She showed one girl a better way to fold her yardage. She did not say a word about the shop or the kits or the three hundred and twelve, and neither did I.
At half past two, Opal stood up at the front table. Her granddaughter tried to help her and she waved her off.
She held up her finished star, a little uneven at the bottom where her hand had gotten tired, but every point sharp.
“I want to say something,” she announced, loud enough for the back of the room. Everybody stopped.
“I’ve got nine grandchildren,” Opal said. “Two of them are in Kansas City and one is in the Navy in Virginia and I don’t see them like I want to.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
She lifted the star a little higher. “I’m going to make one of these stars for every one of them. Nine stars. And I’m going to write Marla’s name on the back of each one, so they’ll know where it came from.”
She sat down. Her granddaughter was crying. Erin was crying. The Pomona sisters, all three, were crying in exactly the same way.
I looked to the back of the room and Gwen had put down the rotary cutter and had both hands over her face.
“Opal,” I said, when I could talk, “you put your own name on there too.”
“I’ll put both,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of thread.”
At three o’clock we cleaned up. Hugh came back to fetch the irons and pulled up the duct tape inch by inch.
The women went out with their stars in their bags and their patterns folded in their purses, and every one of them stopped at the front to say thank you, and some of them hugged me, and a few of them asked when the next one was.
Gwen stayed until the end. She folded the last of the empty kit bags into a neat square and set them on the table.
Then she walked out into the parking lot with me, into that bright, cold March wind, and stood by my car.
“Don’s disability stopped in October,” she said, without any greeting at all.
“They do a review every few years. They lost a form, or he sent it to the wrong office, we still don’t know. It’s been five months. We’ve got an appeal in. They say maybe summer.”
I did not say anything. I let her talk.
“The light bill was three hundred and forty dollars in December,” she said.
“I sat at the table and looked at it, and I thought about your star. I thought, Marla teaches it to everybody for free. She’s taught it at the fair. It’s everybody’s now. That’s what I told myself.”
“Did you tell the others that too?”
She nodded. “I told them you’d always said it belonged to everybody. Sonya asked if I’d talked to you. I said I would. I didn’t.” She wiped her nose with the cuff of the burgundy fleece.
“I kept meaning to. And then it sold so fast. And then it was three hundred, and I couldn’t figure out how you tell somebody that.”
“You walk into a room,” I said, “and you say it.”
She laughed, a terrible wet little laugh. “Well. I did that.”
“You did.”
“I don’t have the money to pay you back, Marla. Not now. I’m sorry. We kept the lights on and we paid Don’s prescriptions and that’s where it went. The girls got five dollars a kit for cutting and I paid for the fabric out of the rest.”