The Star She Gave Away Twice

“Gwen’s. And Sonya and Ilse and Bonita and Rae are all in the pictures.”

He rubbed his jaw. “You want me to go over and talk to Don?”

Don Tolliver is Gwen’s husband. He worked at a stave mill outside of town until a load of white oak bolts shifted on him six years ago and broke his back in two places.

He walks with a cane now, slowly, and Hugh helps him get his hay in every summer because Don cannot stand on a trailer anymore.

“No,” I said. “Don’s had a hard enough time. This isn’t his doing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know Don,” I said. “He doesn’t even know which end of a rotary cutter is sharp.”

Hugh almost smiled at that. Then he got serious again, which for Hugh means he went very still.

“Then what do you want to do, Marla? Because I can tell you want to do something. You’ve got that look you get when somebody’s kid has been charged for a lunch he didn’t eat.”

I did not know yet. I only knew what I did not want to do.

I want to be honest about the star, because it matters to what came after. The Ozark Star is not a miracle.

There are a hundred eight-pointed stars in the world. Mine just has one little trick in it, a way of making the four points at once out of two squares with nothing thrown away, so every point comes out sharp.

I worked it out the winter after my mother died, when I could not sleep and could not pray and could only sit at the table and cut.

Mama had taught me to quilt on an old treadle Singer, and every star I made that winter was for her. The red was her favorite color. The navy was the color of her church dress.

When I finally got the points to come out right, I took the block to Thursday guild at the extension office, and the women there made such a fuss over it that I went home and typed up the directions that same night.

The next Thursday I taught it to all of them for nothing. It never crossed my mind to charge.

You do not charge your friends for a thing that came out of grief and turned into something pretty.

That was twelve years ago. Since then I had taught it at two church retreats, at a 4-H day for the girls, and once at the county fair in a tent so hot the fabric stuck to our arms.

I had never sold it. I had never put my name on a single copy. I suppose that was my own mistake.

“I looked it up on my lunch,” I told Hugh. “You can’t copyright a block like that, not really. Stars are stars. Maybe the written directions, maybe the pictures. A lawyer in Springfield would cost more than the whole shop made.”

“I wasn’t saying sue.”

“I know you weren’t.” I closed the laptop. “And I don’t want to holler at Gwen on the phone, either. Once you holler at somebody you’ve sat beside for eleven years, you don’t ever sit beside them the same way again.”

“So you’re going to let it go.”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to think.”

I thought for four days. I did not go to Thursday guild that week. I texted Gwen that the school had a health inspection coming, which was true, though it was not the reason.