Later that night, Pauline received a response from Daria, her predecessor as treasurer.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Fwd: Your e-mail
I’m so shocked I don’t even know what to say. You didn’t do anything to deserve this sort of response. I need to think this over carefully. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? In the meantime, try to get a good night’s sleep. Thank you again for being treasurer. We all (well, almost all) appreciate it.
Daria
The next day was a Saturday. While Ray shuttled the kids back and forth to their weekend sports and clubs and activities, Pauline moped around the house, attending to neglected chores and waiting for the phone to ring. Before Daria could keep her promise to call, Jeanette showed up on her doorstep, unexpected but very much welcome.
Pauline invited her in, poured them each a tall glass of sweet tea, and led her outside to the back porch. When Pauline asked about her vacation, Jeanette offered a few brief, hasty anecdotes before jettisoning any pretense that this was an ordinary social visit.
“I can’t believe what Brenda wrote to you,” Jeanette said, fuming. “Well, I can believe it, since I know Brenda and I saw the e-mail, but still, I can’t believe it.”
“I know what you mean,” said Pauline glumly. “I don’t know if my response made things any worse, but it definitely didn’t make them any better.”
“Pauline . . .” Jeanette hesitated. “Is there some reason why you reminded her about her late payment in the weekly update sent to the entire guild rather than writing to her privately?”
“She never responds to the e-mails I send her privately.” Pauline lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap, helpless. “And I do mean never. In all the time I’ve been treasurer, I’ve sent her what has to be hundreds of overdue-payment reminders, and she’s never once replied. I’m never even sure that she receives them.”
“Oh, she receives them, all right,” said Jeanette grimly. “She never responded to Katie, either.”
“Katie?”
“She was the treasurer before Daria. She moved to Texas before you joined the guild.” Jeanette picked up her glass, which was misty with condensation, but she didn’t drink. “Okay. Here’s what I think, for what it’s worth. I think Brenda believes you wanted to publicly humiliate her, to get back at her for paying late.”
“That wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want to punish her. I just wanted to get her to pay, and since she seemed to resent my reminder e-mails, I thought I would just add it to the weekly update as a casual, breezy aside.” Pauline hesitated. “And okay, maybe I wanted everyone else to know how late she was, but only to put the pressure on so she would pay before we lost the discount.” The way things were going, that outcome seemed inevitable. “I never intended to humiliate her. Honestly, I didn’t think she was capable of being humiliated.”
“I believe you,” Jeanette said. “I’m just trying to explain how Brenda probably sees it.”
“If this had been the only incident . . .” Pauline began, thinking aloud—and then the whole story came tumbling out of her: Brenda’s perpetual tardiness, her unresponsiveness, the number of times Pauline had paid her way and had not always been reimbursed. As she spoke, Pauline realized for the first time just how long the unpleasant situation had been going on, and how many times she had forced a smile and dealt with it rather than encourage Brenda to dislike her even more than she already did. Why had she put up with it so long?
All at once, she was struck by the realization that she didn’t want to anymore.
Jeanette took in the whole sorry tale, and when it was over, she took a deep breath, puffed out her cheeks as she exhaled, and said, “Look, you need to talk to Daria.”
“I sent her an e-mail. She said she would call. But really, I think the damage has been done.” Pauline steeled herself. “Brenda’s right about one thing. I should step down as treasurer.”
Jeanette put a hand on her arm. “Oh, no, Pauline, please don’t make any rash decisions when you’re upset. You’re the best treasurer we’ve ever had. You’re the most organized person I’ve ever met. I’ve never heard anything but praise for you and the job you’re doing.”
“You must not have included Brenda in your poll.”
“Before you make any decisions, talk to Daria. I think you’ll find she has similar stories to tell.”
And Daria did.
