Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  It would have been a greater relief if Heidi had limited their contact to the hours they spent within the store, but apparently that was not to be. Gretchen had worked for Heidi for so long that she could hardly refuse to help when asked, not without putting greater strain on an already troubled relationship. And if Heidi more frequently asked her to do unpaid favors outside of the quilt shop, Gretchen never acknowledged that she complied because she was the junior partner, or because Heidi’s daughter was waiting in the wings to buy out her share.

  On the afternoon of Heidi’s party, Gretchen left one of the part-time employees in charge of closing the shop and ran Heidi’s errands at the dry cleaner’s, the bakery, and the florist. Then it was off to the Muellers’ large home in an arboreal neighborhood of Sewickley, where she found a caterer’s truck in the driveway behind a van bearing the logo of a professional housecleaning service. A bit put out, Gretchen went around to the back of the house to her usual entrance, wondering why Heidi had asked her to come over when she apparently already had sufficient help.

  Heidi was in the kitchen instructing the two caterers.

  “Gretchen, finally,” she greeted her, taking the dry cleaning. “I’ll run these clothes up to the master suite so you can get started.”

  “What do you need me to do?” asked Gretchen. “You seem to have everything covered.”

  “You’re right. I’m probably fine, but you know how stressed out I get over Chad’s business parties. It’s easy to throw a get-together for friends, but when the purpose is to impress potential clients …” Heidi ran a beautifully manicured hand through her dark brown pixie cut and sighed. “I still have to shower, and dress, and—well, since you’re here anyway, would you mind taking a walk through the house to make sure everything is spotless? You never know how hired help is going to perform. My mother always said they do worse on important occasions out of spite.”

  Gretchen winced, but the caterers and the middle-aged woman scrubbing Heidi’s tile floor did nothing to indicate they had overheard, although they could not have avoided it. “Of course,” she agreed. Heidi thanked her and hurried off, the recently pressed dress and suit slung over one shoulder, their thin plastic sheathes rustling crisply.

  Feeling foolish, Gretchen strolled through the house going through the motions of inspecting the cleaners’ work. Heidi could easily handle the task herself, but perhaps she sought Gretchen’s professional opinion. She found only two problems so minor that they hardly qualified as problems: The shortest of the four cleaners had neglected to dust a high shelf that Gretchen, too, had occasionally missed back in the day, and an old copy of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine had slipped beneath a sofa cushion in the family room.

  On a closer look, Gretchen discovered that it was not an old issue, after all, but the most recent. The address label indicated that it was the store copy, from the subscription Heidi had ordered for Quilts ’n Things so the four employees would leave the copies for sale in pristine condition on the racks. They had a longstanding agreement that no one could take the store copy home until everyone else had read it, but Gretchen had never seen this issue. Apparently the rule was flexible where Heidi was concerned.

  “Oh, you didn’t need to be that thorough,” said Heidi, entering the room and finding her replacing the cushion. “I can’t imagine our guests will peek under there.”

  “Do you mind if I borrow this?” asked Gretchen, holding up the magazine. “The cover quilt is exquisite.”

  Heidi’s eyebrows rose in muted incredulity. “It’s a little beyond you, don’t you think?” She gestured for the magazine. “I’m in the middle of an article. I’ll let you have it when I’m finished.”

  Gretchen reluctantly handed it over. “The other girls might wonder why it’s not in the break room.”

  “Only if you tell them.” Then Heidi smiled. “Oh, come on. I’m not the first to bend the rules a little. I promise I’ll bring it back as soon as I’m done. There’s a quilt I might want to teach next session. I need to study it for a while and make a sample top.”

  “You could just photocopy those pages.”

  “Gretchen! I’m surprised at you. That’s a violation of copyright law.”

  Gretchen thought the situation was covered under the Fair Use provision, but she did not want to make a fuss that would delay her return home to Joe. She dropped the subject, told Heidi that the cleaners were progressing nicely, and left before Heidi could assign her another errand.

