Karen was almost afraid to meet the Elm Creek Quilters’ eyes after she finished reading. Too much information, she decided. They probably thought she was a font of ingratiating rhetoric, spouting praise in order to win herself an interview. What they could not know was that she meant every word of it. That letter had been the easiest part of her application to complete because she had written from the heart.
“Thank you,” said Sarah. “Does anyone else have anything to ask Karen?”
Karen took a deep breath to steady her nerves as Gwen continued the interview. She answered the remaining questions with Lucas on her lap and Ethan by her side. Occasionally Ethan piped up with responses of his own, which were invariably more insightful and wittier than her own. Lucas took a liking to Gwen’s daughter and initiated a game of peek-a-boo, burying his face in his mother’s shoulder, peeking out to catch Summer’s eye, laughing, and hiding his face again. At Sylvia’s prompting, Karen showed them her Elm Creek Quilts pattern and quilt block, which they added to her portfolio. She felt a glimmer of pride when they praised the artistry of her design and the ingenuity of the foundation paper piecing construction, but she doubted that that small demonstration of competence would be enough to win them over.
They shook hands all around at the end of the interview, but Karen did not bother to ask when she might hear from them. She packed the diaper bag and led the boys from the parlor to a bathroom a few doors down, in the west wing, where she changed Lucas’s diaper and asked Ethan to try, just try, to go potty before they returned to the car.
As she washed her hands, she looked at herself in the mirror over the sink to see if she looked as hopeless and miserable as she felt. That was when she saw the Cheerio clinging to her bangs, slightly off-center above her forehead.
She gasped and brushed it out of her hair. How long had it been there? Immediately she guessed it: since Lucas’s lunch. She had sat there on the phone trying to reach Nate, paying no attention as Lucas flung cereal across the room.
That explained Sylvia Compson’s odd question about whether she had fed her children and her inexplicable gestures at the start of the interview.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she wailed. Sylvia’s all too subtle gestures aside, everyone she had seen since lunchtime had allowed her to walk around with cereal clinging to her bangs.
“Tell you what?” asked Ethan, drying his hands on a paper towel.
“That I had a Cheerio in my hair! You must have seen it. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried to.”
“When?”
“When you buckled me in the car and when I was on the potty at McDonald’s. You seemed busy and mad so I didn’t want to talk.”
Karen closed her eyes and sighed, remembering. “Honey, I know I was impatient then, but I really, really wish you would have told me.”
“I thought maybe you wanted it there.”
“Why would I have wanted a Cheerio in my hair?”
He shrugged. “It looked pretty.”
Karen could not think of any possible response to that, so she shook her head in disbelief and led the boys from the bathroom. When they passed the friendly woman in the tan suit on their way to the front doors to the manor, the woman said, “I hope your interview went well.”
“I hope yours goes better,” Karen replied wearily. The woman peered at her inquisitively and seemed on the verge of speaking, but just then the parlor door started to open. Karen quickly scooted the boys outside rather than face any of the Elm Creek Quilters again, pausing only long enough to fetch the stroller.
“Mommy, can we play in the water?” Without waiting for an answer, Ethan raced across the veranda and down the stairs toward the fountain in the center of the circular driveway.
“Look both ways before you cross,” Karen called after him, although the driveway was lightly traveled compared to the road leading to the parking lot behind the manor. Her car was the only one parked in the circle. The other applicant, whom Karen could not help thinking of as the Cookie Lady, must have parked in the rear lot as Karen was supposed to have done. The Cookie Lady was probably at that moment making a wonderful impression on the Elm Creek Quilters. She would never know how Karen had set the stage for her, how she had made herself the ideal act to follow.
She set down Lucas and struggled to collapse the tandem stroller so that it would be easier to carry downstairs.
“Oh, dear.”
At the sound of the voice, Karen glanced down the veranda and spotted the white-haired woman who had greeted them when they first arrived at Elm Creek Manor. She was seated in an Adirondack chair a few yards away, a quilt block in one hand, a threaded needle in the other.
“Is something wrong?” asked Karen as she carried the stroller to the grass below.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing wrong,” the white-haired woman said, holding up the quilt block and shaking her head in consternation.
Karen checked on Ethan, who was happily throwing leaves into the fountain and following their progress through the whorls of water. Assured that he was occupied, she scooped up Lucas and went to see what was the matter. “Maybe I can help.”
“Oh, would you try, dear?” The woman smiled gratefully before gesturing to the center of the block. “I can’t get this edge to lie smooth no matter what I try.”
Karen pulled up a chair beside her, set down Lucas, and leaned over for a closer look. “I’m not that great at hand appliqué,” she said apologetically, studying the Rose of Sharon block. Despite the woman’s frustration, the block seemed nearly halfway completed. “I’m more of a fusible-webbing, machine-zigzag stitch kind of appliquér. But maybe …” She reached for the block. “May I?”
