Rose Quilters and any unfortunate passersby, exactly what she thought of her.

Daria agreed to take over the role of treasurer until Pauline wanted the job back, a qualifier Pauline tried to get her to drop since she had no intention of returning to office. She felt tired and sad, and she felt even worse when, after her third skipped meeting, Daria sent her an e-mail lamenting Pauline's absence, denouncing Brenda's behavior, and declaring her intention to call a vote and demand that Brenda be expelled from the Cherokee Rose Quilters so that Pauline could return.

Pauline's heart sank. If Brenda were expelled, her closest friends—because she surely had some—would likely go with her. Who knew how many others might follow them out of sheer disappointment that the guild had allowed personal conflicts to tear them apart? The Cherokee Rose Quilters might not survive the schism, and then all the good they had done—supporting those in need, introducing the art of quilting to schoolchildren, inspiring quilters to strive for greater mastery of their beloved craft, preserving and celebrating Georgia's rich quilting heritage—all of that would be over.

It never should have come to that. Why had no one in Brenda's long history with the Cherokee Rose Quilters held her accountable for her behavior? Daria fired off angry e-mails about hypothetical votes, but throughout the whole sordid affair, no one—not Daria, not Jeanette, not the guild president—had sat Brenda down, told her that she had behaved badly, and asked her to make it right. Brenda would never do so without prompting—strong, insistent prompting. She still didn't believe she had done anything wrong, and unless and until she did, Pauline could count on more of the same bad behavior from her every day they both remained Cherokee Rose Quilters.

Eventually, reluctantly, Pauline realized that the only way to save the Cherokee Rose Quilters would be for either Pauline or Brenda to quit. And since Brenda was certain to stubbornly hold on to the guild as long as there was breath in her body, Pauline had to be the one to go.

Jeanette tried to talk her out of it. Daria tried even harder. Pauline's loyal daughter declared that Brenda ought to be the one to go and that Pauline ought to let Daria call for that vote. Her faithful son agreed.

“Don't throw yourself on your sword for her sake,” Ray told her. He adamantly believed that she shouldn't let one nasty, mean-spirited person drive her out of the Cherokee Rose Quilters, a group she was so proud of and loved so dearly.

“Don't you understand?” Pauline choked out. “It's because I love the group and—almost—all the people in it that I have to quit. I can't see it fall apart all because of me.”

“It's not all because of
you
,” Ray corrected gently. “It's because of
her
.”

“Well, she's not going to do what's necessary to hold it together, so I have to.”

Ray took her in his arms and held her as her tears began to fall. “If you're sure this is the right thing to do, sugar, then do what you gotta do. Whatever you decide, I'm with you all the way.”

Pauline was grateful for that, because she felt as if she were losing a part of herself. And although she knew it was for the greater good, she was as angry as she was sorrowful, because she had given up something very dear to her—and Brenda had won.

It seemed like she cried for a week, but then, drained and miserable, she resolved to pull herself together. She rejoined the Sunset Ridge Quilt Guild and signed up for a kickboxing class at the gym to fill the hours she had once spent balancing the guild's books. From time to time she and Jeanette got together for lunch or an afternoon of companionable quilting. At first Daria and the other guild members in the know pleaded with Pauline to come back, insisting that things just weren't the same without her. The few guild members who remained blissfully unaware of the conflict had somehow got it into their heads that she was too busy with work to attend guild meetings anymore, and they wrote to express sympathy and hopes that her workload would ease up soon.

Pauline was surprised that they hadn't learned the real reason for her departure through the grapevine and that they had seized upon her job as the explanation for her extended absence. The emergency call center was the one workplace in her long employment history that had never required her to take work home at the end of the day. Did her friends really believe that the operations center was so overwhelmed that it had begun routing emergency calls to its employees' cell phones after hours?

The very question exhausted her, so in a way it was a relief when the e-mails and phone calls stopped coming. “We'll keep your place vacant for a while,” the guild president promised in her last message, but Pauline knew they wouldn't hold it for her forever. As long as Brenda remained in the guild, Pauline couldn't bring herself to return.

She tried to move on, but as November approached, Pauline's thoughts turned to the Château Élan retreat, which always fell on the first week after Thanksgiving. It pained her to think of all the work that went into running a successful retreat and how she could not pitch in to help. She thought of all the lovely quilts that would be made that week, and how much money they would raise for worthy and important causes.

The Cherokee Rose Quilters gave so much to their community, to their state, to the world of quilting. That had always been what Pauline admired most about them. And now, they continued their good works while Pauline stood on the sidelines, watching and missing them and wishing she could help.

