The Quilt Money on the White Tablecloth

Lisa came up a few times too. She couldn’t sew, she said, but she could thread needles and tell stories, and she was good at both. The three of us sat in that hot little room and talked about our mothers, and I learned more about Hannah’s family in one summer than some people learn in ten years.

We hand quilted the last of it in the evenings in August, Hannah on one side of the frame in my living room and me on the other, Curtis in his recliner pretending to watch the Brewers.

On the last night, Hannah tied the final knot and buried the thread, and Curtis got up out of his chair without anybody asking and came over and looked at it for a long time.

“That’s something,” he said. That was all. From Curtis, that is a speech.

The wedding was the third Saturday in September at Hannah’s family’s Lutheran church in Westby, with the reception at the community hall. It was a beautiful fall day, cool in the morning and warm by noon. The maples along the coulee roads were just starting to turn.

They did have a band. And a photographer. And a dessert table with seven kinds of bars that the church ladies made, including the scotcheroos, which went first. They did not have a barn. Hannah said she liked the hall better anyway. Her parents had their own reception there thirty years ago.

Hannah wore her grandmother’s veil and a dress she’d bought with some of my quilt money. She told me that in the church basement before the service, while I was pinning a flower on Wyatt.

“Your money’s in the dress,” she said. “And in the band. I wanted you to know where it went.”

The quilt was on a stand by the gift table at the hall. Somebody had made a little card for it in nice handwriting. It said, Pieced by Darlene, Hannah, and two grandmothers who didn’t get to finish.

I didn’t see that card until after supper. I had to step outside for a few minutes when I did.

Then came the toasts.

The best man went first, one of Wyatt’s wrestling buddies, and he told a story about a road trip to Iowa that I am still not sure I wanted to hear. Mark gave a short, sweet toast about watching Hannah grow up. Everybody clapped.

Then Curtis stood up.

I hadn’t known he was going to. It wasn’t on the program. He had his tan sport coat on, the same one from the Bluff View, and he took the microphone from Mark and held it like it might go off.

“Most of you know me,” he said. “I’m the guy who tells you your soil test came back bad.” A few people laughed. “So I’m used to giving people news they don’t want.”

He looked over at the head table, at Wyatt and Hannah.