The Goodbye Quilt

by Susan Wiggs

  The music stops and the dancing couples fall still. The singer appears on the corner stage, accompanied by a drummer, a bass player and a woman on keyboard. Applause greets them and we set aside our drinks to listen. She picks up the steel guitar and smiles as they tune up, then places her lips close to the speakers. “Here’s something by a guy I once knew, Doug Sahm, from Kilgore, Texas.” A ringing, sweet melody slides from the speakers as she strokes the guitar.

  It’s the kind of song that sounds fresh, even though we’ve heard it a hundred times before. There’s some thing about good live music that does that to a person. I feel a sense of happiness sprouting from within, and when I look across at Molly, I can tell that she feels it, too. There are very few people you can talk to without words. The fact that my daughter has always been one of those people for me is beyond price.

  I grab and hang on to this moment, because I learned long ago that happiness is not one long, continuous state of being. Like life itself, happiness is made up of moments. Some are fleeting, lasting no longer than the length of a sweet song, yet the sum total of those moments can create a glow that sustains you. Watching Molly, I wonder if she knows that, and if she doesn’t, if it’s something I can teach her.

  Sensing the question in my look, she tilts her head to one side and mouths, “Something wrong?”

  The singer is joined by other band members, and the set segues into a lively swing tune. The volume increases tenfold. I lean across the table. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just wondering if we’ve talked about what happiness is.”

  She cups her hand around her ear and her mouth moves again.

  “Happiness,” I say, nearly shouting. “Do you know how it works?”

  She shakes her head, at a loss, then meets me halfway across the table. “Are you happy?” I ask in her ear.

  She sits back down, laughing, and mouths the words, “I’m fine.”

  Her words remind me that there are some things I’m not meant to teach her. She’ll only learn them by finding out for herself. I can hope and pray that I’ve raised a young woman who knows how to be happy, but I can’t hand it to her like my mother’s button collection, sealed in a mason jar. Starting now, she will have to be the steward of her own life.

  After four songs, greeted with enthusiastic applause, the band takes a quick break and we buy a copy of their CD. The singer smiles a little bashfully and we smile back, two strangers who like the sound of her voice. She signs the case with an indelible marker. “Y’all enjoy that, now,” she says.

  “We will,” I say.

  The waitress reappears, another beer and another 7UP on her tray, even though we didn’t ask for a second round.

  “The gentlemen over there sent them,” she explains, indicating with her thumb and a wink.

  “Oh, uh…” My cheeks catch fire. I can’t bring myself to look.

  The waitress sets down the drinks and leaves.

  “Get out of town,” Molly says. “Mom, those guys sent us drinks.”

  “Don’t make eye contact. And for heaven’s sake, don’t drink—”

  She takes a sip of her fresh 7UP. Watching her expertly made-up eyes over the rim of the glass, I see a whole world of things I haven’t told her, matters that need to be explained to someone who, in so many ways, is still only a child. I’ve had eighteen years to teach her not to accept gifts from strange men. I never got around to doing it. So much of this thing called parenting is a matter of waiting for a situation to arise and then addressing it. Just when you think you have all your bases covered, you—

  “They’re coming over,” she says in a scandalized whisper.

  I want to slither under the table. I’ve never been good in social situations, not with men, anyway. For Molly’s sake I need to get over the urge to slither. This is a teachable moment.

  “Thank you for the drinks,” I tell the older one. He’s maybe thirty, and the way he’s looking at me makes me glad I’m wearing the mom clothes. “We were just leaving, though.”

  “I bet you have time for one dance,” he says, smiling beneath a well-groomed mustache. He looks like the guy in that old TV series, Magnum PI. Magpie, Dan called it. I never did like that show.

  His friend is clean-shaven, late twenties, checking out Molly with an expression that makes me want to call 911.

  And here’s the thing. I can’t call 911. Nobody’s doing anything illegal. It just feels that way to me.

  “My mother and I really need to go,” Molly says, polite but firm as she stands up. She tugs her shirt down, probably hoping they don’t notice her midriff.