Ray noticed her melancholy deepening, and he worried about her. He tried to cheer her up with flowers and candy and dinner dates and sweet notes tucked into her lunch sack, but although she appreciated them and adored him for trying, nothing worked.

Finally Ray pointed out something that should have been obvious. “You know, sugar, you don't have to be a Cherokee Rose Quilter to give.”

And of course, he was right.

Pauline had heard about Elm Creek Quilt Camp and Quiltsgiving some time ago, although she couldn't remember where—perhaps from a feature in
Quiltmaker
magazine, perhaps from a quilter she had met at the Château Élan. She studied their website with Ray peering over her shoulder, barely able to contain his eagerness. This, he surely thought, would perk up his darling wife. This would do the trick.

And so it had, at least a little. Looking forward to her week away had lifted her spirits. Upon her arrival, she had discovered that Elm Creek Manor was lovely and safe, the quilters gathered within its gray stone walls kind and generous. The thought of making quilts to comfort children in need eased the pain in her heart and helped her see her own disappointment in a different light.

Her sacrifice had kept the Cherokee Rose Quilters together. Their good works would continue, and Pauline could do good works of her own, on her own.

But somehow she sensed that among the Elm Creek Quilters and their campers, she would never be entirely alone.

“Pauline?”

She started and turned toward the voice to find Linnea studying her worriedly. “Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course. I'm fine.” Then Pauline noticed that Gretchen was watching her from the front of the classroom, her brows drawn together in concern. The other students had already packed up and were filing from the room. Quickly Pauline jumped up and began loading her things into her tote bag.

“You've been staring into space for quite some time,” said Jocelyn.

“Waiting for inspiration to strike?” asked Michaela.

Pauline forced a laugh. “You guessed it. Sadly, my muse decided not to put in an appearance this morning.”

From the back of the room came a laugh. They all turned to find Karen Wise smiling their way. “She'll turn up,” Karen promised, slipping the straps of her tote over her shoulder. “This is Elm Creek Manor, after all. Inspiration is never far away.”

Suddenly Pauline found herself smiling, her melancholy lifting.

She didn't doubt Karen for a moment.

CHAPTER THREE

Linnea

O
ver lunch—the campers had been offered a choice between a vegetable curry with basmati rice or a chicken and pesto panini, and Linnea had chosen the sandwich, grilled to perfection—Linnea, Mona, and Pauline discussed their first Giving Quilt class and concluded that the Resolution Square quilt was charming, Gretchen was a lively and encouraging instructor, and they were unanimously pleased that they had signed up for the course.

“After lunch, I think I'm going to go back and cut enough pieces for a second quilt,” said Pauline thoughtfully as they cleared away their dishes and left the banquet hall. “Maybe even a third, each in a different color palette. How are you two going to spend the afternoon?”

“I brought a stack of Girl's Joy blocks from home,” Linnea said. “They've been sitting in a box at the back of my closet for years, so I'm finally going to sew them together and give the finished quilt to Project Linus.”

Mona declared her intention to curl up in a chair by the ballroom fireplace with a good book and read to her heart's content, a luxury usually denied her back home, where her four sons' cheerful, boisterous activity rarely gave her a moment of quiet solitude. Pauline seemed disappointed that the sisters wouldn't be joining her in the classroom, so Linnea quickly suggested that they meet in the lobby at five o'clock and have supper together. Brightening, Pauline agreed.

“I like her,” Mona remarked to her sister after Pauline departed.

“So do I,” said Linnea. Pauline was funny and endearingly eager to please, but she seemed rather lonesome. Linnea wondered why she had skipped her own guild's annual retreat in favor of Quiltsgiving at Elm Creek Manor, but it was obvious that Pauline didn't want to talk about it, so Linnea had to leave her insatiable curiosity unsatisfied. Perhaps by the end of the week, Pauline would open up and share her story with her newfound friends. In the meantime, Linnea would try to cultivate patience.

The sisters returned upstairs, Linnea for her quilt blocks and Mona for her book, and before long they found themselves back in the ballroom, where, from the sound of things, Pauline was not the only student hard at work behind the partitions that marked the walls of the classroom. While Mona settled down in her fireside chair with a contented sigh and turned to the first chapter of her novel, Linnea carried her blocks and tote bag full of supplies to one of the sewing stations set up on long tables near the tall windows that looked out upon the rear of the manor, where a few small, icy snowflakes drifted lazily in the breeze. She exchanged brief, cordial smiles with the campers sewing industriously at the stations to her left and right, and then set herself to work, sewing Girl's Joy blocks into rows, pressing the seams, and sewing the rows together.

