An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler (54 page)

Suddenly a faint creak broke the still night air. Sylvia glanced in the direction of the sound to find Andrew leaving his motor home. Unconsciously, she sat up straighter as he approached. He carried something in his right hand, and as he came closer, she saw that it was a sweater.

“You looked chilly,” he said, draping it over her shoulders.

“Thank you.” She drew the sweater around herself as he sat down beside her. She tried to think of something to say. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

He nodded, and they sat for a moment in silence, listening to the crickets and watching the fireflies dance, glowing and fading as they moved over the grass.

“You’re not usually so quiet,” Andrew said, breaking the silence.

“Yes, I am,” Sylvia said. “I don’t think one needs to chatter on and on unless one has something to say. You must be confusing me with Agnes.”

“No, no.” Andrew chuckled. “I could never do that.”

Sylvia wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but his voice warmed her as much as the sweater did.

A companionable silence fell over them again.

Andrew shifted beside her, resting his elbows on his knees. “Something on your mind?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Something’s keeping you up tonight. Is anything wrong?”

“Oh, no. I’m fine,” Sylvia said briskly, forcing out a smile. “I’m just enjoying the night air.”

“Is that so.” He regarded her wryly. “I think I know you well enough to see when you’re not happy. But you go right ahead and keep your secrets, Sylvia. I know better than to try to pry them from you.”

Sylvia’s smile faded. She did have her share of secrets—no one lived to her age without accumulating at least a few. But some secrets weighed too heavily on her heart, and the longer she kept them inside, the more they pulled her down.

She found herself telling Andrew about Sarah and Carol, how she had hoped to bring them together and how she had failed. She told him how much it pained her to see them estranged, and how she loved Sarah as if the young woman were her own child, how Sarah’s joys brought her such delight, and how Sarah’s sorrows pained Sylvia as if they were her own.

As she spoke, Andrew listened without interrupting. He didn’t tell her that the problem wasn’t as bad as she thought, in that infuriating, patronizing way so many men had. Nor did he try to solve the problem for her. All he did was listen, fold his hand around hers, and share her burden. And that, she realized, was exactly what she needed.

Eight

A
s she left her office in the computer sciences building late Tuesday afternoon, Judy thought about the round robin quilt. It was already beautiful, even without Agnes’s center motif, which apparently was going to remain a heavily guarded secret. Whenever Sylvia wasn’t around to hear, the other Elm Creek Quilters would beg Agnes to show them her progress—but each time she refused. She wouldn’t even give them a hint. “You want to be surprised, don’t you?” she would ask, smiling.

“No,” Diane would retort.

But Agnes merely laughed and brushed aside their questions, no matter how persistent they became. All she would reveal was that she was using appliqué rather than piecing, which they had assumed anyway. Not even Bonnie could equal Agnes in appliqué.

Maybe she should use appliqué, too, Judy thought as she crossed the Waterford College campus, heading for home. It would be easier to decide if she knew what Agnes was doing, especially since Judy was now making the fourth border rather than the last. According to their original schedule, it was Gwen’s turn to work on the quilt, but Gwen had begged Judy to switch places.

“My life is in chaos right now, what with final exams coming up and Summer’s graduation,” Gwen had explained. “I’ll owe you one.”

Judy had laughed. “In that case, I’ll do it.” She had finals of her own to write and grade, but she didn’t mind trading places with Gwen, although it meant coming up with a new design. The border she had originally planned had a scalloped edge, which made it unsuitable for its new position. She had studied the quilt that evening and had thought about it throughout the day, but try as she might, she couldn’t think of what to add.

As she walked up her driveway, Judy decided that if inspiration eluded her much longer, she’d use Diane’s trick and just set the quilt on point again with solid fabric triangles.

When she entered the house, she saw Steve in the living room on his knees, stuffing foam peanuts and wadded-up balls of newspaper into a trash bag. He looked up at the sound of the door, and before she could greet him, he held a finger to his lips. She nodded to show she understood. Emily was sleeping.

