The Quilt on Our Pickup Tailgate

Ruth

I called Ruth at a quarter to eleven. I knew she would be up. She did not sleep much anymore.

She picked up on the second ring.

“Is Abby all right?” she said. That was the first thing.

“She’s in her room,” I said. “She’s not crying. I wish she would.”

“She will. Let her.” I heard her set something down. “Tell me.”

I told her. When I got to the part about Carla, Ruth made a little sound, not angry, more like a person who has just been told it was going to rain on a day she already knew it would.

“Carla,” she said. “Oh, Carla.”

“I don’t know what to do, Ruth. I can’t fight her. She’s family. And Abby has to see her every Sunday.”

“Don’t fight her,” Ruth said. “That’s not what a quilt’s for.”

“Then what?”

“A quilt’s made to be looked at, Jennifer. A ribbon is a nice thing, but it’s a piece of satin on a pin.”

She was quiet a second.

“In 1958, at the Clayton County fair, they ran out of rack space in the exhibit hall. You know what they did? They strung clotheslines between the oak trees by the grandstand and hung the overflow out there in the open air. Best-looking quilt show I ever saw. Everybody walked by it on the way to the tractor pull.”

I sat there at my kitchen table with the fair book in front of me.

“We don’t have oak trees,” I said slowly. “We have a parking lot.”

“You have a truck,” Ruth said.

And I could hear that she was smiling.

Six thirty in the morning

I did not sleep much. At five-thirty I knocked on Abby’s door and she was already awake, sitting on her bed in her 4-H T-shirt with the pillowcase in her lap.

“Grandma Ruth wants to show your quilt,” I said. “At the fair. Today. Not inside. Outside, on the truck.”

Abby looked at me for a long time.

“Won’t that make Aunt Carla mad?”

“It might,” I said. “We’re not going to say one word about Aunt Carla. Not one. We’re going to hang up a quilt and let people look at it. That’s all. If anybody asks why it isn’t inside, you tell them the tag wasn’t signed, and that it was Mom’s line. That’s the truth.”

“It was your line,” Abby said. And then, for the first time since the night before, the corner of her mouth went up a little.

“It was my line,” I said.

We picked up Ruth at six. She was waiting on her front step in a blue cotton dress and a straw hat, with a folding lawn chair, a thermos of coffee, a bag of clothespins, and a sack of molasses cookies wrapped in wax paper. She was ninety-one years old and she had been ready since five.

“I brought the good clothespins,” she said. “The wooden ones. The plastic ones let go.”