By midafternoon, she had completed the center of the quilt top and had only to add borders to finish it off, but her legs were stiff from sitting so long and the back of her neck ached from her tendency to draw her shoulders up to her ears when she concentrated. A break was definitely in order.

She gathered her things and tidied up in case another camper needed to use the sewing machine, and then joined her sister at the fireplace on the other side of the ballroom. Several chairs had been arranged in two concentric arcs around the hearth, where a lively blaze gave off warmth and light and a cheerful crackle of sparks. Nearly all of the chairs were occupied with a camper reading as Mona was, sewing quilt pieces together by hand, or dozing.

“I need to stretch my legs,” Linnea said, resting a hand on the back of her sister's chair. “Want to go for a little walk?”

Mona read to the end of the line before pausing to smile up at her. “Another walk? You must not have noticed the snow flurries. Are you sure your Southern California constitution can handle it?”

Linnea shook her head, patiently exasperated. Sometimes Mona deliberately forgot that Linnea had grown up in Minnesota the same as she had and knew quite a lot about enduring winter weather. “Those few little flakes aren't much, and anyway, I'm staying indoors. I thought I might search out the library.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Mona marked her place with a finger, closed her book, and rose, yawning and stretching. “You go on. I'm happy with the book I have right here.”

“You don't want to explore?”

“I do, but not as much as I want to stay warm and cozy by the fire.” Mona smiled an indolent apology, sat back down with her legs tucked to one side, and opened her book on her lap.

Mona did look much more relaxed, as if the cares and woes of her workplace had been forgotten, or at least tucked out of sight where they would not trouble her for a little while. For more than a year, ever since the new governor had been elected and had launched a merciless campaign to abolish all collective bargaining rights for state workers, Mona had been under tremendous stress—first because of the threat to her job as an office manager for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and second because of her prominent position as vice president of her labor union. Not only did she have to worry about impending pay cuts and the loss of her own benefits, she had to worry on behalf of the thousands of other workers relying upon her to advocate for them. If spending less than twenty-four hours at Elm Creek Manor could work such miraculous cures, maybe Linnea and Mona should have booked two weeks. Maybe Linnea should have brought her husband along too.

With a sudden pang of longing, she bade Mona good-bye and hurried out to the foyer to call him. He answered on the second ring. “Hey, sweetheart,” Kevin greeted her, forewarned by the caller ID that this was not the call from a potential employer he had been praying for. “How are you? How's your sister? How's quilt camp?”

Linnea smiled, warmed by the sound of his voice. “We're all fine.” She told Kevin about her day and asked about his. Although it was three hours earlier in Conejo Hills, California, he had already been quite productive. On his way to join the president of the Friends of the Library and a few other like-minded citizens for coffee, he had stopped by the post office and mailed ten updated résumés and two follow-up letters. Later that afternoon, he planned to meet a former coworker at the driving range. Kevin didn't know whether his former colleague was hiring, but if he wasn't, he might be aware of someone who was—and if he did, he would surely recommend Kevin. For five years they had worked together in the marketing department of a European luxury car manufacturer's West Coast division, but eighteen months earlier, the four branches spread throughout the Los Angeles region had been consolidated into one central office. Kevin's friend had been transferred there and promoted to assistant vice president. Kevin's job had been eliminated entirely.

“This is what I get for taking a job with a foreign car company,” Kevin had said on that first demoralizing evening after the rumors that had been circulating for months were finally confirmed by an unceremonious summons to his supervisor's office and a terse dismissal. “My father probably rolled over in his grave the day I went to work for them. Maybe now he can rest in peace.”

“That's ridiculous,” Linnea had replied. “Your father would have done the same in your place.”

“I'm not so sure.”

Kevin's father had worked on the line for General Motors for more than forty years. He had bought a house in a modest Detroit suburb and had put three kids through college with his earnings, fair wages secured for him by his union. His favorite prank was to secretly paste
BUY AMERICAN
bumper stickers on his neighbors' Toyotas and Hondas. But for all his staunch pride, first and foremost he had been a loving father, and Linnea knew he wouldn't have blamed Kevin for taking a job with a foreign car company considering that General Motors had laid him off and no other American companies had hired him. Kevin's father had understood and respected a man's right to support his family through honest work—as long as that man didn't cross a picket line to take a loyal union man's job. He wouldn't have wanted Kevin to decline honest work just to make a point.

