The Goodbye Quilt (7 page)

“We’re fine. We’re in…” I think for a moment. “Ohio. She’s sleeping.”

“So what’s the matter?” In Dan’s book, if everything is fine with Molly, everything is fine, period. I can hear the bed creak, can picture him rolling over, pulling up the covers. “What time is it?”

I’m not about to tell him. “Late,” I admit. “Sorry I woke you. I couldn’t wait. Dan, I just thought of something.”

“What did you think of, Lindy?” He never gets mad when I wake him up out of a sound sleep. I wonder how that can be. Suddenly I wish I was there with him, rubbing his warm shoulders with gentle persistence.

“We need to get an orphan.”

“A what?”

“An orphan. You know, adopt a child.”

“Huh?” Another creak of the bed, or maybe it’s the sound of Dan, scowling.

“From Haiti.”

“Linda, for Chrissake—”

“No, listen, I found this site on the internet. There are thousands of them, waiting for families. We have so much, Dan. We’re still young. We could give some poor child a chance.

“There’s one I found named Gilbert. He’s six. He lost his family in the earthquake.”

“Go back to bed, Linda. It was hard enough raising our own healthy, well-adjusted child.”

“It hasn’t been hard at all.”

“Speak for yourself.”

His comment reminds me of their struggles. His frustration, Molly’s tears, the long silences and the breakdowns I used to feel compelled to fix. “We did a great job.”

“I’m not saying we didn’t. But we’re done. It’s our time now, Linda.”

“And I want to do something with it, something
that matters. Think about it, Dan. These kids…they’re not sick or abused. They didn’t grow up in institutions. They’re kids like Molly, except they had the bad luck to come home from school one day to find that their families were gone.”

“I’ll send a check to the Red Cross.”

“They need
families.
We could—”

“We could do a lot of things, but adopting an orphan from Haiti isn’t one of them.” He must know how that sounds, because he takes a breath and adds, “Honey, you’re in panic mode over Molly leaving. This is no time to be discussing such a huge undertaking.”

I pull the jacket tighter around me. Panic mode. Am I panicking?

“I need a child who needs me,” I blurt out.

“Lindy. Slow down. What you need is a life of your own.”

The words fall like stones on my heart. He’s right.
He’s right.
“I’ll work on that,” I say, feeling a bleak sweep of exhaustion.

“Have fun on your trip,” Dan says, a yawn in his voice. “I love you both.”

“Love you, too.” After we hang up, I sit for a while and look at the stars. It’s so quiet I can hear a train whistle blow, miles away.

Odometer Reading 123,277

“I’m running out of thread,” I tell Molly.

“We can stop somewhere in the next town,” she says, unconcerned. She is more interested in finding a radio station. We have a rule. Driver gets to pick the music. We’re already bored with our playlists and she’s hungry for something new.

“This is mercerized thread spun from Sea Isle cotton,” I explain. “It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”

“I know how cotton is grown, Mom.”

In quilting, the type and quality of thread you use matters greatly. Just think of all the stitches that go into a quilt. You need the kind of thread
that pulls through smoothly, that is strong despite repeated tugging, that will never fray or pill.

To people who don’t practice the craft of hand-sewing, thread is thread. Therefore, this is far less of a concern than the dearth of radio stations. The FM band yields too much static, and the AM stations are crammed with crop reports or the phony sentiment of country tunes.

“In pioneer days, mothers and daughters worked on their quilts together,” I tell her.

“Good thing we’re not pioneers.” A soybean rust update comes on the radio, and she groans in exasperation.

I tried to get her interested in quilting a time or two, to no avail. She was impatient with the detail and repetition. Our few “lessons” ended with her pricking herself with a needle and sighing loudly with boredom. She usually wound up shooting baskets in the driveway with her dad.

She fiddles with the dial a bit more, and hits pay-dirt. The announcer’s voice says, “Settle back and enjoy this local favorite, from Beulah Davis and the Strivers.”

“Hey, isn’t that the group we heard last night?” asks Molly. “Cool.”

The melody and words are soothing and emotional, and I pause in the quilting to look out the window. It’s a sea of grass, rolling out on both sides, and I imagine Molly and me as pioneers, setting off on a journey into the great, wide unknown.

I wonder what it was like for those women and their daughters, when their lives took them in different directions. They weren’t able to pick up the phone or log onto the internet and get in touch. Separation meant the possibility of never seeing each other again. I should count my blessings.

The quilt section in my lap is made of cornflower-blue fabric sprigged with tiny daisies. It was a dress I made for Molly to wear to her very first piano recital, back when she was just eight years old. Her first public performance. What a nerve-wracking day that was. I recall her practicing Bach’s “Minuet in G Major” over and over again until it drove Dan out into the yard with the weed-whacker. And I, of course, couldn’t help tuning in on every note. I adjusted my breathing to the rhythm of her playing and when she hesitated—the long, agonizing pause in the fifth bar as she spread her tiny hand over the keys of a big chord—it made me hold my breath until she found the right notes.
When she hit the wrong note I would wince and then remind myself not to do that at the recital.

