The Star She Gave Away Twice

“Your mama would be proud of this,” she told me. “Red and navy. That’s a church color star.”

I had to turn around and pretend I was looking for something in my bag.

At a quarter to twelve the young mother at the second table, Erin, asked me if I knew there was a shop online selling a pattern that looked just like mine. She said it so innocently.

She said she had almost bought it in January, but forty dollars was two weeks of groceries, so she had decided to wait.

“I know about it,” I said.

“Is it yours?”

“It’s the same star,” I said. “It’s free here.”

She looked at me a long moment and then went back to her cutting.

At the front table, Opal had stopped pinning and was watching me over her glasses, and I knew she had heard every word.

I do not think she understood, and I did not explain. I was not there to tell the room what Gwen had done. I was there to teach a star.

At noon half the room had gone out to the hall for sweet tea and brownies, and only a few women were still at the tables cutting. That was when the door right behind me opened.

I was standing at the front table holding up the finished block again, about to show them how to sew the center row together. The light was pouring in through those tall windows.

I was smiling at something one of the Pomona sisters had said, and I was still smiling when I turned around and saw who it was.

Gwen Tolliver stood just inside the doorway.

She had her dark bob tucked behind her ears and she was wearing her old burgundy fleece, the one with the zipper pull missing, that she wore to every Thursday morning from October to April.

Against her fleece she hugged two big gallon zipper bags, stuffed full of precut kit pieces.

Through the plastic I could see the cut prints, blues and creams and a little red, the scrap version her shop sold. My star, in pieces, in every one.

She stopped. She did not come any farther in.

The cutters went quiet one table at a time, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk flies over.

The women drifted back in from the hall with their tea and stopped. Nobody in the room knew who she was except me and Mrs. Ferris, who was standing by the bookshelves with a stack of returns. But everybody could tell something was happening.

Opal leaned over to me and said, in what she thought was a whisper, “Is that the one?”

I did not answer her. I just held on to the block.

Gwen looked down at the kits in her arms. Then she looked at me.

Then she looked around the room at the tables, at the pattern with my name printed at the top of every paper.

Her chin started to shake, and I saw her bite down on the inside of her cheek the way she does when she is trying not to cry at a funeral.

“I saw the paper,” she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. “Mrs. Albright from church brought it to me Thursday. She said, isn’t this Marla’s star.”

Nobody moved.

“I brought these,” Gwen said, and lifted the kits a little, like they were heavy.

“They’re already cut. They’re already paid for. I thought if anybody here didn’t bring enough fabric, they ought to have them.” She swallowed.