  On Monday morning, she opened the store alone and put on a pot of coffee for early bird shoppers. Heidi’s weekends off had extended into Mondays, but Gretchen did not mind. She rather looked forward to days when Heidi was unlikely to stop by. The shipment of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine arrived midmorning, so Gretchen unpacked the boxes and stocked the shelves, admiring the cover quilt anew. She wondered how long Heidi would hold on to the store’s copy and thought of how they always had one or two of the previous month’s issues left over when the new edition arrived.

  Surely they could spare one copy, just this once.

  At lunchtime, Gretchen left the shop in the care of the part-time helpers, discreetly took a copy of the magazine from the rack, and retired to the break room with her ham sandwich, apple, and pint carton of skim milk. The cover quilt was indeed beyond Gretchen’s abilities, as Heidi had rightly noted; the Grand Prize winner of the Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival had taken its maker nearly eight years to complete. Gretchen would have to content herself with admiring the photograph of the original.

  She spent a half hour pleasantly browsing through the magazine, lingering over the classified section, where she often picked up ideas from other shops or found a bargain. A quarter-page ad immediately caught her attention, and she held her breath as she read that Sylvia Compson’s Elm Creek Quilt Camp was seeking two new teachers.

  Elm Creek Quilt Camp. What a lovely, enchanted place it had seemed to Gretchen five years earlier when she and Heidi had visited. Fortunately, Heidi had declared it a research trip and deducted their tuition and fees from the Quilts ’n Things account or Gretchen would not have been able to afford to go. Heidi had heard about the marvelous success of the Elm Creek Quilters and was exploring the possibility of creating a similar quilters’ retreat closer to home. Gretchen had had a wonderful time, but was not surprised when Heidi concluded that they could not possibly reproduce what Sylvia Compson and her associates had created. “If I had inherited an enormous mansion in the middle of the countryside, I could do it, too,” she grumbled as they drove home. Gretchen refrained from pointing out that Heidi had inherited something very much like it, along with an impressive trust fund. What Heidi lacked was a group of close quilting friends she could rely upon to help run the business as Sylvia had in the Elm Creek Quilters. For all the people who admired Heidi and enjoyed her company, Gretchen was the only person she consistently relied upon.

  How wonderful it would be to become a teacher at Elm Creek Quilt Camp, to work side-by-side with the marvelous woman who had inspired her in college so many years before. She envied the lucky women who would be invited to join that remarkable circle of quilters.

  Then she thought some more. Well, why not? Why couldn’t she be one of those lucky quilters? In fact, this job, coming along at precisely the right time, could be an answer to her prayers. She could make a break from Heidi and yet remain within the quilting world. The ad said a live-in arrangement was possible; living at Elm Creek Manor would fulfill Joe’s dream of retiring to the country. The estate was large enough that they could surely find a place for him to set up a woodworking shop—perhaps in that red barn the caretaker used.

  Gretchen pulled hard on the reins of her wildly galloping imagination. She had not even applied and she was already packing the moving van. It would not be easy to move from the home she and Joe had shared throughout their married life, and at their ages, it would be challenging to put down roots someplace new. When it came right down to it, Joe might not want to
try. She would speak to him before allowing her hopes to rise.

  But she already knew that she would gladly take the least desirable classes at the worst times of the day for the opportunity to become an Elm Creek Quilter.

  At the end of the workday, she bought the magazine and hurried home to show it to Joe. “Huh,” he said, scanning the ad. “What do you know.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “Well …” He searched her expression for the right answer.

  “Looks like they’re hiring in Waterford. Too bad it’s hundreds of miles away. That’s a long commute.”

  “We could move.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose we could.”

  “Joe, I want to apply for this job.”

  He studied her, and she knew he could tell she was serious. “Well, all right then. Give it your best shot. They’d be lucky to have you.”

