The Quilt I Made for Rosie
What Lois said
My sister Lois drove up on a Sunday in September. She came in without knocking, which she has done since 1971, and sat down at my table and looked at me.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said. “And you haven’t touched that quilt since March. I looked in the spare room. The needle is still stuck in it, Eunie, and there’s dust on the thread.”
I did not answer.
She turned her teacup around in its saucer. Lois is not a woman who cries, but she was looking at the tabletop hard. “I’m the one who started this,” she said. “I poked you in the ribs and asked you for that name. I have felt sick about it since the day I did it.”
“You asked a question. I’m the one who answered.”
“Well.” She sighed. “That’s right. You are.”
“Did you say you were sorry?” Lois asked. “To her, I mean. Properly.”
“I said it in the kitchen. I said it in two cards.”
“And what did you say after the sorry?”
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, because we both knew. A baby’s grandmother might be allowed to be glad.
Lois set her cup down. “Mother used to say a sorry with a ‘but’ hooked on the back of it is just an excuse in its church clothes.”
“I know what Mother said.”
“Then you know what to do.”
She finished her tea and kissed the top of my head. And that night I went into the spare room and pulled the dust cover off the frame.
Three weeks of nights
I finished the quilt in twenty-two evenings. I know because I made a pencil mark on the calendar each night, like a prisoner counting days.
I quilted from seven to eleven with the radio low and the lamp pulled close, rocking the needle through the muslin and the batting and the old blue flannel, eight stitches to the inch the way my mother taught me.
Around the tenth night, I began to talk to the baby. I did not mean to. I heard myself say, “I am so sorry, little girl. I wanted to be there.” A salty drop landed on a red petal. I thought, well, that will wash, and went on.
When it was done I bound the edge in dark green and made a label for the back out of a scrap of muslin. I wrote on it in fabric pen, in my best penmanship.
For Rose Ann Barlow. Stitched by her grandmother Eunice, Hadley Bend, Iowa. Backed with the blankets her daddy slept on.
But I could not send a quilt alone. A quilt alone would say, “Here, take this, now be nice to me.”
So I wrote a letter. The first draft was four pages and said how hurt I was. The second blamed Lois. The third used the word “misunderstanding,” and I tore it in half over the sink.