The Wedding Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  In the years since, James had taken his hard-earned, well-deserved place within Elm Creek Quilts, second only to Sarah. From the time he was in high school he had wanted to lead Elm Creek Quilts someday, although he had not told Sarah that until his junior year at Penn State, when, after she and Matt spent most of the spring semester encouraging him to find a summer internship, he finally confessed that he didn’t want to work anywhere but Elm Creek Quilt Camp. Since then, he had become Sarah’s most trusted adviser and one of the most popular teachers on the faculty. Sarah marveled at his ability to manage the business, teach, and pursue his own art with equal, effortless ease. Best of all, he was happy in his work, a blessing she knew from her own experience never to take for granted.

  With a sigh, she threw off the sheet and climbed out of bed. She had too much to do and no time to spare reminiscing. Leo’s parents and stepparents would be arriving that morning, and by afternoon, most of the bridesmaids were expected as well. Sarah already had a list of chores for Caroline’s friends—checking over the place cards, assembling programs, filling gift bags, tying bows around wedding favors—and she hoped the young women would be willing workers. Ayana had always been a helpful girl, so Sarah was counting on her, and Gina was as industrious as her mother—but like her mother, she would be busy in the kitchen and couldn’t be spared for other tasks. As Sarah showered and dressed, she considered asking her own friends to pitch in when they arrived in a few days’ time, and decided that whatever the bridesmaids couldn’t finish, she would entrust to her friends. They had already agreed to help her with the Memory Album quilt, and she was sure they wouldn’t mind additional duties.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Anna had set out a continental breakfast, which several of the manor’s residents and guests were enjoying when Sarah arrived. Caroline sat close to Leo in the corner booth with Emily, while Jeremy and Russell sat at the long table discussing a football game. At the other end of the table, Carol sipped a cup of black coffee and worked a crossword puzzle, frowning at the computer pad as if sheer disapproval would transform it into the newsprint she preferred. On the other side of the kitchen, Maggie poured herself a cup of coffee and looked around for the sugar bowl, which someone had moved to the other side of the sink. Gina stood in the pantry with her pad and stylus, examining the shelves and making notes for what in all likelihood was yet another grocery list. James was absent, which Sarah had expected, as he went for a long run every morning before breakfast unless the weather was truly horrific. He was always training for one marathon or another and had a broad interpretation of what qualified as perfect running weather.

  Sarah returned everyone’s greetings and helped herself to coffee and a bagel, which she toasted, spread thickly with cream cheese, and sprinkled with cinnamon. She sat down across the table beside Jeremy, who warned her in a whisper that Caroline had made them all promise there would be no wedding talk at breakfast.

  “She did, did she?” Sarah sipped her coffee contemplatively and glanced sideways at her daughter, who had everyone at her table laughing at an animated story about the mishaps of her fellow medical students as they crammed for a notoriously difficult exam. “Well, I made no such promises, and I have a long agenda to get through before breakfast.” Raising her voice, she said, “If I could have everyone’s attention, there’s a lot to accomplish today, and I’d appreciate your help.”

  While everyone else nodded, Caroline raised her hands as if preparing to cover her ears. “Unless you’re talking about quilt camp or the apple harvest, please, stop right there.”

  “Honey, this is your wedding,” said Carol, astonished and mildly scandalized. “These are your plans for your family and your friends.”

  “I’m just trying to help make sure it all gets done,” added Sarah, “on time and properly, and I can’t do that if you forbid us to talk about it.”

  “Can’t you wait until after breakfast?” Caroline pleaded.

  “And have everyone go their separate ways before I can assign them some work? Not on your life.” Sarah touched the screen of her pad and scrolled to her list. “Let’s start with the rooms. There are fresh linens on all the beds of the second-floor west-wing suites—except those belonging to permanent residents, of course. You’re on your own as usual.” Jeremy laughed. “I need volunteers to help make beds—” She broke off as Caroline suddenly groaned and buried her head in her arms on the tabletop. “Sweetheart, are you sick?”

  “Yes, sick of wedding talk.” Caroline sat up and draped an arm over Leo’s shoulders. “We should have eloped.”

  Leo made a noncommittal sound, neither nodding nor shaking his head, managing to avoid the appearance of choosing a side. A wise young man, Sarah thought.

  “Everyone considers eloping at some point,” remarked Anna, smiling as she leaned against the counter and sipped from a steaming cup of coffee.

  “Usually not so close to the wedding date, though,” said Maggie, a bit warily.

  “This isn’t funny,” said Carol, looking in dismay from her granddaughter to her daughter and back. “What will people say if you elope? They’ll think your family doesn’t want you to marry poor Leo, and we all know he’s such a nice young man.”

  Sarah suddenly imagined Caroline slipping out the back door of the manor before dawn on the morning of her wedding day, Leo trailing after her obligingly with suitcases in hand. “Caroline,” she said evenly, mindful of her mother’s distress, “you may be sick of wedding talk, but many people have gone to a lot of time, trouble, and expense to arrange a lovely weekend for you. Before you consider running off for a quickie ceremony somewhere, I want you to think about how you would feel later, knowing you had disappointed all those people.”