  “Just trying to be friendly,” the clean-shaven one said. His buddy seems to be having a delayed reaction to the word mother.

  On the way out, I hand the waitress $20 and don’t ask for change.

  “Okay, that was weird,” Molly says as we step out onto the street.

  “Honey, when a guy approaches you—”

  “I didn’t mean it was weird that they approached me,” she interrupts. “I’m just not too keen on guys hitting on my mom.”

  “Guys hit on women. It’s what they do. They don’t think about whether she’s somebody’s mother. Or daughter, or sister. And when we were in there, all I could think about was whether or not I’ve talked to you enough about staying safe around strange guys.”

  She laughs. “You’re killing me, Mom.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You know everything. Sorry, I forgot.” She doesn’t realize it now, but the older she gets, the wiser I get.

  Something I probably won’t share with her—the last time I met a man in a bar, I married him. Not right away, of course. But there are eerie similarities. The bar was dim, like the one we just left, and—in those days—smoky. Dan didn’t send a waitress to do his work for him. He strode right over to me and said, “Let me buy you a drink.”

  I was too startled to say no. By the time the drink arrived, it was too late. I had noticed his lanky height and merry eyes, the heft of his biceps and the humor in his voice and his mouth, even when he wasn’t smiling. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was love at first sight, but it was definitely something powerful and undeniable.

  He was a guy with clear potential and big plans, and I was a mediocre student at the state college. Less than half a year later, we found ourselves standing face-to-face at the altar, with nothing between us but dreams and candlelight. I still remember our first lowly, undemanding jobs and the way the days melted into a rhythm of partying every weekend, making love before dinner, staying up late and watching edgy movies.

  Then Molly came along, and nothing was ever the same. We thought, at first, that nothing would change. Our denial ran deep; we walked around with her in a Snugli or stroller, pretending she was a fashion accessory.

  Of course, she was so much more than that. She had the power to turn us into different people. We were no better and no worse, but different. She was our happiest, most blessed accident.

  All of which goes to show what can happen when you talk to strange men in bars.

  In the middle of the night, I wake up and blink at my surroundings, my sleep-blurred gaze tracking the seam of the drapes, glowing amber from the lights of the motel parking lot. I hear Molly breathing evenly, sweetly, a sound that catches at my heart now as it did the first time I ever heard it and thought, My God.

  Emotion and memory chase away sleep and I get up, shuffling over to the laptop computer. I touch the keyboard and it wakes up, too. Little boxes tile the screen; Molly was IMing with Travis late into the night. I quickly close the IM windows without reading the text.

  It’s 3:00 a.m., and the internet is there, waiting for me. Following the stream of my own thoughts, I click to site after site, surfing from link to link as though pulling myself along some invisible, unending chain. Ultimately, it’s unsatisfying, filling my head with too much information. Yet it’s given me a huge idea.

  Slipping on a light jacket, I step out into the parking lot with my cell phone. The whole worl
d is asleep. There are no cars on the street, no critters rooting in the trash, no breeze stirring the tops of the trees. I punch in our home number on the cell phone.

  “It’s me,” I say when Dan picks up on the second ring.

  “What?” he asks, grogginess burgeoning to panic. “Where the hell are you? Are you and Molly all right?”

  “We’re fine. We’re in…” I think for a moment. “Ohio. She’s sleeping.”

  “So what’s the matter?” In Dan’s book, if everything is fine with Molly, everything is fine, period. I can hear the bed creak, can picture him rolling over, pulling up the covers. “What time is it?”

  I’m not about to tell him. “Late,” I admit. “Sorry I woke you. I couldn’t wait. Dan, I just thought of something.”

  “What did you think of, Lindy?” He never gets mad when I wake him up out of a sound sleep. I wonder how that can be. Suddenly I wish I was there with him, rubbing his warm shoulders with gentle persistence.

  “We need to get an orphan.”

  “A what?”

  “An orphan. You know, adopt a child.”