After a few days of playing phone tag, Pauline learned that Daria’s experience with Brenda mirrored her own. Brenda had paid all her fees late, if she paid at all; she had ignored Daria’s increasingly tentative reminders; and she generally had made Daria’s tenure as treasurer miserable, driving her to quit and pass the job, gratefully and guiltily, to Pauline. “I should have warned you what you’d be dealing with.”
“It’s okay,” Pauline told her. “I would have thought you were exaggerating, and I would have accepted the job anyway.” She had enjoyed being treasurer, and if not for Brenda, she would enjoy it still. She was good at the job and she liked making an important contribution to the guild.
Brenda had taken all that away.
Daria sighed. “I was in office three months before guilt got the better of Katie and she confessed that her husband had made her quit.”
“What?”
“It’s true. When Brenda’s payments were overdue, Katie would charge them to her credit card, and she often didn’t get reimbursed in time to pay off the bill. Her husband got so fed up with all the late fees that he finally put his foot down and said that if she wanted to stay in the guild, she couldn’t be the treasurer anymore.”
“Wow.” Pauline tried to imagine Ray ever ordering her to do anything and failed. “I guess he’s the boss of her?”
“He had good reason to be upset.”
Pauline couldn’t deny that.
Daria had more stories that echoed Pauline’s own experiences, and she predicted that Brenda would pay the day before the Château Élan’s deadline arrived. She would pay at the last minute and not a second sooner because she wanted to make a point, because she could, because it would drive Pauline crazy, and because it was as far as she could go without inflicting any lasting harm upon the guild and turning the others against her.
And so she did.
Pauline couldn’t figure out how Brenda had been allowed to get away with her behavior so long. She had been the bane of many a guild treasurer, compelling two that Pauline knew of to step down, and yet no one had held her accountable. No one had been willing to confront her or tell her that her behavior was unacceptable—no one except Pauline. But Pauline didn’t want to engage in pointless squabbling or browbeat Brenda into following the guild rules. Brenda was an adult; she ought to be able to do what was right and follow the guild rules just like everyone else.
Pauline hoped that resigning from the treasurer’s position would alleviate the knot of tension that tightened in her gut every time she thought of Brenda and the Cherokee Rose Quilters, but it didn’t. Tensions grew as Jeanette and Daria told other members about the conflict, forwarding e-mails and repeating conversations and sharing their own Brenda stories.
The growing divide in the guild dismayed Pauline, but she couldn’t see any way to stop it from widening. She skipped the next monthly meeting, unwilling to go through the motions of the evening’s business as if nothing had happened. She also doubted her ability to get through the meeting without telling Brenda, in front of God and the Cherokee Rose Quilters and any unfortunate passersby, exactly what she thought of her.
Daria agreed to take over the role of treasurer until Pauline wanted the job back, a qualifier Pauline tried to get her to drop since she had no intention of returning to office. She felt tired and sad, and she felt even worse when, after her third skipped me
eting, Daria sent her an e-mail lamenting Pauline’s absence, denouncing Brenda’s behavior, and declaring her intention to call a vote and demand that Brenda be expelled from the Cherokee Rose Quilters so that Pauline could return.
Pauline’s heart sank. If Brenda were expelled, her closest friends—because she surely had some—would likely go with her. Who knew how many others might follow them out of sheer disappointment that the guild had allowed personal conflicts to tear them apart? The Cherokee Rose Quilters might not survive the schism, and then all the good they had done—supporting those in need, introducing the art of quilting to schoolchildren, inspiring quilters to strive for greater mastery of their beloved craft, preserving and celebrating Georgia’s rich quilting heritage—all of that would be over.
It never should have come to that. Why had no one in Brenda’s long history with the Cherokee Rose Quilters held her accountable for her behavior? Daria fired off angry e-mails about hypothetical votes, but throughout the whole sordid affair, no one—not Daria, not Jeanette, not the guild president—had sat Brenda down, told her that she had behaved badly, and asked her to make it right. Brenda would never do so without prompting—strong, insistent prompting. She still didn’t believe she had done anything wrong, and unless and until she did, Pauline could count on more of the same bad behavior from her every day they both remained Cherokee Rose Quilters.
