Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Late morning sunlight broke through the leafy wood as the road forked just ahead. By longtime habit Judy took the left branch, which led to the rear parking lot. The narrow road wound through the trees and emerged beside a sunlit apple orchard, then curved around past a red barn, climbed a low hill, and crossed the bridge over Elm Creek. All at once the manor came into view—three stories of gray stone and dark wood, its unexpected elegance enhanced by the rambling natural beauty of its surroundings.

  She had passed those fond, familiar landmarks a hundred times each summer, but already they seemed to belong to someone else.

  On the other side of the creek, the road broadened and became a parking lot circling two towering elms. Judy pulled to a stop next to Andrew’s enormous motorhome and climbed the stone steps to the back door. She smelled eggs, sausage, and biscuits as soon as she set foot inside the manor, but when a glance through the kitchen door revealed only stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, a cluttered countertop, and an unswept floor, she continued down the hall to the front foyer, where she found Sarah, Sylvia, and Summer setting up for camper registration. As the three members of the faculty who lived in the manor, they were usually the first to arrive at any Elm Creek Quilters’ gathering at the manor, but not always. Some evenings Summer rushed in late for evening programs after a dinner date with her boyfriend, Jeremy, and for the past few weeks, the usually punctual Sarah had dragged herself downstairs for morning meetings, barely on time and looking a little green. If Judy didn’t know her friend so well, she’d worry that Sarah was hung over, the way she clutched her stomach and nibbled on only a few dry crackers for breakfast. She had apparently given up coffee, too, but surely the effects of caffeine withdrawal would have faded by now and couldn’t account for her rough mornings.

  This morning Sarah seemed her usual, cheerful self as she glanced up from her work and threw Judy a grin. “Thank goodness, another pair of hands.”

  “Where do you need me?” Judy asked. “Should I start in the kitchen?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Sarah. “Let the delinquents clean up the mess. That’s their job.”

  “Delinquents” was a harsher term than Judy would have used for the three young men who had worked for them all summer, but she couldn’t deny that they deserved it. Earlier that spring, in an act of bewildering cruelty, the three seniors from Waterford High School had broken into, robbed, and vandalized Bonnie Markham’s quilt shop. So thorough were they in their destruction that Bonnie was forced to close the shop for weeks. When she reopened for a going-out-of-business sale, she barely earned enough to pay off her outstanding debts. After Bonnie lost her lease, Sylvia proposed opening a new quilt shop in Elm Creek Manor, but Bonnie had yet to act on the proposal. At first Judy thought her friend was merely waiting for the insurance check, but the funds had sat untouched in her savings account for several weeks now, collecting interest. Perhaps Bonnie realized any other shop would be a poor imitation of the business she had built from the ground up. Perhaps she was saving the insurance money for another, yet undiscovered dream.

  After the boys had been caught and forced to face up to their crime, Bonnie—dear, compassionate, forgiving Bonnie—had asked the judge for leniency. The boys had never been in trouble before, and all three had intended to start college in the fall. She couldn’t bear to think that their future prospects were ruined because of one very bad mistake.

  “They threw those futures away when they broke into your shop,” said the judge, who had expected Bonnie to demand justice and restitution. Impressed by her pleas, he relented and sentenced the boys to probation and community service, which they would serve at Elm Creek Manor. He would consider the terms fulfilled after the boys earned back every cent they had cost Bonnie.

  “But that will take years,” burst out Mary Beth, mother to one of the offenders. “Anyway, her insurance will pay for everything.”

  The judge regarded Mary Beth over the rims of his glasses. “What an astonishing sense of entitlement given the circumstances. I’m beginning to see why your son is here today. If it takes years, so be it. They can come back every summer and every school holiday until the debt is paid.”

  Mary Beth had had the good sense to look chagrined and she uttered not another word of protest. Bonnie was satisfied with the decision, and Sylvia had readily agreed to her part in seeing to it that the young men fulfilled their sentences, but most of the Elm Creek Quilters thought they had not been sufficiently punished. “If they showed one sign of remorse, just one,” Sarah had grumbled to Judy earlier that summer as she ordered her reluctant new employees outside to scrub out garbage cans. “Working instead of enjoying a carefree, three-month-long summer vacation isn’t a punishment. It’s normal life for most of us.”