“Of course.” The woman handed it to her.
Karen flipped it over and examined the stitches on the back. They were tiny, neat, and even. “I don’t think the problem is your needlework. Your stitches are excellent. Maybe it’s the appliqué. Did you baste the edges of the circle in place before you began sewing?”
“Of course.”
“As I said, I’m no expert, but whenever I appliqué circles, I always cut a template out of cardstock, and then cut a circle from my fabric an eighth to a quarter of an inch larger. Then I place the template on the wrong side of the fabric, thread my needle, and take small running stitches in the fabric circle all the way around the edge, leaving longer tails at the beginning and the end.” Karen demonstrated the movements with an imaginary needle and the woman’s cloth. “Then I pull gently on the thread tails, drawing the fabric circle around my template. That makes a circle with perfectly smooth edges.”
“What an ingenious idea,” exclaimed the woman.
“I can’t take credit for it. I read it in a book or a magazine somewhere. After I have my circle, I press it flat with a hot iron and use my sewing machine to baste the edges in place until I appliqué the circle to the background fabric.”
“Do you sew right through the cardstock with your machine when you baste?”
Karen shrugged and returned to the quilt block. “I might not if I had a top of the line machine, but mine is secondhand and tough—built to withstand just about anything, but without all the fancy computerized stitches. There’s not much I can do to hurt it.”
“Well, thank you very much.” The woman patted the quilt block as if to reassure it all would be well. “I will have to try that.”
Rising, Karen nodded to the front doors of the manor. “I’m sure one of the Elm Creek Quilters could show you how.”
“I’ve no doubt one of them could. Have a safe trip home, dear.”
“Thanks.” Karen scooped up Lucas and carried him on her hip as she went to join Ethan at the fountain, pushing the stroller along before her. Why had she bothered to bring it? It was one more bead on a string of bad decisions. Her sense of failure and impending rejection, which had ebbed as she chatted with the white-haired woman, suddenly returned in a torrent. Discouraged, she allowed t
he boys to play near the fountain for a few minutes longer, concealing her disappointment and weariness behind smiles and encouragement for their game. Then she coaxed them back into their car seats and drove home.
The boys had slept too much that day to fall under the spell of the car’s motion another time, so although Karen longed to be alone with her thoughts, she gave in to Ethan’s requests for stories and sang along with the CD as they wished. She owed them after dragging them through that debacle. She also owed them supper, and she was not in any hurry to get home.
When they reached the outskirts of State College, she pulled over at an Eat ’N Park and treated all of them to buttermilk pancakes. The boys bounced happily on the padded vinyl seats of their booth and made sticky messes of themselves with the maple syrup, but they charmed the waitress as well as several nearby diners and Karen’s heart lifted each time they made her laugh. She even ordered a Dutch apple pie to go before remembering that Nate did not deserve his favorite treat, not that day and possibly not for the rest of their marriage. But she was not bold enough to ask the waitress to remove the charge, so she paid the bill, cleaned the boys with wet wipes, and took them home.
Nate was waiting for them on the front stoop. As she drove past him into the garage, she glimpsed his expression, somehow both wary and resolute. He met her at the car door before she turned off the engine.
“How did it go?” he asked, backing away from the door as she opened it.
“How did it go?” She could not even look at him. She opened Lucas’s door and unbuckled him from his car seat. “I had to take two small children on a job interview. How do you think it went?”
Nate went around to the other side of the car for Ethan. “If I could have gotten out of that meeting—”
“You could have.” Carrying Lucas, she reached into the front seat for the pie. She brushed past Nate and went into the house. “Like you said, you made your choice.”
“I put an existing full-time job ahead of a potential part-time job. I’m sorry, but from where I stand, that looks like the only logical choice.”
She slammed the pie box on the kitchen counter and glared at him. He carried the diaper bag and her briefcase, which he set on the floor. He reached for Lucas but she would not hand him over.
Ethan followed a pace behind his father. “We were good, Mommy. Even Lucas. Except for the Cheerio. You said.”
His words abruptly drained the force of her anger. “Yes. You were both as good as I could have expected. You did what I asked and you used good manners. Thank you.”
Ethan beamed and ran off to the living room. A second later, she heard PBS Kids on the television. Lucas squirmed until she set him down, and he toddled off after his brother.
“Karen, I said I was sorry.”
“If you don’t want me to work, why not just say so?”
A muscle in his jaw tightened and relaxed. “I did not deliberately sabotage you and you know it.”
“One day, Nate. I asked for one day.”
“And I had every intention of giving it to you, but I couldn’t.
Honey—”
He reached for her, but she avoided his touch and fled downstairs to the basement, where she sat on the folding chair in front of her sewing machine and covered her face with her hands so the boys would not hear her cry.
