The Star She Gave Away Twice

“They ought to learn it from the one who made it. Not from me.”

Then she walked to the very back table, the one by the bookshelves where nobody had sat because the light was poor, and she set the kits down, and she sat down beside them with her hands in her lap.

I stood up there for what felt like a full minute. Thirty women looked at me, waiting to see what I would do. I could feel Mrs. Ferris looking at me too, and I knew without turning around that she would back me up whatever I decided.

I thought about all the things I could have said. I had practiced a few of them in the car, in the shower, in the walk-in cooler at school.

Some of them were very clever and some were very cruel, and none of them were things my mother would have let me say out loud.

So I said, “Anybody who needs fabric, Gwen’s brought some. Help yourselves.” And I turned the block around and showed them how to sew the center row.

Three women went back and took kits. Gwen handed them over one at a time without looking up.

One of them was Erin, the young mother, who said thank you, and Gwen said you’re welcome, honey, in that warm voice she has, and I had to look away again.

About half past twelve Hugh came in with a box of fried chicken from the gas station out on the highway, the good kind with the potato wedges.

He stopped in the doorway exactly where Gwen had stopped. He saw her at the back table. He looked at me. I gave him a little nod.

He set the chicken on the side table, walked straight back to Gwen, and said, “Gwen. How’s Don’s back holding up in this cold?”

She looked up at him like he had handed her a glass of water in the desert.

“Not good,” she said. “But he’s all right. He’s all right.”

“Tell him I’ll be by to look at that gate,” Hugh said, and went back to setting out napkins.

We ate standing up, the way you do at a class like that. Opal ate two thighs and told everybody about the wringer washer she used until 1971.

The Pomona sisters argued about whether you press seams open or to the side. Gwen did not eat. She sat at the back table with her hands in her lap and watched me.

At one o’clock, when we started sewing again, she got up and came to the front. She stood at the edge of my table, not quite looking at me.

“Marla,” she said, very low, “would you let me help cut? Some of these ladies are slow on the big squares. I’m fast.”

I knew she was fast. She was the fastest cutter in our guild.

She had cut thirty-two charity quilts for the hospital in West Plains the year Don got hurt, because she said she could not sit still in a waiting room.

I handed her my old rotary cutter. “Back three tables,” I said. “Start with the Pomona girls. They argue, but they listen.”

She took it, and our fingers touched for just a second on the handle, and I felt how cold her hands were.

She worked the rest of the afternoon without stopping. She cut for the women with arthritis and for the young mothers who were afraid of the blade.