The dress was meticulously put together, every stitch in place with hand-smocking across the bodice, the full skirt crisply ironed. She wore white ankle socks and Mary Janes, her hair held back in a blue band, and she looked like a dark-haired version of Alice in Wonderland.

“I’m not going in.” I can still recall the exact sound of her little-girl voice as she balked at the door to the recital hall. It was an intimidating auditorium, filled with echoes. On the stage, the Stein way crouched like a slumbering black dragon.

“Okay,” Dan said, immediately agreeable. “Let’s go home.” He had come under duress to begin with and was already chafing in his good shoes and starched shirt. He reached up to adjust the bill of the baseball cap that wasn’t there. “Better yet, let’s go for ice cream.”

“We can’t leave,” I said, shooting daggers at him with my eyes. “Look, Moll, your name’s already on the program.” I showed her the printed sheet the piano teacher’s son had given us at the door.

She refused to let go of Dan’s hand. He was her
ally and suddenly I was the enemy. We stood on either side of her, locked in a silent tug-of-war.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me that he was always quick to back off while I played the ogre, pushing her into new situations, sometimes against her will. I wonder if I’m doing that now, pushing her across the country to college. Dan, like Travis, would prefer for her to go to the state school.

Elsewhere on the quilt is a rosette of red stretchy fabric from the swimsuit she wore when I delivered her to her first swim lesson. At the YMCA pool, she had clung to me like a remora. Her howl of panic ricocheted around the pool deck, and her slippery, strong little body strained toward the locker room. Dan had rescued her that day, coming out on deck in his board shorts, looking like a hunk on
Baywatch
as he snatched her up. I was furious with him, but didn’t want to make even more of a scene, so I bit my tongue. He took her by the hand and led her away from the noisy echo chamber of shrieks, punctuated by coaches’ whistles.

An hour later, I found them both in the rec pool. “Watch me, Mommy, watch!” Molly yelled, and leaped off the side, disappearing under the surface. She sprang up and swam, struggling like a puppy,
straight to her waiting father. “See?” she said, her wide eyes starred by wet lashes, “I don’t need lessons.”

This is different, I thought at the recital. He can’t save her from the piano. He can only help her run away.

In the end, the decision was taken from all of us. “There you are,” said Mrs. Dashwood, the piano teacher, bustling forward. “Let’s go backstage and get some lipstick on.” The teacher, who had an MFA and the face of a pageant winner, was idolized by her little-girl students. Mrs. Dashwood was wise, too, under standing the power of the promise of stage makeup to distract a kid from fear. She took Molly by the hand and walked her down the sloping aisle of the auditorium.

Molly glanced back once, her eyes filled with uncertainty, yet she was unresisting as Mrs. Dashwood led her away. I watched the teacher stop at the edge of the stage to point something out. By the time Molly disappeared behind the curtain, there was a discernible spring of excitement in her step.

I found myself clutching Dan’s hand. I didn’t even remember grabbing it, but I would never for
get what he said. Leaning down to kiss my cheek, he said, “Relax. She’s in good hands.”

“Hey, if it were up to you, she’d be at the ice-cream parlor.”

“And guess what—the world wouldn’t come to an end.”

As the youngest on the program, Molly went first. Mrs. Dashwood welcomed everyone, then introduced her. A smattering of applause and a few adoring “Awws” came from the audience, which consisted of carefully dressed parents, grandparents and the occasional doting aunt or restless sibling.

Molly walked slowly with a curious dignity, her full skirt tolling like a bell with each step she took. So tiny, I thought. A porcelain doll, all alone up there. She didn’t look at the audience, didn’t try to find me with her eyes. She stood still, and my heart skipped a beat. But Molly knew what she was doing. She jacked up the stool to its highest level so she could reach the keyboard.

We had practiced how to smooth the full skirt in order to sit down properly. She remembered every unhurried move. Her patent leather shoes glittered in the stage lights, dangling above the pedals. Mrs.
Dashwood said she wouldn’t use the pedals until she was tall enough to reach them.

She rested her little hands on the keyboard. This was it, I thought. This was her moment. I took in a breath, ready to be dazzled.

It was a disaster from the first chord. Wrong notes, hesitation, whole measures forgotten. It was the longest ninety seconds of my life.

When it was over, I had aged a decade. Molly barely made it through the adorable curtsy we’d rehearsed. She fled into the wings and we found her in the stage hallway, a crushed flower surrounded by blue petals.

“This is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she sobbed, going limp against Dan when he picked her up. “This is worse than missing
larynx
in the spelling bee.”

“I still can’t spell
larynx
,” I murmured.

“We should have gone for ice cream,” Dan said.

In the passenger seat of the Suburban, I dart my needle into the heart of the fabric, quilting it with the words, “Be audacious.” The cornflower-blue fabric is like new. Molly never wore the dress again.

She didn’t give up piano, though. Following the recital, she walked into the house, went straight to the piano and played the Bach flawlessly, every note ringing sweet and true through the empty rooms. “Just to make sure I could,” she said.