  Judy agreed, and she, too, had saved the worst, dirtiest, and most tedious jobs for the vandals without a single twinge of conscience. And she had to admit that all three had worked hard that summer, probably harder than they had ever worked in their lives. She couldn’t say whether they were genuinely remorseful or just sorry that they had been caught, but she knew that few young men had ever had more reason to welcome the approach of autumn.

  Leaving the kitchen to the young men, Judy joined in helping her friends prepare for registration. They arranged the long tables on the black marble floor and set up the usual stacks of forms, chatting companionably, occasionally glancing at the tall double doors in case an early arrival surprised them. Invariably, some eager quilter wouldn’t be able to wait for the first day of camp to begin at noon. Once a camper had entered through the back door at nine o’clock in the morning and had sat alone in the kitchen, sewing a quilt block and helping herself to the coffee still in the pot from Sarah and Matt’s breakfast. The Elm Creek Quilters didn’t discover her there until it was time to prepare lunch.

  A few veteran quilt campers preferred to drive around back, park their own cars, and enter through the back door as that early arrival had done, but most preferred to use the front entrance and have Matt or Andrew valet park for them on the first day. Judy understood that, especially for new campers, it was the approach that mattered, the sense that they had arrived at another, separate, sheltered, and sheltering place, a haven from the chaos and disappointments of ordinary life. As their vehicles emerged from the leafy wood, the gray stone manor suddenly appeared, steadfast and welcoming, surrounded by a lush green lawn. Then the newcomers would spy the wide, covered veranda whose columns spanned the front of the manor. As they drew closer, they would see the twin arcs of the stone staircases descending to the driveway, which encircled a fountain in the shape of a rearing horse, the symbol of the Bergstrom family. Judy enjoyed watching campers take in the scene for the first time, awestruck and thrilled that they would be able to spend a week in such a grand place. Judy still experienced that same thrill, even though Elm Creek Manor had become as familiar to her as her own home. Sometimes it felt like her true home, the home of her heart.

  One by one the other Elm Creek Quilters arrived. Gwen, her gray-streaked auburn hair rippling in thick waves down her back, made a dramatic entrance in a swirl of long batik skirts and the clinking of beaded necklaces. Diane appeared soon after, tall and blonde and enviably slender, clutching a coffee cup and scowling as if she had been dragged unwillingly out of bed only moments before, although Judy was certain she had already done Pilates, prepared breakfast for her husband and two sons, and shepherded the whole family to nine o’clock Mass. With Diane came Agnes, Sylvia’s sister-in-law, her snowy curls as neatly arranged as if she had left the hairdresser only moments before. Her blue eyes were bright and guileless behind oversize pink-tinted glasses as she surveyed the preparations and immediately took charge of room assignments, a task everyone agreed she handled better than anyone. Although Sarah did her best to accommodate every camper’s special requests as soon as their registration forms arrived in the mail, sometimes mistakes occurred. Other times the campers did not make their preferences known until they stood in the
foyer. A quilter might need a first-floor room, only to discover that she had been given the key to a third-floor suite and that all first-floor rooms were booked. Two campers might decide on the way over from the airport that they wanted to room together, and roommate assignments would have to be shifted quickly and delicately, without hurting anyone’s feelings. Agnes, with her perfect combination of diplomacy and amiable resolve, deftly spun solutions that made everyone feel as if they had received the best part of the compromise.

  Bonnie arrived last, and with only moments to spare, breathless and red-cheeked from her sprint from the rear parking lot. The other Elm Creek Quilters would have forgiven her no matter how late she came, and not only because she had the longest commute. After her soon-to-be-ex-husband changed the locks to their condo and badgered her into selling it, Bonnie had lived with Agnes for a while before finding an apartment of her own in Grangerville, ten miles from Waterford. Agnes had enjoyed Bonnie’s company and had urged her to stay on at her home near the Waterford College campus, and Sylvia had offered her one of the manor’s coziest suites for as long as she liked, but Bonnie insisted on proving that she could survive on her own.

  “Prove it to yourself or to Craig?” Diane had asked.

