The Star She Gave Away Twice

Pam held her phone out across the steam table at a quarter past nine on a Tuesday in February, right between breakfast cleanup and the first pan of lunch rolls.

She had flour on her thumb and a look on her face I had not seen in eleven years of working beside her.

“Marla,” she said, “isn’t this yours?”

I wiped my hands on my apron and took the phone. On the screen was a quilt block, eight navy points on a red ground, around one big plain navy square in the center.

I knew every seam in it. I had drawn it on the back of a school lunch menu twelve years ago.

Underneath the picture it said Hollow Star Table Topper Kit. Precut fabric, full color pattern, everything you need. Forty dollars plus shipping. Below that, in small gray letters, the shop said 312 sold.

“Scroll down,” Pam said quietly. “Look at who.”

I scrolled. The shop was called Hill and Hollow Quilt Co., and the little round picture at the top was Gwen Tolliver, smiling in front of her sewing room window.

I had sat across a folding table from that smile every Thursday morning for eleven years.

There were more pictures. Kits laid out in neat rows on a kitchen table I recognized as Sonya’s, because of the rooster canisters.

An iron I knew was Ilse’s, because she had burned the same mark into its plate that she burned into everything.

Hands cutting fabric with Bonita’s turquoise ring on the finger. Rae’s grandson’s high chair pushed into the corner of one shot, full of folded navy yardage.

All five of my friends from the quilt guild. Every one of them was in those pictures somewhere. Not one of them had said a single word to me.

“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “I thought you’d want to know. My sister-in-law bought one for Christmas and showed it to me Sunday, and I said, that’s Marla’s star, I’d know it anywhere.”

“You did right,” I told her. My voice came out flat and polite, the way it does when the lunch count is wrong and there is nothing to do but feed whoever shows up.

I handed her the phone back and went to start the rolls, because two hundred and forty kids were going to be hungry at eleven whether my heart was broken or not.

I pressed dough into pans for an hour and did not cry once. I counted instead. Three hundred and twelve kits at forty dollars apiece came to twelve thousand four hundred and eighty dollars.

I did the math three times on the edge of a flour sack with a grease pencil, and it came out the same every time.

That evening I sat at my own kitchen table with my reading glasses pushed up on my head and my laptop open to that shop.

Hugh came in from the barn smelling like hay and cold air, hung his coat on the nail, and looked over my shoulder for a long minute.

“That’s your star,” he said.

“It’s my star.”

Hugh has run a road grader for the county for twenty-six years. He is not a talker.

He spends his days alone in a cab, putting the crown back in gravel roads that the freeze and thaw tear up every March, and he has learned to look at a thing a while before he touches it.

He pulled out the chair beside me and sat down. “That Gwen’s shop?”