Thirty Quilters and a Red Barn Door

The Cake

We had cake in the yard after that, with coffee from two big church percolators.

Mom sat in her lawn chair in the middle of it all, and every one of those thirty women came and bent down to hug her.

Melvina came last. She lowered herself into the lawn chair next to Mom with somebody’s help and the two of them sat there side by side, looking up at the barn.

They didn’t say much. They had known each other sixty years. They didn’t need to.

At one point Melvina said, “It’s close to yours, Arlys. The star. It’s very close.”

Mom said, “It’s better than mine. One of my points ran crooked. I never told anybody.”

Melvina laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes.

Percival wouldn’t take a dime for the afternoon. When Mom tried to thank him he took his cap off and turned it in his hands. “Arlys, Elbert pulled me out of a ditch with his tractor in 1979 and never let me pay him either. I figure we’re about square now.”

Coffee in the Morning

I stayed overnight at Mom’s that night, on the pullout couch in her little front room. I hadn’t done that in years.

In the morning I woke up to the sound of her coffee maker and the screen door. I got up and went to the window.

She was standing out on her front step in her robe with her cup in both hands, in the early morning sun, looking across the yard at the barn.

The sun was well up over the corn and full on the barn wall, and the blue and gold were bright as anything against the red.

She lifted her cup a little toward the star, and then toward the red door above it. I saw her lips move. I don’t know what she said, and I never asked her.

Then she came back inside and saw me standing there in my pajamas, and she smiled like she was twenty years younger.

“Good morning,” she said to me. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning.”

Tammy goes to guild on Tuesdays now. She is terrible at laying out the points, Ardith says, but she keeps at it, and Melvina has adopted her the way she adopted Mom sixty years ago.

Tammy is working on a baby quilt for a cousin, in blue and gold.

Every Friday I still go out and do Mom’s hair at her kitchen table. She still tells me, in passing, that she was out with her coffee that morning. Only now she says it with her whole face.

And when I think about that August afternoon, the thing I see first isn’t the quilt going up, or the women clapping, or even Mom’s finger on the initials, though I’ll carry all of that with me the rest of my life.

The thing I see first is my brother on a ladder up the side of a red barn, and a girl from town with her feet planted and both hands on the rails at the bottom, holding the ladder.