Glancing over from the driver’s seat now, Molly notices me working the blue piece. “What’s that one?” she asked.

I angle it toward her. “Your first piano recital.”

“I don’t remember that dress.”

“Bach’s ‘Minuet in G Major.’” The name of the piece usually jogged her memory.

“I’m blanking. Cute fabric, though.”

Funny how the heart holds its memories, or lets them go. Each detail of that day is etched into me. I can even remember the flavor of ice cream we got afterward—maple walnut with chocolate sprinkles. Yet Molly has cast the nerves and trauma of that day from her mind. They are not important to her.

“Remember that red silk charmeuse you wore to your senior adjudication last January?” I ask her.

“Of course. I brought it along to keep you from cutting it up,” she says, her urgency making me smile. “I love that dress.”

“I know. I figured you’d want to wear it again.” Unlike the flounces and sashes of her childhood, the red dress makes her look truly grown-up, slender and elegant. Maybe even sexy, with its clinging shape and single bare shoulder. In the same auditorium where she’d once stumbled through a minuet, she had performed last on the program. Supple as a ribbon of scarlet silk in a breeze, she had swayed through a grand, emotional rendition of Chopin’s “Nocturne in C Minor,” a piece he composed when he was seventeen, the same age Molly was.

Mrs. Dashwood, scarcely changed from the no-nonsense teacher we’d known for years, had handed her a tube of Chanel lipstick and declared her one of her most accomplished students ever.

The adjudicator gave Molly the highest possible marks and pronounced her the winner of the competition. Had she played better than the other students? It was hard to say. The adjudicator was Italian, a retired professor from the state college. All the other competitors were boys. It was hard not to miss the professor’s enthusiasm for a pretty, talented girl in a red dress.

Still, I believed she had outdone the others in more than just looks. She had a gift. That nocturne
sang with feeling. She knew how to take a heartfelt emotion and fling it wide for all to hear.

I’m kind of glad she doesn’t remember the first disastrous recital. But I’m also glad I pushed her to do it. It occurs to me how much simpler it is to push your child in the right direction rather than yourself.

Molly flicks on the turn signal and drifts over to the right lane.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Thread, remember? You need thread.”

The Suburban glides down the exit ramp and she takes a right, following a sign that points to “City Center.”

Before too long, we find one of those chain craft and fabric stores. “They won’t have the right kind,” I lament.

“Then get another kind. No biggie.” She catches the look on my face. “You should have brought more of the magical thread, if it’s so important.”

We step into the bright commercial glare of the craft shop. “You’re right,” I admit, “but Minerva’s ran out and won’t be getting in any more. She’s closing the shop, you know.”

“Nope, I didn’t know. I thought it was for sale.”

“It is. She’s retiring and selling the place, but I doubt she’ll find a buyer in this economy. I’ll miss it. All her customers will. The idea of driving all the way to Rock Springs has no appeal to me at all.”

“Bummer,” Molly says, tucking her thumbs in her back pockets as she regards a display of notions.

As always, beautiful fabrics draw my eye. A few impossible-to-resist fat quarters make it into my shopping basket. The lure of a new project beckons. This happens a lot; I get close to the end of one thing and another pops into mind, seductive and infinitely more alluring than the project at hand.

At the end of a multitiered aisle, Molly fingers a green glass suncatcher marked Special of the Week. “Can I get this?”

My knee-jerk reaction is,
You don’t need more junk.
But she takes after me, a magpie drawn to every glittering object that catches her eye. She’s always been this way. Besides, it’s in the shape of a music note, and it’s only five bucks.

“One more pit stop,” Molly says. Instead of going to the car, she heads into the shop across the way, a department store named Bradner’s.

I happily follow her. It’s fun shopping with some
one who has her figure; everything looks good on her. But when I step into the store, I catch a whiff of White Shoulders perfume. This doesn’t seem like Molly’s kind of shop.

“What do you need, sweetie?”

“Come on,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “We’re going to pick out some new clothes for you.”

“But…”

“But
what,
Mom?” Her excitement flashes to annoyance.

The usual litany of excuses piles up: I don’t need new clothes. I don’t have time. I don’t want to spend the money. I want to lose some weight before I buy a bunch of things.
I’m not important enough.

I look at Molly and grin. “Let’s do it.”

She did not inherit her fashion smarts from me. Must be all those style blogs and glossy magazines she loves to read. When she teams up with a salesgirl named Darcy, there is no stopping the two of them. I surrender to their superior savvy and wait in a big double dressing room in a bra and panties that have seen better days, bare feet in need of a pedicure.

The glaring fluorescent lights and full-length, three-way mirror have no mercy. I stare at myself in
triplicate, the images growing smaller and smaller into infinity. Molly and Darcy bring in tops, slacks and jeans, silky cardigans and jackets nipped in at the waist, belts and low-heeled pumps. They can’t resist accessorizing with statement jewelry, bright scarves, slender hoop earrings. The attention feels good—and the clothes look good on me.