  “Huh?” Another creak of the bed, or maybe it’s the sound of Dan, scowling.

  “From Haiti.”

  “Linda, for Chrissake—”

  “No, listen, I found this site on the internet. There are thousands of them, waiting for families. We have so much, Dan. We’re still young. We could give some poor child a chance.

  “There’s one I found named Gilbert. He’s six. He lost his family in the earthquake.”

  “Go back to bed, Linda. It was hard enough raising our own healthy, well-adjusted child.”

  “It hasn’t been hard at all.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  His comment reminds me of their struggles. His frustration, Molly’s tears, the long silences and the breakdowns I used to feel compelled to fix. “We did a great job.”

  “I’m not saying we didn’t. But we’re done. It’s our time now, Linda.”

  “And I want to do something with it, something that matters. Think about it, Dan. These kids…they’re not sick or abused. They didn’t grow up in institutions. They’re kids like Molly, except they had the bad luck to come home from school one day to find that their families were gone.”

  “I’ll send a check to the Red Cross.”

  “They need families. We could—”

  “We could do a lot of things, but adopting an orphan from Haiti isn’t one of them.” He must know how that sounds, because he takes a breath and adds, “Honey, you’re in panic mode over Molly leaving. This is no time to be discussing such a huge undertaking.”

  I pull the jacket tighter around me. Panic mode. Am I panicking?

  “I need a child who needs me,” I blurt out.

  “Lindy. Slow down. What you need is a life of your own.”

  The words fall like stones on my heart. He’s right. He’s right. “I’ll work on that,” I say, feeling a bleak sweep of exhaustion.

  “Have fun on your trip,” Dan says, a yawn in his voice. “I love you both.”

  “Love you, too.” After we hang up, I sit for a while and look at the stars. It’s so quiet I can hear a train whistle blow, miles away.

  DAY FIVE

  Odometer Reading 123,277

  From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.

  —Honoré de Balzac

  Chapter Seven

  “I’m running out of thread,” I tell Molly.

  “We can stop somewhere in the next town,” she says, unconcerned. She is more interested in finding a radio station. We have a rule. Driver gets to pick the music. We’re already bored with our playlists and she’s hungry for something new.

  “This is mercerized thread spun from Sea Isle cotton,” I explain. “It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”

  “I know how cotton is grown, Mom.”

  In quilting, the type and quality of thread you use matters greatly. Just think of all the stitches that go into a quilt. You need the kind of thread that pulls through smoothly, that is strong despite repeated tugging, that will never fray or pill.

  To people who don’t practice the craft of hand-sewing, thread is thread. Therefore, this is far less of a concern than the dearth of radio stations. The FM band yields too much static, and the AM stations are crammed with crop reports or the phony sentiment of country tunes.

  “In pioneer days, mothers and daughters worked on their quilts together,” I tell her.

  “Good thing we’re not pioneers.” A soybean rust update comes on the radio, and she groans in exasperation.

  I tried to get her interested in quilting a time or two, to no avail. She was impatient with the detail and repetition. Our few “lessons” ended with her pricking herself with a needle and sighing loudly with boredom. She usually wound up shooting baskets in the driveway with her dad.

  She fiddles with the dial a bit more, and hits pay-dirt. The announcer’s voice says, “Settle back and enjoy this local favorite, from Beulah Davis and the Strivers.”

  “Hey, isn’t that the group we heard last night?” asks Molly. “Cool.”

  The melody and words are soothing and emotional, and I pause in the quilting to look out the window. It’s a sea of grass, rolling out on both sides, and I imagine Molly and me as pioneers, setting off on a journey into the great, wide unknown.

  I wonder what it was like for those women and their daughters, when their lives took them in different directions. They weren’t able to pick up the phone or log onto the internet and get in touch. Separation meant the possibility of never seeing each other again. I should count my blessings.

