The Quilt in the Dog Crate
I did not know that yet. I only knew he was not there, and I sat in my car in their driveway on East 17th with the windows up, and I decided before I turned the key that I was not going to call him.
People have asked me why. My friend Kim asked me that same night, in fact. “One phone call, Denise. He’d have set her straight in five minutes.”
Maybe he would have. But my brother had a three-month-old who had come five weeks early, a stack of statements from the hospital, and a wife he loved. I was not going to stand in his kitchen and make him pick between his sister and his wife over a blanket. And I knew something else, sitting there. If Jeff made her sorry, she would be sorry she got caught. She still would not know what the thing was.
I did not have any idea yet how to show her. I only knew that telling would not do it.
So I drove home to our place off Monroe and I ran the bathtub.
I should tell you about the quilt, because Courtney was right about one thing. It was busy.
The pattern is called Grandmother’s Flower Garden. It is made of hexagons, each one about the size of a quarter, and every one of them is basted over a little paper shape and then whipstitched to its neighbors by hand. Seven hexagons make a flower. A ring of white hexagons makes the path around it. A crib quilt done that small takes better than a thousand pieces, and there is not a machine made that will sew them for you.
Then you layer it and quilt it, by hand, a quarter inch inside every single piece.
I learned it from my grandmother, Helen, on her farm north of Buhler. Jeff and I spent every winter Saturday out there while our folks worked. Grandma kept her quilting frame the old way, hung from the front room ceiling on four ropes and pulleys. She let it down after breakfast and cranked it back up before supper so there was room to walk.
I was eight the winter she put a needle in my hand. Jeff was five. He did not care one bit about sewing. He cared about the frame, because when it was down it made a roof, and he would lie on his back underneath it on the linoleum with his toy tractors and look up at the wrong side of whatever she was working on.
“That boy’s seen more of the backs of my quilts than the fronts,” Grandma used to say.
She made flower gardens more than anything. Hers always had yellow centers, every flower, except one. One flower in every quilt she ever made had a red center.
I asked her why, that first winter.
“So the Lord will know I don’t think I’m perfect,” she said. “And so you can always find the one that’s mine.”
My first stitches were so long she said you could trip a horse on them. She did not pick them out. She said they would hold, and that somebody had to be eight.