The Quilt I Made for Rosie

“Eunice, I have to say something,” she said. “When Kayla went back to work and I got Tuesdays and Thursdays, I assumed you had your own days. I swear I thought that. It was Trevor who let slip, last month, that you hadn’t been over once. I’m not keeping that baby from anybody.” She looked at the photograph over the sink. “Mama would have thrown a pan at me.”

I laughed before I could stop it, and then I was crying a little, and Diane pushed a box of tissues across the table without a word, the way women do.

“I could do something,” she said. “I could say I’m bringing Rosie out your way on a Tuesday. Kayla wouldn’t stop me. I could just drive her over.”

I wanted it with every bone in me.

“No,” I said. “Thank you. Not behind her back. If I get that door, I want it to be opened from the inside. I want Rosie’s mother to hand her to me. Nothing else would hold.”

Diane studied me over the rim of her cup. “Well,” she said at last. “Aren’t you the stubborn one.”

“My husband used to say so.”

“I’ll put it in her hands myself. Tuesday. And I’ll keep my mouth shut, I was a postal clerk thirty years.” She touched the edge of the box. “Put the sorry first, did you?”

“It’s the first line.”

“Good,” said Diane. “That’s the line she needs to see first.”

The waiting

I wish I could tell you I was patient. I was as patient as a woman can be who lays out her breakfast dishes the night before, to have something to do.

I made three hundred and twelve rolls for the Methodist harvest supper. On Sunday I sat in my pew with my gloves folded and heard Pastor Merle preach on the father in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, the one who saw his boy a long way off.

I thought of that father running down the road with his robe held up. I thought, that is not me. I cannot run, and I have promised to stay on the porch. I told the Lord so, in a whisper, and said I would be obliged if He would do the running.

On the sixth day a text came from Trevor. It read, “Kayla got the box.”

That was all. I wrote back, “Thank you, son,” and set the phone face down on the counter. Then days seven and eight went by, and nine and ten.

I told myself she could take until Christmas, that I had said so in the letter and I meant it. I told myself that a person who writes a letter like that cannot then watch the phone.

I watched the phone.