The Quilt I Pieced a Second Time

There was no clean way to pull the thread without the whole thing coming apart in our hands.

“It is a quilt, Dale,” I said. I believed about half of it. “I can make another quilt.”

He reached over in the dark and put his cold hand on top of mine. For Dale, that is a whole speech.

We did not talk the rest of the way. The yard light came up over the hill and the dog met us at the gate the way he does, and life went on being ordinary, which is its own kind of mercy.

I lay awake that night and did the thing you are not supposed to do. I went back over it. The way she held the can against her hip. The way she did not shake it before she reached in.

A fair person shakes the can. You shake it so the stubs mix and the ones that fell in first come up with the rest. She did not shake it. I would swear to that part in church.

But swearing to how a woman held a coffee can is not proof, and I knew it, and I turned over and tried to pray myself to sleep instead.

Pearl

Here is the part I could not let go of. It was not Katie, and it was not even Rhonda.

It was Pearl Hoffmeyer.

Pearl is eighty-one. She has sat in the third pew from the front on the left side of Pleasant Grove longer than I have been alive.

Her husband Vern farmed the place out east of the river until his heart quit in a bean field nine years ago. Now Pearl lives in town in a little rented half of a house.

Vern and Pearl never had children. They had each other and the land and the church, and when Vern died the land went to the bank note and a nephew in Des Moines.

Pearl kept the recliner and the photographs and not much else. She came to town with two suitcases and a sewing basket and started over at seventy-two.

She has not missed a Sunday that I know of. She sits in that third pew and sings the alto line in a voice gone thin, and she stays after to help fold the chairs even when her hands shake.

She has her Bible and her violets and her dead husband’s recliner that she will not give away.

Pearl bought sixty dollars of raffle tickets.

I know because I was at the card table taking the money the night of the sale, two weeks before the supper. She counted it out of a change purse in bills that had been folded small.