The Quilts They Threw Away

What Brent Said

The dumpster had come on Monday, after Loyal flew home, and the first load had already gone out. I had not known, because I was at my sister’s in Eau Claire seeing her through a knee replacement. I drove back Wednesday night in the rain and went by Perl’s Thursday morning, to do the violets.

Behind me, a truck door slammed.

“Ma’am, you can’t be in that.”

It was Brent, coming up the driveway with a phone in one hand and a coffee in the other, in the same vest. He looked at the quilt in my arms, and I watched his face do the arithmetic.

“Where are the rest of them?” I said. “There are fifty quilts in this house. For the babies at Pinewood. Where are they?”

“I’d guess they’re in there.” He tipped his coffee at the dumpster. “That’s the sewing room, most of it. Bagged it last night. It all goes out at two.”

I could not speak.

“Ma’am, I understand it’s sentimental. But I was given authority to clear the property. It’s fabric. It’s forty-some bags of fabric and a hundred and eighty dollars of dumpster, and I don’t bill by the sentiment.”

“They are quilts for newborn babies,” I said.

“Sure. And I’m sure they were very nice.” He took a sip. “But let’s be real. Nobody at a hospital is going to put a dead woman’s homemade blanket on a premature infant. Think about the germs. They’d throw it out the minute you drove away.”

I have been called stubborn and prim and, once, by a state inspector, “a gentle terror.” I have never been as angry as I was in that driveway, with the cold wet weight of that quilt against my chest.

A few things were in my mouth. What I said, out loud, in a voice from somewhere I did not know I kept, was, “Brent, I am going to stand right here.”

“That’s trespassing. I have a client’s authorization.”

“Then call somebody.”

“The hauler’s coming at two.”

“Then I will stand right here until two.”

He shrugged, the way you shrug at weather, and walked back down the driveway with his phone at his ear. I heard him say, “Yeah, it’s a neighbor lady. No, I don’t think she’ll be a problem. She’s sixty, seventy.”

Seventy. I am sixty-three.

That, I will admit, made me angrier than the germs.

The Prayer in the Driveway

I laid the wet Lone Star over the rim of the dumpster as gently as you would lay a baby in a basket. I put both hands flat on the cold steel side. I closed my eyes, and I prayed.

I did not pray anything pretty. I was shaking, and I said what a person says when she has run out.

“Lord, I don’t know what to do. I’m one woman with a coffee can of quarters in her purse. Those are Perl’s babies in there, and You know whose they are. I can’t get them out, and I can’t leave them. Please. Send me somebody. Send me anybody.”

And because He already knew it anyway, I added, “And please do something about my temper.”

When I opened my eyes, I called Marge. She answered on the second ring, because it was Thursday and she was already in the church basement setting up the frames.

“Marge. It’s Zona. I’m at Perl’s. They threw the quilts in the dumpster.”

There was a silence. It was not a long one.

“Which ones?” said Marge.

“All of them.”

“I’ll call Dorothy,” said Marge, and she hung up.

That was the whole telephone call. In a town this size, when Marge calls Dorothy, Dorothy calls Linda, and Linda calls her sister at the school, and the school calls the feed store, which has four men with nothing to do until noon. In nineteen minutes by my watch, the first car pulled in.

It was Marge herself, in church pants and a quilted jacket, driving her son’s pickup because her own eyes are not what they were. She climbed down with a walking stick, looked at the dumpster, looked at me, and said, “Move over.”

Then Dorothy in her Oldsmobile. Linda in her minivan with a stack of folded tarps. Nancy, who is seventy-one and has a hip she is not supposed to be using. Carol, in her barn coat. Eleven women of the Thursday circle in all, in sensible shoes, gathering in a loose ring around the mustard-colored dumpster.

Then three men from the feed store showed up in Carhartts, with a stepladder.

I looked at the sky and said, “Thank you.”