Anna
Olive oil, roasted red pepper, rosemary, basil, sea salt, a pinch of white pepper, and—and what? What had she forgotten? With no time to rummage through her notes, Anna closed her eyes and willed the recipe to emerge from her subconscious. It wasn’t her fault she was unprepared. This was supposed to have been her night off, but when her boss called and asked if she would be willing to take over the provost’s dinner for several important college donors, she told him she would be there in ten minutes. For months she had begged him to entrust her with a special event like this one. She had assisted senior chefs for years and was eager to try her hand at the head chef position. As she raced from her apartment to the kitchen of the banquet room of Nelson Hall, where the guests were due to arrive in less than two hours, she ran through the menu given to her over the phone. It was not difficult, and she was confident she could handle it even on such short notice. Then she arrived at the kitchen to discover that two of her work-study students had failed to show and the fresh vegetables her predecessor had requested from the College Food Service’s prep room in South Dining Hall had arrived frozen. By the time she sorted out that mess, she was a half hour behind schedule. Ordinarily she thrived on improvising in the face of unexpected complications, but today, the additional stress made her head ache.
Ideally, she should set the sauce aside for a half hour to allow the flavors to blend, but she had run out of time and would have to serve it as is—if she managed to finish it at all. “What did I forget?” asked Anna, thinking aloud, not really expecting an answer.
“Thyme,” replied her favorite work-study student, almost at her elbow. “You added thyme when you made this for Junior Parents’ Weekend.”
“Of course. Thyme.” Anna measured the last of the herbs into the processor and punched the blend button. “Thank you, Callie.”
“Whatever,” said Callie, trying unsuccessfully to conceal a grin of pleasure. Unlike the rest of the crew on duty that night, Callie had a passion for food and was not simply putting in hours to earn textbook and beer money. She watched everything Anna did and asked admiring questions, making Anna feel almost as if she had a protégé. Sometimes Anna was tempted to encourage Callie to enroll in a culinary institute after graduation, but she worried that Callie might be insulted. Just because Anna had no idea what anyone would do with a degree in American Studies did not mean that it was not useful. What would she know about it? She had known she wanted to be a chef since the seventh grade and had never explored other options. According to her boyfriend, Anna had a disgraceful tendency to be skeptical of any education that was not immediately practical, but she was working on it.
“The provost set down his salad fork,” remarked another student, peering through the round window in the kitchen door instead of stirring the chocolate sauce for the raspberry tarts even though Anna had already asked him twice. He was a business major and considered such mundane tasks beneath him because he believed he was destined to become the CEO of a major international corporation before reaching his thirties. He didn’t need to learn how to cook; he needed to observe the wealthy donors dining with the college provost because one day he would be among them.
Make yourself useful, Anna silently ordered him, but she said, “Do they look like they’re ready for the main course?”
“I … think so.”
“Okay. Just a minute.” Anna took the pitcher of herb sauce and hurried to the gleaming stainless-steel counter where her assistants were spooning wild rice pilaf and sautéed vegetables onto warmed plates, assembly line fashion. “Where are the salmon fillets?”
“Here,” said Callie, removing the first of several trays from the broiler.
Anna gestured to Callie and the laconic observer by the door. “Callie and Rob. Get the salmon on the plates.” Something in her tone made even Rob promptly obey. As soon as each fillet was in position, Anna dressed it with sauce. “Okay. Servers, come and get ’em. And take care of the head table first this time, please?”
She had little time to talk except to issue instructions or urge a server to hurry. She had scarcely enough time to monitor the progress of the meal in the banquet room on the other side of the door, but she found moments where she could. Her position in Waterford College’s College Food Services could rise or fall depending upon the diners’ response to her entrée.
Occasionally Rob returned to the window in the door to describe the progress of the meal. “The provost just tried the fish. He’s smiling. So is the guy next to him.”
“On which side?”
“Um, his right. Our left.”
Anna closed her eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief. That �
�guy” was the college’s most generous donor. If he was happy with the meal, she could consider it a successful evening even if the kitchen caught on fire.
She couldn’t relax until after dessert was served, when all she had to worry about was keeping the servers circulating with coffee and making sure they refilled the cream pitchers and sugar bowls and didn’t confuse regular with decaf. Despite its inauspicious beginning, the banquet appeared to be a success.
Afterward, the provost came into the kitchen to congratulate Anna on a job well done. “Glad to help,” she said, and she was pleased when he continued on through the kitchen, where her student workers were busy cleaning up, to thank them as well. It was common knowledge on the Waterford College campus that working for food services was the lowest of the low as far as work-study jobs were concerned—minimum wage for menial tasks and, except on special occasions such as this, the indignity of cleaning up after their more fortunate classmates in the dining halls. A word of thanks and a handshake from the provost was a nice perk, and Anna was so relieved to have survived the evening that she intended to provide her students with another: all of the extra desserts they could carry back to the dorms.
Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters Page 11