  The quilt section in my lap is made of cornflower-blue fabric sprigged with tiny daisies. It was a dress I made for Molly to wear to her very first piano recital, back when she was just eight years old. Her first public performance. What a nerve-wracking day that was. I recall her practicing Bach’s “Minuet in G Major” over and over again until it drove Dan out into the yard with the weed-whacker. And I, of course, couldn’t help tuning in on every note. I adjusted my breathing to the rhythm of her playing and when she hesitated—the long, agonizing pause in the fifth bar as she spread her tiny hand over the keys of a big chord—it made me hold my breath until she found the right notes. When she hit the wrong note I would wince and then remind myself not to do that at the recital.

  The dress was meticulously put together, every stitch in place with hand-smocking across the bodice, the full skirt crisply ironed. She wore white ankle socks and Mary Janes, her hair held back in a blue band, and she looked like a dark-haired version of Alice in Wonderland.

  “I’m not going in.” I can still recall the exact sound of her little-girl voice as she balked at the door to the recital hall. It was an intimidating auditorium, filled with echoes. On the stage, the Stein way crouched like a slumbering black dragon.

  “Okay,” Dan said, immediately agreeable. “Let’s go home.” He had come under duress to begin with and was already chafing in his good shoes and starched shirt. He reached up to adjust the bill of the baseball cap that wasn’t there. “Better yet, let’s go for ice cream.”

  “We can’t leave,” I said, shooting daggers at him with my eyes. “Look, Moll, your name’s already on the program.” I showed her the printed sheet the piano teacher’s son had given us at the door.

  She refused to let go of Dan’s hand. He was her ally and suddenly I was the enemy. We stood on either side of her, locked in a silent tug-of-war.

  Not for the first time, it occurs to me that he was always quick to back off while I played the ogre, pushing her into new situations, sometimes against her will. I wonder if I’m doing that now, pushing her across the country to college. Dan, like Travis, would prefer for her to go to the state school.

  Elsewhere on the quilt is a rosette of red stretchy fabric from the swimsuit she wore when I delivered her to her first swim lesson. At the YMCA pool
, she had clung to me like a remora. Her howl of panic ricocheted around the pool deck, and her slippery, strong little body strained toward the locker room. Dan had rescued her that day, coming out on deck in his board shorts, looking like a hunk on Baywatch as he snatched her up. I was furious with him, but didn’t want to make even more of a scene, so I bit my tongue. He took her by the hand and led her away from the noisy echo chamber of shrieks, punctuated by coaches’ whistles.

  An hour later, I found them both in the rec pool. “Watch me, Mommy, watch!” Molly yelled, and leaped off the side, disappearing under the surface. She sprang up and swam, struggling like a puppy, straight to her waiting father. “See?” she said, her wide eyes starred by wet lashes, “I don’t need lessons.”

  This is different, I thought at the recital. He can’t save her from the piano. He can only help her run away.

  In the end, the decision was taken from all of us. “There you are,” said Mrs. Dashwood, the piano teacher, bustling forward. “Let’s go backstage and get some lipstick on.” The teacher, who had an MFA and the face of a pageant winner, was idolized by her little-girl students. Mrs. Dashwood was wise, too, under standing the power of the promise of stage makeup to distract a kid from fear. She took Molly by the hand and walked her down the sloping aisle of the auditorium.

  Molly glanced back once, her eyes filled with uncertainty, yet she was unresisting as Mrs. Dashwood led her away. I watched the teacher stop at the edge of the stage to point something out. By the time Molly disappeared behind the curtain, there was a discernible spring of excitement in her step.

  I found myself clutching Dan’s hand. I didn’t even remember grabbing it, but I would never forget what he said. Leaning down to kiss my cheek, he said, “Relax. She’s in good hands.”

  “Hey, if it were up to you, she’d be at the ice-cream parlor.”

  “And guess what—the world wouldn’t come to an end.”

  As the youngest on the program, Molly went first. Mrs. Dashwood welcomed everyone, then introduced her. A smattering of applause and a few adoring “Awws” came from the audience, which consisted of carefully dressed parents, grandparents and the occasional doting aunt or restless sibling.