Ever since Kevin had become unemployed for the second time in twelve years, he had searched in vain for another position, but as the months dragged on, he had begun to suspect that often he was eliminated on paper before anyone bothered to meet him. At fifty-six, with decades of employment and countless successful marketing campaigns to his credit, he was usually more educated, experienced, and qualified than the people who were doing the hiring. Bewilderingly, these very factors had somehow become liabilities. Even when Kevin assured the interviewers that he was aware the position he had applied for was entry-level and absolutely did not expect anything remotely close to his former salary, they didn't believe him, and they rejected him as too expensive. Even when he assured them he was certain he would find the job fulfilling, rewarding, and challenging, they suspected that he would start looking for another, more interesting job the minute they hired him.

After far too many promising leads sent him careening headlong into brick walls of disappointment, Kevin, whom Linnea had once considered capable of selling ice to penguins, had ruefully remarked that he must not be cut out for marketing after all, since he apparently couldn't successfully market himself. Maybe his former employers had been right to lay him off.

“That's ridiculous,” Linnea had retorted. “It's not you. It's them, and it's the economy. Things will turn around. Things will get better. They always have.”

But even Linnea knew that that didn't mean they always would.

Kevin didn't usually need lots of reassurance. He was by nature optimistic, and even in the bleakest of times, he retained his sense of humor. Linnea's salary and benefits would keep them from losing their house, the kids' college funds, and their health care, and after years of wishing for more of it, he finally had ample time to spend with his family and to take care of the many home-repair chores he had been putting off indefinitely. He took over the housecleaning and the laundry, and he cooked supper almost every night, firing up the grill and learning to prepare just about anything on it. “We do have a stove, you know,” Linnea reminded him with amusement when she came home from the library one evening to find him outside on the porch preparing Tex-Mex Four-Alarm Chili in a Dutch oven.

“The grill is more manly,” Kevin pointed out, his mouth involuntarily quirking into a smile. Linnea smiled back, thankful beyond measure that she had married a resilient man. He would not slip into depression and insecurity as so many other men and women who had lost their jobs in the downturn of the economy had done. Kevin would never give up, and even in the midst of his struggles he would never lose sight of his many blessings.

Linnea tried to follow his example and keep a positive outlook on the future, but sometimes she felt as if they were precariously seated on a broken, teetering, three-legged chair. By working together they could keep their balance, but if something came along to knock one of the remaining legs out from beneath them, they would come crashing down.

Linnea felt that precarious uncertainty anew as she held the phone to her ear, yearning to offer her husband that one elusive, essential piece of advice that would help him find work. But when no wisdom came to mind, she instead told him again that she loved him, and she wished him good luck with his coffee shop gathering and at the driving range later. They both knew she wasn't referring to his stroke.

After they hung up, Linnea stood alone in the foyer, thinking of Kevin and wishing she could devise some ingenious plan to land him the job of his dreams—but lately it was all she could do to cling to her own job and to remember the dreams and hopes that had set her upon the path she had chosen.

Neither she, nor Kevin, nor Mona had expected their livelihoods to be on such shaky ground at that point in their careers. They had expected to be settled, stable, and working steadily toward the retirements they were carefully and frugally saving for. They had not counted on recessions or politics to throw everything into upheaval.

The sudden appearance of three quilt campers laughing and chatting as they descended the grand staircase roused Linnea from her reverie, and she needed a moment to remember why she had been standing alone in the foyer.

The library. Of course. She had heard that the manor boasted a glorious library, but it was not included on the maps distributed at registration. Soon after her arrival the previous day, Linnea had wandered into the parlor and had found a small bookcase stuffed with well-read novels and paperbacks previous campers had left behind. A note card on the top shelf encouraged visitors to borrow books during their stay or take one and leave one of their own in trade. While this was a pleasant amenity, it could not possibly be the magnificent library full of antique treasures Kevin's distant cousin had raved about at the last Nelson family reunion.

Linnea pushed her worries about Kevin back into the far reaches of her mind and set off in search of the library. She passed guest suites and storage closets, the laundry room and the kitchen, and she even discovered an unlikely door that led outside to a gray stone patio, perhaps the one she, Mona, and Pauline had passed on their walk that morning. As she wandered, she began to suspect that the west wing of the manor was decades older than the elegantly appointed, expansive south wing. The rooms in the west wing were more modest in size, the ceilings lower, the windows smaller. Perhaps the west wing was the original residence built by Sylvia Bergstrom Compson Cooper's first ancestors to come to America, and their descendants had added the south wing after the family prospered. It did have a certain Gilded Age look about it.

But none of her speculation brought her any closer to finding the library. Eventually she concluded that the library, if it existed, could not be on the first floor. She decided to head upstairs to her suite for her registration packet and search the map of Elm Creek Manor for a library-sized blank portion, perhaps labeled “Here there be books.”