The Quilt in the Dog Crate
“Dr. Reyes says nothing loose in the crib till she’s a year old,” he said. “No blankets. So it goes on the wall where she can look at it, and when she’s big enough it comes down and goes on her.”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“Kitchen.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We talked most of the night. I’m not going to tell you it was pleasant. I asked her why. She’s going to have to be the one to tell you, Neesy. It ought to come from her.”
I sat down on the nursery floor with my back against the crib and sewed a muslin sleeve along the top of that quilt, catching only the backing so not a stitch would show on the front. Jeff sat in the rocker with Hattie against his chest and watched me do it.
“I should’ve looked in the cedar chest,” he said after a while.
“You were working seventy hours a week.”
“I should’ve looked.”
“You stood up in front of two hundred people and bought it back with your boat,” I said. “I think we’re square.”
He laughed, and then he did not. He put his face down against the top of that baby’s head and his shoulders went, and I kept sewing and let him have it to himself. I have only seen my brother cry twice. The other time was at that isolette.
He hung it himself. He found the studs and set the brackets with a level, and slid the rod through, and stepped back. The yellow and blue against that gray wall looked like a window somebody had opened.
Hattie, over his shoulder, looked at it. Babies that age love a pattern. She looked and looked.
“Bottom row,” Jeff told her. “Third from the left. That one’s your great-grandma’s.”
Courtney did not come out of the kitchen that day. I left a little jar of Orvus on her dryer with a note that said, For when it needs washing. Cold water. Lay it flat. I did not sign it.
She came to my house nine days later.
It was a Tuesday evening and Mark was at the church for a trustees meeting. I opened the door and there she stood on my porch with no makeup on, holding a Walmart sack.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course you can.”
She sat at my kitchen table and did not take her coat off. I put the kettle on for something to do.
“I’m not going on the Auxiliary,” she said. “Mrs. Lindahl was nice about it. She said maybe next year. I think everybody in that hall knew by Sunday noon.” She pressed her lips together. “I had it coming. I’m not here about that.”
I sat down across from her.
“My mom made all my clothes,” she said. “Did Jeff ever tell you that? Every stitch, till I was fourteen. We didn’t have anything. She’d get remnants off the dollar table and I’d go to school in Pratt in a dress that matched the kitchen curtains. There was a girl who used to call me Homemade. In the lunch line. Hey, Homemade.” She laughed, and it was not much of a laugh. “I told myself when I had a baby, every single thing she owned was going to come out of a box with a tag on it. So nobody could ever say that to her.”
I had not known. I had known her nine years and I had not known.