  The best thing about Joe was that he sincerely believed that.

  Gretchen had not typed a résumé in more than twenty years. She no longer even owned a working typewriter. When Joe agreed that neatly printing her application materials by hand looked unprofessional, she went in early to Quilts ’n Things every day for a week to use the store’s computer unnoticed, though she suffered pangs of guilt for using company resources to obtain another job. She had many lesson plans from which to choose, while three of her favorite students wrote letters of recommendation and promised not to divulge her plans to anyone. Joe was an able photographer and had taken pictures of all Gretchen’s quilts throughout the years. She wished he had not insisted that she pose with them. Compared to the glossy, perfectly lit photos in the quilt magazines, hers always looked like amateur snapshots—which, she supposed, they were. An amateur photographic record of how her quilts had remained timeless while she had aged. She sent off her application with a hope and a prayer.

  Six weeks later, just as she was beginning to wonder if her package had been lost in the mail, a young woman from Elm Creek Quilt Camp phoned to invite her for an interview. She also asked Gretchen to design an original quilt block to represent Elm Creek Quilts. Gretchen planned her design as she made supper that evening: She would take the traditional Oak Leaf block, alter it to resemble elm leaves, and place a Little Red Schoolhouse block in the center. It was so literal and obvious she worried that other applicants might come up with the same idea. She would have to rely upon her precise handiwork to give her the edge.

  It was far more difficult to summon up the courage to ask for the time off so she could travel to Waterford. Gretchen did not know what to tell Heidi.

  “That’s easy,” said Joe. “Lie.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” said Gretchen, surprised that he would suggest it. “I don’t want to and I can’t do it convincingly anyway.”

  “If you tell her you’re going for a job interview, she’ll either fire you or make you so miserable that you’ll wish she would.”

  Gretchen knew that, too. She could not risk the job she had for the one she wanted. Together she and Joe worked out a solution: Gretchen would say she needed the time off for professional development to improve her teaching opportunities. That was true. Misleading and incomplete, but true.

  “Professional development?” asked Heidi dubiously a few days later when Gretchen asked for the time off.

  Gretchen nodded. The phrase was a holdover from her substitute teaching days, the reason many teachers had given for needing her services.

  “You never needed ‘professional development’ before.”

  “I needed it,” Gretchen clarified. “I just never asked for time off for it.”

  Heidi shrugged and granted her the days off, perhaps hoping that Gretchen would return prepared to embrace the way of quick-pieced, rotary-cut, one-day quilts.

  On the day of the interview, Joe offered to drive her to Elm Creek Manor. As much as Gretchen longed for his company and moral support, she knew three hours in the car would leave his back in painful knots. He stowed her overnight bag in the trunk, kissed her, and held her for a long time.

  “Do you have your maps?” he asked, after her gentle reminder that she had a schedule to keep.

  “Yes, honey, but I remember the way.” She gave him one last hug and climbed into the car.

  “Do you have your triple A card?”

  “Yes, and my AARP card and my charge card.” She buckled her seat belt. “And my driver’s license and registration.”

  “Do you have change in case you need to call me?”

  “I have four quarters in my purse,” she assured him. “Don’t worry so much. I’ll be fine.”

  She blew him a kiss as she pulled out of the driveway. He followed the car to the sidewalk and was still standing there when other houses and street signs blocked her sight of him in the rearview mirror.

  Gretchen had not taken such a long car trip alone in many years, not since she gave up traveling to teach at other quilting guilds. A book on tape she had checked out from the library kept her company as the car wound through the familiar, forested hills of western and central Pennsylvania until she reached Elm Creek Manor, nearly two hours before her interview. She parked in the lot behind the manor and listened to the tape until the end of the chapter, then shut it down and wondered how to fill the time. She decided to stroll through Elm Creek Manor and see if anything had changed since her visit.