  “We’re not eloping,” said Leo, smiling reassuringly, his dimple deepening. “We’ve spent hours practicing the Viennese waltz, and I intend to show off.”

  “You can show off in Vegas,” Caroline pointed out.

  She could not seriously be considering a Vegas wedding. Sarah took a deep breath and counted to ten silently. By the time she reached seven, she realized that Caroline had no intention of eloping and missing the one day she was guaranteed and entitled to be the center of attention—not that she was ever far from the center on an ordinary day. She just wanted to punish Sarah, a little, for defying the promise she had exacted from everyone else.

  “Sylvia’s mother eloped,” Sarah mused aloud. “Her parents had wanted her to marry another young man, the son of a wealthy Manhattan department store magnate. Actually, originally Eleanor’s elder sister was supposed to marry him, but a few days before the wedding, she ran off with her best friend’s widowed father, who also happened to be her father’s biggest business rival. So, with a wedding all arranged and guests arriving and the merger of family fortunes at stake, they expected Eleanor to step into her sister’s place as easily as putting on the wedding gown she had left behind.”

  Distraction by narrative, a technique Sarah had perfected during the tantrums of Caroline’s truly terrible Terrible Twos, worked its magic yet again. “Her sister eloped with her best friend’s dad,” Caroline paraphrased in disbelief, “so her parents expected her to marry the jilted groom?”

  “Yes, and she would have, except the man she truly loved, Sylvia’s father, arrived in the nick of time to whisk her away to Elm Creek Manor.” Sarah remembered how she and Sylvia had pieced together the story from the scant evidence they had discovered in the attic while searching for Bergstrom family photos to scan in for Melissa’s album. She realized with a bit of a shock that that had been almost twenty-five years before. “Eleanor and Frederick celebrated their wedding here a few weeks later, with the Bergstroms, their family, and friends. Not one person from Eleanor’s side of the family attended.”

  “What happened to the sister?” Gina asked, drawn from the pantry by Sarah’s story.

  “Oh. Well, she and her husband went down with the Titanic, so their elopement story didn’t end quite as happily.” Sarah picke
d up her pad. “Not that anything so unfortunate would happen to Caroline and Leo if they eloped, of course. It’s probably just a coincidence.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to play it safe,” said Carol. “I’m not superstitious, but I’ve never known a wedding celebrated at Elm Creek Manor to end unhappily. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”

  As her mother threw her an urgent look, Sarah hesitated, remembering Sylvia’s sister, and how her Elm Creek Manor wedding had led to the sisters’ estrangement. She also thought of Sylvia’s first marriage, which had been happy indeed but ended far too soon with her husband’s death in World War II. But Sarah offered a half shrug and a noncommittal nod rather than contradict her mother and undermine the power of her words, which seemed to be having the desired effect. She didn’t want to say anything to encourage Caroline to elope, and Carol’s claim was, for the most part, true: Except for those two notable exceptions, all the weddings Sarah knew of that had been celebrated at the manor had led to happy marriages, despite their sometimes inauspicious beginnings.

  Sylvia and Andrew’s relationship was a case in point. Andrew’s children had strongly objected when he announced his engagement to Sylvia, voicing concerns about Sylvia’s health—which was fine, despite the stroke she had suffered a few years earlier—and their advanced ages, which from Sarah’s new perspective didn’t seem so advanced anymore. They insisted that if Andrew chose to marry, they would not attend and give tacit approval to what they knew would be a tragic mistake. Though disappointed, Sylvia and Andrew were not dissuaded—in fact, they moved up their wedding date by several months. Only Sarah, Matt, and the judge who performed the ceremony had been in on the secret that Christmas Eve, when the holiday celebration turned into a ceremony honoring Sylvia and Andrew’s love and commitment. The only shadow upon the evening was the absence of Andrew’s children and their families, but the newlyweds were resolved to win them over in time. In later years, after the breach was mended and all was forgiven, both Amy and Bob admitted that their greatest regret in life was that they had refused to attend their father’s wedding. Privately Amy had told Sarah that one of her greatest joys was that her father had found a second love in his golden years, and that he and Sylvia had made each other very happy for the rest of their lives.

  Anna and Jeremy’s wedding could have been equally fraught with tension, but if anyone adamantly believed they shouldn’t marry, they kept their objections to themselves. Anna was Catholic and Jeremy was Jewish, and both of their families preferred for them to marry within their own faiths. But concerns about religious differences fell into a surprisingly distant second place behind their families’ misgivings about the apparent haste with which the couple had decided to marry. Sarah, too, had been astonished when they announced their engagement a mere handful of months after they had begun dating, but of course, they had been friends for years before their relationship developed into something deeper and richer.

