The Quilt I Pieced a Second Time

The Drawing

Rhonda held the ticket up to the light like she needed her glasses to read it. I knew before she opened her mouth that she had already read it down in her lap.

I was standing by the coffee urn in the fellowship hall of Pleasant Grove with a dish towel over my shoulder. Somebody has to keep the pies moving at a fall supper, and that somebody is usually me.

The quilt was spread across two folding tables up front where everybody could see it. Double Wedding Ring, in the soft colors. Butter yellow, a washed blue, and a rose that took me three tries to get right.

I had pieced it all winter at my kitchen table. Every curved seam of it. There is not a harder pattern we do.

Rhonda cleared her throat into the microphone. She ran the raffle every year, and she liked the microphone more than she liked the raffle.

“Well, folks,” she said, “we sold a lot of tickets for this beautiful quilt. The money goes to the furnace fund, so give yourselves a hand.”

People clapped. The furnace at Pleasant Grove is forty years old and groans like a tractor in January. The furnace fund is a real thing, and I was glad for it.

The hall was full that night, the way it gets the second Saturday in October. Ham and scalloped potatoes, three kinds of bars, coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.

The men sat together down at one end talking corn prices and the Hawkeyes. The little ones ran between the tables until somebody’s grandmother caught an arm.

I knew nearly every face in the room. I have washed dishes beside most of these women for thirty years. That is what makes a thing like this cut the way it does.

“The winner of the quilt,” Rhonda said. She paused the way she pauses. “Is Katie. Katie Vorhees.”

For a second nobody moved. Then the Vorhees table in the back stood up all at once.

Katie put both hands over her mouth. Rhonda beamed out over the crowd like a woman handing out her own good fortune.

Katie is Rhonda’s daughter. She is twenty-three and getting married in June.

I kept my hand on the coffee urn because it was warm. Because I did not trust my hand to do anything useful just then.

I smiled. I have been a Christian woman for fifty-two years and I know how to smile with nothing behind it.