Eventually, reluctantly, Pauline realized that the only way to save the Cherokee Rose Quilters would be for either Pauline or Brenda to quit. And since Brenda was certain to stubbornly hold on to the guild as long as there was breath in her body, Pauline had to be the one to go.
Jeanette tried to talk her out of it. Daria tried even harder. Pauline’s loyal daughter declared that Brenda ought to be the one to go and that Pauline ought to let Daria call for that vote. Her faithful son agreed.
“Don’t throw yourself on your sword for her sake,” Ray told her. He adamantly believed that she shouldn’t let one nasty, mean-spirited person drive her out of the Cherokee Rose Quilters, a group she was so proud of and loved so dearly.
“Don’t you understand?” Pauline choked out. “It’s because I love the group and—almost—all the people in it that I have to quit. I can’t see it fall apart all because of me.”
“It’s not all because of you,” Ray corrected gently. “It’s because of her.”
“Well, she’s not going to do what’s necessary to hold it together, so I have to.”
Ray took her in his arms and held her as her tears began to fall. “If you’re sure this is the right thing to do, sugar, then do what you gotta do. Whatever you decide, I’m with you all the way.”
Pauline was grateful for that, because she felt as if she were losing a part of herself. And although she knew it was for the greater good, she was as angry as she was sorrowful, because she had given up something very dear to her—and Brenda had won.
It seemed like she cried for a week, but then, drained and miserable, she resolved to pull herself together. She rejoined the Sunset Ridge Quilt Guild and signed up for a kickboxing class at the gym to fill the hours she had once spent balancing the guild’s books. From time to time she and Jeanette got together for lunch or an afternoon of companionable quilting. At first Daria and the other guild members in the know pleaded with Pauline to come back, insisting that things just weren’t the same without her. The few guild members who remained blissfully unaware of the conflict had somehow got it into their heads that she was too busy with work to attend guild meetings anymore, and they wrote to express sympathy and hopes that her workload would ease up soon.
Pauline was surprised that they hadn’t learned the real reason for her departure through the grapevine and that they had seized upon her job as the explanation for her extended absence. The emergency call center was the one workplace in her long employment history that had never required her to take work home at the end of the day. Did her friends really believe that the operations center was so overwhelmed that it had begun routing emergency calls to its employees’ cell phones after hours?
The very question exhausted her, so in a way it was a relief when the e-mails and phone calls stopped coming. “We’ll keep your place vacant for a while,” the guild president promised in her last message, but Pauline knew they wouldn’t hold it for her forever. As long as Brenda remained in the guild, Pauline couldn’t bring herself to return.
She tried to move on, but as November approached, Pauline’s thoughts turned to the Château Élan retreat, which always fell on the first week after Thanksgiving. It pained her to think of all the work that went into running a successful retreat and how she could not pitch in to help. She thought of all the lovely quilts that would be made that week, and how much money they would raise for worthy and important causes.
The Cherokee Rose Quilters gave so much to their community, to their state, to the world of quilting. That had always been what Pauline admired most about them. And now, they continued their good works while Pauline stood on the sidelines, watching and missing them and wishing she could help.
Ray noticed her melancholy deepening, and he worried about her. He tried to cheer her up with flowers and candy and dinner dates and sweet notes tucked into her lunch sack, but although she appreciated them and adored him for trying, nothing worked.
Finally Ray pointed out something that should have been obvious. “You know, sugar, you don’t have to be a Cherokee Rose Quilter to give.”
And of course, he was right.
Pauline had heard about Elm Creek Quilt Camp and Quiltsgiving some time ago, although she couldn’t remember where—perhaps from a feature in Quiltmaker magazine, perhaps from a quilter she had met at the Château Élan. She studied their website with Ray peering over her shoulder, barely able to contain his eagerness. This, he surely thought, would perk up his darling wife. This would do the trick.
