Thirty Quilters and a Red Barn Door

Every Friday After That

For the next two weeks, I went out every Friday and did Mom’s hair, and every Friday she told me the same thing without meaning to.

She would mention, in passing, that she had been out with her coffee that morning. She’d say it the way you would mention the weather. Then she would go on to something else.

“You still go out?” I asked her the second week.

“Of course I go out,” she said. “Where else would I drink my coffee?”

“Mom, the quilt isn’t there.”

She looked at me in the mirror I was holding up for her, and her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady.

“I know it’s not there,” she said. “I still know where it is. It’s right under that red. I just say good morning a little louder now, so he can hear me through it.”

I put the mirror down. I had to go stand at her sink and run the water a minute so she wouldn’t see my face.

That was the Friday I decided. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do.

I just knew Mom was 84 years old and her 85th birthday was coming in August, and I was not going to let her spend whatever years she had left saying good morning to a red door.

Ardith

Mom’s quilt guild meets on Tuesday mornings in the church basement, the way it has since before I was born.

There are about thirty of them most weeks. The youngest is 60 and the oldest is Melvina, who turned 90 in March and still drives herself.

I have done hair for half of them at one time or another. Ardith has been the guild president for eleven years, and she has been coming to my chair every other Thursday for nearly as long.

She is 77, a retired dairy herd inspector, and she does not waste words.

When she came in for her color that next Thursday, I told her the whole thing while her foils processed. She listened without saying a word.

When I finished, she sat there in my chair with her head full of foil and her lips pressed into a line.

“That woman painted over Arlys’s star,” she said.

“She didn’t know what it was, Ardith.”

“She knew it was Arlys’s,” Ardith said. “She knew it was on that door twenty years. That’s enough knowing for anybody.”

I told her I wanted to make Mom a new one. I told her I could paint walls but I couldn’t draw a straight line, let alone an eight-point star, and I didn’t know the first thing about the pattern.

Ardith looked at me in the salon mirror for a long minute. Then she said, “You’ll need a sheet of exterior plywood. Not the cheap stuff. The smooth sign board with the paper face, or the paint will raise the grain on you in two winters.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Honey,” she said, “I’m going to tell the guild on Tuesday. After that, you’ll be lucky if you get to hold a brush.”