  Entering through the back door, Gretchen passed by the kitchen and stopped short at the sight. It was in a state of utter disarray, with cupboard doors hanging ajar, dirty pots and pans loaded into the sink, and dishes cluttering every countertop. It was nothing like the warm, busy, cozy place she remembered, and she could not imagine Sylvia Compson standing for it. She hoped the rest of the camp had not experienced a similar decline.

  To her relief, the rest of the manor seemed to be in perfect order. Smiling campers passed her in the halls, chatting with one another or lost in thought as they contemplated the day’s classes. A peek into the banquet hall revealed four young men clearing away the lunch dishes. One dark-haired young man seemed to be in charge, but the others seemed to follow his direction only grudgingly. If they were the new kitchen staff, that would certainly account for the state of the kitchen.

  Gretchen moved on to the ballroom, her favorite place in the manor and where she had spent most of her time during her week at camp. The room bustled with activity, and every glance into a classroom revealed quilters working busily as their instructors demonstrated techniques or strolled past tables checking their students’ progress. A murmur of nostalgia and longing tugged at her. If only, she thought. If only she could get the job, she would belong here. This was where she was meant to be. She could not bear to spend the rest of her days dissatisfied and unappreciated at Quilts ’n Things, or worse yet, set adrift with only the purchase price of her share in the store to sustain her.

  She had lingered long enough in a doorway for the instructor to glance up and catch her eye. “Would you like to come in?” the dark-haired, ruddy-cheeked woman invited.

  Gretchen shook her head in apology and moved on. She left the partitioned section of the ballroom for the dais where, she remembered, a few quilters would often gather to work on their projects when they were not scheduled to be in class. If she could engage them in conversation, she might be able to glean some information about the state of the camp that might help her in her interview.

  Five women had pulled up chairs in a half circle and worked on projects of their own as they offered advice to a younger woman hand piecing a nine-patch block. Gretchen quickened her step; sharing some of her hand-piecing secrets would allow her to join the conversation. But as she drew closer, the quilt draped over another woman’s lap drew her attention.

  “That’s a lovely quilt,” she said, wondering why it looked so familiar.

  The five women looked her way. “Thank you,” said the woman Gretchen had addressed, adjusting her lap hoop to offer a better look. The sense that she was looking upon s
omething she knew well increased, but at first Gretchen could not explain why. Of course she recognized the traditional Dogtooth Violet block, because four years earlier, she had made her own Dogtooth Violet quilt and taught it as a class for advanced quilters. Her fingers had memorized the shape of every triangle, the thickness of the folded seam allowances where they met in the middle of each edge, the precise way to hold the central star when attaching the corner triangles so that the bias edges would not stretch and distort the block.

  But it was more than just the familiar block. Gretchen stifled a gasp. The plum, green, gold, and black batiks that the other woman had used were much more vivid than the muted florals Gretchen had chosen for her version, but otherwise it was the same quilt. Gretchen quickly scrutinized the other woman’s features and dismissed the obvious explanation that she was a former student. Gretchen had taught the class only once; after the first time, Heidi had banned it from the schedule with the excuse that such small classes barely paid for themselves. Gretchen would have remembered if this woman had been one of her eight students.

  But how was it possible that someone she had never met had duplicated her quilt so precisely, down to the size and number of the blocks and the outer border of isosceles triangles alternating in height to echo the Dogtooth Violet shapes? They were traditional patterns; she had not invented them. It was possible that someone else could have made a quilt similar to hers—but identical in every detail except for the fabric?

  The woman misinterpreted her stunned silence. “It’s not as difficult as it looks,” the woman assured her. “The quilt pictured with the pattern was hand pieced, but I machine pieced mine.”

  “Pattern?” echoed Gretchen.

  The woman nodded. “A friend of mine took a class at a quilt shop a few years ago. I kept calling to see if I could sign up for the next session, but they never taught that class again. The quilt shop owner said her teacher wasn’t interested.”