Curtis shook his head. “No,” he said. “There wasn’t another way. If you’d waited till we got home, the kids would’ve gone back to La Crosse thinking his own father thinks he’s spoiled. You fixed it before it set.” He let out a breath. “Like a stain.”
He pulled into the yard and shut off the truck, and we sat there in the dark for a minute with the engine ticking.
“Twenty years,” he said. “Five thousand dollars in quilts.”
“More than that,” I said. “That’s just what I kept.”
He reached over and put his hand on my knee, the way he used to when we were young and driving home from dances.
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“I’m going to call him tomorrow,” he said. “And I’m going to call her too.”
He did. He called Wyatt after church on Sunday, and I heard him from the porch, walking around the yard with the phone to his ear. I didn’t listen to the words. I didn’t need to. I could hear in his voice that he wasn’t giving a speech.
Then he called Hannah. That one was shorter. When he came back in, his eyes were wet, and he went straight to the barn and didn’t come back for an hour.
The next week he drove up to La Crosse by himself on a Thursday evening and took the two of them out for burgers. He never told me what he said. Wyatt told me later it was the first time in his life he’d heard his father say the words, I was wrong.
About two weeks after the supper, Hannah called me on a Tuesday night.
“Darlene,” she said, “this might be a strange thing to ask.”
“Ask it,” I said.
“Would you teach me to quilt?”
I had to sit down. I was in the kitchen, and I pulled out a chair and sat in it like I’d been pushed.
“My grandma, Lisa’s mom, was going to teach me,” she said. “She kept saying when you’re older, when you’ve got time. And then she got sick, and then she was gone, and I never learned.”
She stopped for a second. “When you put that envelope on the table and said it was your quilt money, I thought about her. I thought, I’m marrying into a family with a quilter in it. I don’t want to miss it twice.”
“Honey,” I said. “Come Saturday. Bring a sack lunch. We’ll start with a nine-patch.”
She came that Saturday, and the one after that, and nearly every Saturday through the whole spring and summer.
My sewing room is the little bedroom at the top of the stairs. It has a long table Curtis built me out of an old door, a cutting mat, the good machine I bought with quilt money ten years ago, and my grandmother’s Singer in the corner, which still works if you talk to it nicely.