The first Saturday I showed Hannah how to press fabric and how to hold a rotary cutter so she wouldn’t lose a finger. She was nervous with it. Her first strips were crooked, and she apologized about every one.
“Don’t apologize to the fabric,” I told her. “It can’t hear you, and it forgives everybody.”
The second Saturday we worked on the quarter-inch seam. It is the whole secret of quilting, that quarter inch. If you get it wrong by a hair, by the end of a row you’re wrong by an inch. She ripped out a lot of seams that day, and she didn’t cry once.
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By the end of May she had finished a nine-patch table runner, all blues and whites. She took a picture of it and sent it to her mother, and Lisa called me that night to say thank you, and we talked for an hour about nothing in particular.
Curtis started finding reasons to come upstairs on Saturdays. First it was to fix the light over the cutting table. Then it was to bring us coffee. Then he just stood in the doorway and watched, with his arms crossed, asking questions about how much fabric a queen quilt took, and why I bought so much of one color.
One Saturday early that summer he came up with a box from the attic. It was my mother’s scrap box, the one I hadn’t opened in years.
“Thought you two could use this,” he said, and set it on the table, and went back down before either of us could say anything.
Hannah and I went through it piece by piece. Old feed sack prints, faded flannel from my father’s shirts, a scrap of the yellow dress my mother wore to my high school graduation. I told Hannah where each one came from, the ones I knew.
At the bottom there was a little stack of curved pieces, cut and never sewn. Melon shapes and arcs. My mother had started a double wedding ring and never finished it.
Hannah picked one up and held it in her palm.
“Darlene,” she said, “could we finish this one? Together? For the wedding?”
I had to go into the bathroom and run the water for a minute.
We worked on it all summer. A double wedding ring is not a beginner quilt, and I told her so. She didn’t care. I cut the hard curves, and she pieced the arcs, and we used my mother’s pieces and some of Hannah’s grandma’s fabric that Lisa brought over in a grocery sack from Westby.
There were Saturdays in July when it was so hot upstairs that we brought the fan in from the porch and worked in our bare feet. There were Saturdays when Hannah ripped out the same arc three times. She never quit.