He crossed the room and wrapped her in a hug. “Welcome home,” he murmured, as if she’d been gone for months instead of hours, and gave her a kiss that made her knees weak. It was the same welcome he’d given her every day for years, but she had never grown tired of it, and couldn’t imagine she ever would.

“How long has she been napping?” Judy asked.

“About fifteen minutes.” Steve kissed her again before returning to his work.

Judy inspected the mess. “What’s all this?”

“My mom sent Emily a present.”

Something in his tone made her wary. “What was it?”

“Well—” Steve hesitated. “There’s good news and bad news.” He rose, took Judy by the hand, and led her down the hall toward their bedroom.

“This must be the good news,” Judy teased, but he passed their room and stopped outside Emily’s.

“No, the good news is my mother finally understands that you’re not Chinese.”

Judy laughed. “At last. What’s the bad news?”

Steve quietly pushed open the door. Emily was sleeping, tucked under the Log Cabin quilt Judy had made for her. She looked so adorable that for a moment Judy forgot her mother-in-law, so swept up was she in the fierce love she felt for her only child. Once she had feared that she loved Steve so much she couldn’t possibly have enough love left over for anyone else, but her first glimpse of newborn Emily proved to her once and forever that she had been wrong, so wrong.

Then she saw the doll in Emily’s arms. It was new, and it was wearing a kimono.

Judy turned to Steve and sighed. Steve grinned and closed the door.

“That does it,” Judy said. “Next year for her birthday, I’m getting your mother an atlas.”

“Or you could get her tickets to
Miss Saigon.”

“Oh, aren’t you the funny one,” she retorted, nudging him with her hip. He laughed and embraced her again, and kissed her, and after one more kiss they forgot about the mess in the living room for a little while.

As they lay in bed holding each other, Steve said, “I forgot to tell you. Your mom called.”

“To give you more career advice, I presume?” Judy’s mom considered writing a hobby, and she was anxious for Steve to find employment better suited for the husband of a computer science professor and the father of the most beautiful and gifted grandchild the world had ever seen. She’d been sending him advice columns and Help Wanted ads for years. Steve good-naturedly replied with thank-you notes and clips of his articles.

“Not this time.” Steve stroked her shoulder. “She said you got a letter.”

“At her house?”

“That’s what she said.”

“That’s strange. I haven’t lived there since college. Did she say who sent it?”

Steve shook his head and began to speak, but just then Emily called out from her bedroom. “Back to work,” he said, kicking off the covers. They dressed quickly, and Judy went to see to Emily while Steve went to the kitchen to prepare supper. Steve jokingly called the routine they’d followed for nearly three years “tag-team parenting,” but it worked well for them. Steve took care of Emily during the day while Judy worked; after supper, Judy minded Emily while Steve went off to the spare bedroom to write, or to the Waterford College library to do research. They spent the weekends as a family, away from their computers, away from their textbooks. The schedule didn’t leave much time for Judy and Steve to spend alone as a couple, but that made the unexpected moments snatched from their busy days all the more precious.

It wasn’t until after she’d given Emily her bath and put her to bed that Judy remembered to return her mother’s phone call. Her mother lived alone in the house outside Philadelphia where Judy had grown up. When her mother’s voice came on the line, Judy closed her eyes and imagined she was back there again, sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of tea, listening entranced to her mother’s stories of the land of her birth and of Judy’s, a country and time and place Judy no longer remembered. Every detail of that house was etched sharply into her heart. The sound of the winter wind in the trees, the smells of cooking, the sight of her father—young and alive in her memory, tall and strong as he mowed the lawn in summer or pushed her on the swing. One day, she knew, the big old house would become too much for her mother, and it would have to be sold. She hoped that day was a long time off, but she knew every year brought it closer.

“How is your husband, the writer?” her mother asked.

“He’s fine. He has an essay coming out in the next issue of
Newsweek.”

“That’s not bad,” Tuyet said grudgingly. “I suppose that’s good enough for now, until something better comes along.” Judy suppressed a laugh. “And my granddaughter?”

“She’s wonderful.” Judy glanced down the hall to Emily’s bedroom. “Except that today she told me she won’t be eating any more green food.”

