Lisa put her fork down very carefully, the way you set something down in church. Mark looked at the wood paneling like there was a deer head on it he had never noticed. Hannah’s smile stayed on her face, but it had gone thin.
And Wyatt, my big gentle boy who coaches junior varsity wrestling and still calls me on Sunday nights, just looked at his plate.
Nobody at that table knew where to look.
I knew exactly where.
My purse was on the floor by my chair, and inside it was a long white envelope with five thousand dollars in it. Fifty hundred-dollar bills. Craft show money comes in twenties and fifties, a little at a time, but I had the credit union change it so it would fit.
I had saved it over twenty years. I had withdrawn it the day before at the credit union in Viroqua, and the girl at the window had counted it out twice while I stood there feeling foolish and happy at the same time.
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I want to tell you where that money came from, because it matters to what I did.
I started quilting when Wyatt was in first grade. We had waited three years for him, Curtis and me, and when he finally came I quit my job at the bank to stay home. By the time he was six the house was quiet all day, and I was going a little crazy.
My mother had quilted. Her mother had quilted. I had a box of their scraps in the attic and an old Singer that sounded like a tractor. One winter I made a nine-patch for Wyatt’s bed, and a neighbor saw it and asked what I would take for one like it.
I said forty dollars. She laughed and gave me sixty.
That was the beginning. Within a few years I was doing craft shows all over the Driftless. The fall show in Westby, the church bazaars in Cashton and La Farge, the big holiday market in La Crosse, a few summer fairs when I could get a booth.
A good queen quilt took me most of a winter. Hand quilted, they sold for six, seven, eight hundred dollars. The machine-quilted ones went for three or four hundred. Table runners and baby quilts paid for the booth fees and the gas.
Most of the money went where money goes. Groceries, Wyatt’s wrestling shoes, the furnace the winter it quit. But every show, before I did anything else, I took a little off the top and put it in a savings account in my own name.
Some shows it was twenty dollars. One good fall it was six hundred. I never touched it. I didn’t really know what it was for. I just knew it was mine, and it was there.