The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Kits

It was Devona’s idea, though she would not want me to say so, and I will say so because it is true. Her granddaughter Tinley set up a little shop on the computer, selling crocheted baby blankets, and one Tuesday at guild Devona said, “People pay forty dollars for a quilt kit online. Forty dollars, for some fabric and a sheet of paper.”

The room went quiet. I could feel five women thinking the same thing.

“What would we cut?” Ladonna said.

“We’ve got the star,” I said.

I remember the way nobody objected. Iona said, “Berniece gives it away.” Nadyne said, “She’d say yes in a second.” Ladonna, who is the most honest of us, said, “We ought to ask her,” and I said I would, after Branson, once we knew whether it was worth the fuss.

I did not talk to her after Branson.

Tinley made the shop. We called it Hickory Ridge Quilt Kits, after the ridge behind our barn. We bought good cotton wholesale in Joplin: navy, cream, the pink of a dogwood in April. I cut the kits at my kitchen table, three layers at a time, and bundled them in tissue.

For the pattern sheet I needed a master. Every woman in the county has a tracing. I could have taken the one on my own sewing room wall.

I opened the cedar chest instead.

The freezer paper had gone the color of weak tea. The pencil was still dark, the pie plate circle still exact, the dogwood in the center drawn the way a young woman draws a flower she is looking at through a window in winter. I laid it on the glass of Devona’s scanner and I did not breathe.

The fifth point had its hitch. I thought, I should fix it. I did not. For one afternoon I wanted to hold the real thing and have it be mine, so I printed it as it was, with Designed by Hickory Ridge Quilt Kits in script across the top, and told myself that was only business.

We took sixty-one kits to the craft show in Branson on the eighteenth of October last year and sold every one by Sunday noon. I counted the money in the truck: two thousand four hundred and forty dollars. I put the cigar box in Orris’s lap, and he did not say anything, and for the first time in a year his hands were not shaking. The next morning I put two thousand dollars toward the hospital at the billing window in Springfield, and sat in the truck in the parking lot and laughed.

That is how it started. Over the next eleven months the website and the Branson shows and the church bazaars sold three hundred and forty kits. Thirteen thousand six hundred dollars. After the fabric, the printing, the booth fees and the postage, there was $8,700 left. The other four took a thousand dollars each, and I took the rest, $4,700, because I cut and I counted and I carried the weight, and because the hospital had to be paid.

Every Tuesday, I sat across from Berniece at the cutting table, and passed her the cream.