“What? Green food—you mean, moldy food?”

“Of course not,” Judy said, laughing. “I wouldn’t feed her moldy food. I mean green as in peas, lettuce, broccoli.”

“Oh.” Tuyet was silent for a moment. “Tell her that I said she should eat whatever you serve.”

Judy smiled. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” Not that it would make any difference. “Ma, Steve said you received a letter for me today.”

Her mother went silent.

“Ma?”

“I’m still here.” Her mother sighed, and Judy heard a chair scrape across the floor. “I don’t know how to tell you this gently, so I’ll just say it. The letter is from your father.”

“What?”

“It’s true. I’m holding it in my hand this moment.”

Judy’s heart seemed to skip a beat. The moment she had always dreaded had come. Her wonderful, vibrant mother, who had endured so much so bravely, was in decline, and more seriously and suddenly than Judy had feared. “Ma,” she said carefully, “Daddy’s dead.”

“No, no,” Tuyet said impatiently. “Not him, not your real father. Your other father.”

Her other father. For a moment Judy’s mind whirled as she tried to make sense of her mother’s words.

Then she understood.

“Do you mean my biological father?” That had to be it, and yet it couldn’t be. Judy had never heard from him, not once in all those years. His only contact with them had been through a lawyer more than thirty years ago, when he agreed to give up his parental rights so that her father could adopt her. Her father—that title belonged to the man who had raised her, who had married her mother. He had been her father in every way that mattered for as long as she could remember.

“Yes, your biological father. That is what I meant.”

Judy took a deep breath and sank into a chair. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t open it. The letter is addressed to you, not me.”

“Would you—” Judy swallowed. She felt ill, dizzy. “Would you open it and read it to me, please?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If he wanted me to read this letter, he would have put my name on it, too. You can read it yourself when it arrives in Waterford. I will mail it to you in the morning.”

Judy sighed, exasperated. She recognized that stubborn tone in her mother’s voice. She would have to wait for the letter to arrive.

She told Steve about it as soon as she hung up the phone, but she said nothing to her friends. They knew little about her history; they knew she was the child of an American serviceman and that her mother had brought her from Vietnam to the United States when she was very young, but they knew nothing of the struggle to get here, nothing of the fear, that sense of being hunted. That was what Judy remembered most of their flight—the fear.

Since Tuyet had no money to pay for bribes and exit permits, she struck a bargain with an older woman and her family, who saw in the young Judy a ticket out of Vietnam. In exchange for gold, Tuyet claimed these people as her mother, her brother, and her niece, so they would be allowed to accompany them to America. Their money paid the way, but without Judy, they knew they had no chance of making it to the DP camps, let alone the States.

This family of convenience lasted until they were all safely in New York, when Tuyet and Judy were cast out. They took refuge in the small apartment of a distant relative, three rooms crowded with frightened, weary, bickering adults, waiting for a man Judy had never met to come rescue them. Months later, they instead received a letter denying his responsibility for Judy, his daughter, the child named after his own mother.

Judy remembered that, too, her mother crushing the letter in her fist and saying, “We do not need him. Remember that. We do not need him.”

She said it with such determination that Judy believed her.

Since the man who had promised to marry her had changed his mind, Tuyet found work, first in a restaurant kitchen, where she met the woman who found her a better job in a hospital in Philadelphia. Some time later Tuyet moved them into an apartment of their own, a small place, with two rooms—a kitchen and a living room where they shared a sofa bed. Judy later realized that it must have seemed shabby and cramped compared to her grandparents’ home in Saigon, the one her mother had fled in shame when the dashing army doctor’s child in her womb became too obvious to ignore. But to Judy, the new place seemed bright and spacious. For the first time, she had felt safe and happy—except at night, when shadowed figures came out of the dark, spitting at her, striking her, shrieking in her native language
con lai, my lai
, names she did not understand.

Then Tuyet met John DiNardo. Like the man who had abandoned them, he, too was a tall American doctor, but this time the story ended differently. John DiNardo was kind and gentle, and Judy adored him, especially after he married her mother and adopted her as his very own child. After that, all the old fears had dissolved into the past.