  “A bit of both,” Bonnie had replied. She and Craig had had their difficulties through the years, but Judy knew Bonnie had never expected to find herself spiraling into divorce at her age, her business in ruins. She deserved better.

  The Elm Creek Quilters fell into their usual roles, the anticipation that heralded every new week of camp rising as the hour approached. Judy collated maps of the estate with class schedules and descriptions of their evening programs, Agnes and Diane arranged fresh flowers from the cutting garden in each suite, and Gwen paired room keys with quilters’ names. Bonnie and Summer inspected the classrooms to be sure that sewing machines, lights, and audiovisual equipment were in working order, while Sarah and Sylvia supervised and helped out wherever needed. Matt and Andrew stood ready to park cars and assist arriving guests with their luggage.

  “I bet you won’t miss this chaos,” Diane remarked in passing as their deadline approached.

  Judy managed a smile, but fortunately Diane hurried off without waiting for a reply. Judywould miss it, every frazzled, haphazard, crazy bit of it. How many people had the chance to create a thriving business from scratch with her best friends? Every bit of effort, every drop of sweat, every moment of worry had been worth it. She knew that as an empirical fact when she heard Sarah recite her financial reports at their board meetings, but she felt it as a certain truth when she saw women transformed by a week at quilt camp. They arrived stressed, tentative, uncertain; they departed refreshed and happy, with a new confidence in themselves and their ability to create beauty, comfort, and warmth for themselves and those they loved. Sylvia often remarked that the Elm Creek Quilters performed minor miracles every day. To Judy, the real miracle was how a former Vietnamese refugee, forced to flee Saigon as a child after her American serviceman father abandoned her and her mother, had traveled the long and winding way that led her to this place, to these beloved, wonderful people.

  On the opposite side of the table stood her best friend among them, Gwen Sullivan. Like Judy, Gwen was a professor at Waterford College, but since the American Studies faculty kept offices in the liberal arts building on the other side of campus, their paths rarely crossed during the course of an ordinary day. When school was in session, they met every Tuesday for lunch at a small café across the street from the main campus gate. Judy wondered who would occupy the seat across from Gwen at their favorite corner table when the new semester began.

  Gwen must have sensed Judy’s gaze upon her, for she glanced up from her work and smiled. “Are you all packed?”

  “Far from it.” The family had so much work left to do before the moving van pulled out of their driveway that Judy became lightheaded just thinking about it. “Are you offering to help?”

  “Sure. I’ll gladly take charge of packing your fabric stash.”

  Judy laughed. “I bet you would, and all of my best batiks would mysteriously end up in your car instead of the moving van.”

  “Good morning, everybody,” someone called out behind her. Judy turned, expecting to see their first camper of the day, and instead discovered Anna Del Maso standing at the entrance to the west wing hallway. Behind her stood Summer’s boyfriend, Jeremy, tall, dark-haired, scholarly, and, Judy remembered, Anna’s across-the-hall neighbor in their downtown apartment building.

  Judy had completely forgotten Anna was due to start today.

  “Jeremy was kind enough to drive me so I didn’t have to carry grocery sacks on the bus,” Anna said, still lingering on the edge of the foyer. “We let ourselves in through the back door. Was that all right? Maybe we should have knocked first, but Jeremy said no one would hear us and I wanted to get the groceries put away.”

  “Of course you didn’t need to knock.” Sylvia crossed the foyer and greeted the newcomer with a fond hug. “We’re not so formal here, as you’ll soon discover. Elm Creek Quilters come and go as they please.”

  “That’s what I told her,” said Jeremy. “Is Summer around?” When several Elm Creek Quilters pointed to the classroom, he gave Anna an encouraging smile and went in search of his girlfriend.

  As Anna thanked Sylvia for the welcome, Gwen seized her by the shoulders and kissed her dramatically on both cheeks. “You are now an official Elm Creek Quilter. Use your powers only for good.”

  Startled, Anna burst out laughing. “I will. Thanks. I’m glad to be here.” She glanced around the circle of welcoming faces, and Judy suddenly realized that she alone had held back, standing on the bottom step of the grand oak staircase and clutching the banister as if she would bar entry to the secret realms upstairs. She forced a smile, but it was too late. Anna had already looked away.