  Anna had liked her neighbor across the hall from the start, from the first brief greetings they exchanged when they happened to leave their apartments at the same time to the numerous occasions he had held the outside door for her when she returned with her arms full of grocery bags. She learned his name when a few misdirected letters ended up in her mailbox, and a quick trip across the hallway to deliver them to him turned into a twenty-minute conversation. Over time, she discovered more about Jeremy in quick, casual exchanges whenever they crossed paths in the hallway or the lobby: He had written his master’s thesis on the battle of Gettysburg, he taught two undergraduate classes at Waterford College each semester, and he had recently passed the candidacy exam to be accepted as a Ph.D. student in the Department of History. She considered asking him over for coffee some evening, but she lost her courage and settled for accidental meetings in and around their apartment building.

  One night in mid-November, Jeremy knocked on her door bearing a large cardboard box and a hopeful expression. The Waterford College Key Club was collecting nonperishable food items to make Thanksgiving baskets for needy families in the Elm Creek Valley, but the carton they had left in their building’s lobby held only a few boxes of pasta, a canister of raisins, and a package of granola bars. Anna was impressed that Jeremy had taken it upon himself to solicit donations door-to-door, so not only did she contribute a few items from her pantry to the carton, she also accompanied him on the rest of his rounds. The evening ended with them back in her apartment baking wholewheat chocolate cappuccino brownies from ingredients Jeremy had spotted on her pantry shelves. They enjoyed the decadent dessert warm right from the pan as they watched the Peanuts Thanksgiving special on television, sitting cross-legged on her sofa, licking chocolate from their fingertips, as comfortable as if they had been friends for years.

  From then on, their accidental meetings in the hall usually turned into lengthy conversations unless one of them was running late, and at least once every two weeks Jeremy came over for dinner or dessert, testing new recipes Anna invented for the restaurant she hoped to open someday. They met less frequently after Anna began dating Gordon—Jeremy thought Gordon was a pompous blowhard, and Gordon didn’t like Anna to pay attention to anyone but him—but they still talked almost every day.

  Anna had been involved with Gordon for more than a year when Jeremy mentioned meeting a beautiful girl at the library, so the sharp sting of jealousy she felt at the news caught her completely by surprise. A few months later, when the stunning auburn-haired beauty moved in with him and turned out to be as friendly, kind, and interesting as she was gorgeous, Anna silently berated herself for not being more delighted for Jeremy, who was, after all, supposed to be her friend. Summer had always been thoughtful and friendly to her, helping her land the chef’s job with Elm Creek Quilts and encouraging Jeremy to drive her back and forth to the manor on days the bus ride would be too inconvenient. Two months later, when Summer suddenly moved out of Jeremy’s apartment and into Elm Creek Manor, Anna naturally assumed they had broken up, but apparently they remained a couple even after Summer’s departure for graduate school in the fall. By that time Anna had broken up with the pompous Gordon, and she was secretly delighted when Summer’s absence gave Jeremy more free time—which he seemed very glad to spend with her. Their old companionship resumed, stronger than ever, and Anna began to think of Jeremy as her best friend, although she realized Summer probably occupied that place of honor in his life.

  Anna was content being just friends for a long time, but eventually she realized she felt much more than friendship for Jeremy, and she suspected he felt the same about her. She tried to conceal her feelings, because if her crush became public knowledge, things could become awkward for her around the manor. Summer and Jeremy remained a couple, at least officially. To Anna, however, it seemed Summer had been pulling away from Jeremy for months, beginning with the day she had moved out of his apartment and into the manor. Moving to Chicago and discouraging him from visiting too often seemed, to Anna at least, another way to distance herself. But Jeremy was determined to make it work, and Anna was determined not to interfere, no matter how much it hurt.

  On one stormy Friday after Thanksgiving, Anna brooded over her unhappy circumstances as Jeremy drove west through an early winter storm to spend the weekend with Summer. Although they never acknowledged any deepening of their friendship, Anna and Jeremy had become very close, closer than mere friends. The day didn’t truly begin until they’d greeted each other with a text across the hallway that separated their two apartments, and the day didn’t feel properly concluded until that last late-night good-night phone call. Jeremy had to be aware that he spent more of his time and attention upon the friend who happened to be a girl than he did upon his girlfriend, but Anna didn’t know whether he had ever asked himself what that meant. Was he really unaware of what Anna felt for him? Had he not figured out that she repeatedly turned down Sylvia’s invitations to move into a comfortable suite in the manor, with no rent to pay and easy access to the kitchen of her dreams, because she
would miss him if he weren’t living right across the hall? Did he not suspect, as she did, that he had begun describing them as “good friends” so often and so emphatically because he was afraid that he had begun to feel more for her than that?

  She realized she had fallen in love with him, and she knew she couldn’t go back to pretending she was content to be no more than a friend. When he called her en route to Chicago, she blurted out that she could no longer be his fallback girl—the lonely girl he called and texted and spent time with because he couldn’t be with his girlfriend, the loyal best friend he ditched when the woman he preferred finally paid attention to him. Completely blindsided, Jeremy protested that he had never intended to treat her that way, and as the conversation escalated into an argument, Anna confessed that she was in love with him. Mortified, she hung up the phone, assuming their friendship was over.