And so it had, at least a little. Looking forward to her week away had lifted her spirits. Upon her arrival, she had discovered that Elm Creek Manor was lovely and safe, the quilters gathered within its gray stone walls kind and generous. The thought of making quilts to comfort children in need eased the pain in her heart and helped her see her own disappointment in a different light.
Her sacrifice had kept the Cherokee Rose Quilters together. Their good works would continue, and Pauline could do good works of her own, on her own.
But somehow she sensed that among the Elm Creek Quilters and their campers, she would never be entirely alone.
“Pauline?”
She started and turned toward the voice to find Linnea studying her worriedly. “Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
“Of course. I’m fine.” Then Pauline noticed that Gretchen was watching her from the front of the classroom, her brows drawn together in concern. The other students had already packed up and were filing from the room. Quickly Pauline jumped up and began loading her things into her tote bag.
“You’ve been staring into space for quite some time,” said Jocelyn.
“Waiting for inspiration to strike?” asked Michaela.
Pauline forced a laugh. “You guessed it. Sadly, my muse decided not to put in an appearance this morning.”
From the back of the room came a laugh. They all turned to find Karen Wise smiling their way. “She’ll turn up,” Karen promised, slipping the straps of her tote over her shoulder. “This is Elm Creek Manor, after all. Inspiration is never far away.”
Suddenly Pauline found herself smiling, her melancholy lifting.
She didn’t doubt Karen for a moment.
CHAPTER THREE
Linnea
O ver lunch—the campers had been offered a choice between a vegetable curry with basmati rice or a chicken and pesto panini, and Linnea had chosen the sandwich, grilled to perfection—Linnea, Mona, and Pauline discussed their first Giving Quilt class and conclud
ed that the Resolution Square quilt was charming, Gretchen was a lively and encouraging instructor, and they were unanimously pleased that they had signed up for the course.
“After lunch, I think I’m going to go back and cut enough pieces for a second quilt,” said Pauline thoughtfully as they cleared away their dishes and left the banquet hall. “Maybe even a third, each in a different color palette. How are you two going to spend the afternoon?”
“I brought a stack of Girl’s Joy blocks from home,” Linnea said. “They’ve been sitting in a box at the back of my closet for years, so I’m finally going to sew them together and give the finished quilt to Project Linus.”
Mona declared her intention to curl up in a chair by the ballroom fireplace with a good book and read to her heart’s content, a luxury usually denied her back home, where her four sons’ cheerful, boisterous activity rarely gave her a moment of quiet solitude. Pauline seemed disappointed that the sisters wouldn’t be joining her in the classroom, so Linnea quickly suggested that they meet in the lobby at five o’clock and have supper together. Brightening, Pauline agreed.
“I like her,” Mona remarked to her sister after Pauline departed.
“So do I,” said Linnea. Pauline was funny and endearingly eager to please, but she seemed rather lonesome. Linnea wondered why she had skipped her own guild’s annual retreat in favor of Quiltsgiving at Elm Creek Manor, but it was obvious that Pauline didn’t want to talk about it, so Linnea had to leave her insatiable curiosity unsatisfied. Perhaps by the end of the week, Pauline would open up and share her story with her newfound friends. In the meantime, Linnea would try to cultivate patience.
The sisters returned upstairs, Linnea for her quilt blocks and Mona for her book, and before long they found themselves back in the ballroom, where, from the sound of things, Pauline was not the only student hard at work behind the partitions that marked the walls of the classroom. While Mona settled down in her fireside chair with a contented sigh and turned to the first chapter of her novel, Linnea carried her blocks and tote bag full of supplies to one of the sewing stations set up on long tables near the tall windows that looked out upon the rear of the manor, where a few small, icy snowflakes drifted lazily in the breeze. She exchanged brief, cordial smiles with the campers sewing industriously at the stations to her left and right, and then set herself to work, sewing Girl’s Joy blocks into rows, pressing the seams, and sewing the rows together.
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