  “I thought I would set up the lunch buffet.” Anna deferred equally to Sylvia and Sarah, as if she were not exactly sure who was in charge. She had the tall, robust, dark-haired beauty and passionate gaze of an opera singer. Ever since Judy had met her at her job interview earlier that summer, she had half-expected Anna to burst into a Puccini aria at any moment.

  “You want to get right to work, don’t you?” said Sarah, beaming with relief.

  “I thought I should allow enough time to find all the dishes and correct my mistakes,” Anna continued, with an apologetic laugh that suggested she didn’t expect to make any. “Were you thinking inside or outside? That north patio would be a lovely spot, and the weather’s perfect for anal fresco lunch.”

  Judy felt a thrill of alarm and indignation. The campers weren’t supposed to set foot on the cornerstone patio until the Candlelight ceremony that evening after the Welcome Banquet. Anna was only ten minutes into her first day, and already she wanted to jettison their beloved traditions.

  “We’ll have lunch inside,” Sarah said, taking her arm. “I’ll come to the kitchen with you to show you where everything is.”

  As they disappeared down the west wing hallway, Gwen remarked, “Thank the goddess our macaroni and cheese days are over.”

  Diane glowered, but remarkably did not retort. She was convinced Gwen’s references to a female deity were only meant to annoy her, but Judy had discussed religion, politics, and every other conceivable subject with Gwen so often that she knew Gwen spoke from true feeling. Still, Gwen did refer to “the goddess” more often when Diane was around, although Judy wasn’t sure Gwen was aware of it.

  At five minutes to noon, one of the tall double doors opened and three quilt campers in matching fuchsia T-shirts entered, chattering happily and pulling their luggage along behind them. Bonnie and Summer hurried forward to help them carry their suitcases up the four marble stairs, designed in the days before anyone gave a thought to wheelchair accessibility. Judy took her seat at the registration table and assigned their first guests of the week to their rooms—two of them together, the third in a single next door.
As she placed the keys in their hands, the door opened to more campers, and then, for the next two hours, they came at such a steady pace that Judy hardly had a moment to reflect upon her last registration day. Which was all for the better, she thought, rising as Diane offered to take her place so Judy could break for lunch. If she marked every last this and that of her final week as an Elm Creek Quilter, she might not be able to go through with the move.

  From the registration table, Judy had overheard campers exiting the banquet hall in absolute raptures about the lunch. Anna had promised a simple, cold buffet, so Judy had naturally expected cold cuts, rolls, and pasta salad. What she saw arranged on the linen-draped table by the windows made her gasp in amazement. There were fixings for sandwiches, to be sure, but also six different tantalizing salads; a beautiful fruit tray with two sauces, yogurt and ginger; and a several-tiered arrangement of whimsically frosted cupcakes for dessert. The meal put Judy’s wedding buffet to shame.

  Attending to the buffet in a white chef’s coat, her long, dark brown hair twisted up beneath a tall white toque, Anna spotted Judy rooted in place and bit her lip in worry. Judy roused herself and forced a smile as she gathered up a plate and silverware.

  “Is everything all right?” Anna asked. “I could have done some chicken satays or California rolls—”

  “It’s perfect just the way it is,” Judy interrupted. “It couldn’t be nicer.”

  But I could be,she thought as Anna breathed a sigh of relief and went to answer a camper’s question about the gluten-free vermicelli. She couldn’t blame Anna, who wasn’t even Judy’s official replacement. Judy was wrong, wrong, wrong to envy Anna for what awaited her, the friendships, the discovery of the beauties of the Elm Creek estate, the sense of belonging and accomplishment. Judy had enjoyed it all, and now it was Anna’s turn.

  She filled her plate with a small portion of each salad, unable to choose among them, then made her way across the room to a table of quilters who were waving frantically for her to join them. Although they were first-timers, they recognized Judy from her photo on the Elm Creek Quilts website, and three of them planned to attend her borders and bindings workshop the following day. They peppered her with questions about the class—and about the mysterious initiation ceremony they had heard other campers whispering about in the foyer.