The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Coffee

I became Berniece’s friend in the winter of 1991, when our children ended up in the same Sunday school class and she came out to the farm to drop off a pie. We drank coffee at my kitchen table. We talked for four hours. By spring she was the first person I called with news, and I was the first person she called with hers.

It was at that table, that first winter, that she said it.

We were looking at a quilt book. She had already made the star for half the county by then, and somebody had asked her about its origin, and she laughed and said, “You know the only thing I’d like to have back? The very first drawing. The one in pencil, with all my mistakes in it. I think it went out with Hollie’s bathwater.”

The cedar chest was in the next room. I could have walked to it in eleven steps.

I said, “Oh, honey.” And I poured her more coffee.

That is the entire sin, and it took about a second. I would like there to be a reason better than the true one. The true one is that by 1991 I had held that paper for four years, and in four years a secret turns from a thing you owe into a thing you own. I had a friend I loved, and a thing of hers she did not know I had. It was the only time in my life I held anything over Berniece.

I did not feel it as power then. I felt it as a warm place. I understand now what it was.

Verdis asked me once, in 2002, in her kitchen, with the radio on, “Did she ever get that star?” I said, “She’s got what she needs, Verdis.” Verdis nodded and went back to her peas. She died in 2009 believing I had handed it over a long time before. I let her.

The Red Ribbons

There is another reason, and it is the one I least want to put in writing, because it sounds small.

I am a better piecer than Berniece Brannock. I will say it, since it is true and nobody else ever will. My points are crisper. My corners match. I can cut a diamond to a sixteenth of an inch and hold it. For thirty years I have entered a Double Wedding Ring in the Marble Hollow quilt show and the county fair, and for thirty years I have taken the red ribbon.

The blue ribbon went to Berniece, and the blue ribbon went to the star. Never for her piecing, but for the star. People said the star had a way about it. They said it was balanced. A judge from Springfield once wrote on her card, This pattern looks like it has always existed, and I stood two feet away and read it, and clapped.

It was like that in everything. At guild, when a new member asked who taught us all, five people said Berniece. When Orris’s mother died, Berniece ran the funeral dinner, and the church said what a blessing she was, and I was the daughter-in-law who stood next to her at the potato salad.

I do not offer this as a reason. A grudge against a woman who has done nothing wrong to you is not a debt she owes. When I decided in 2025 to take her star, I told myself it was a small payment against an old account. I knew it was a lie while I told it. That is the worst part of the whole business. I knew.