The True Love Quilting Club

by Lori Wilde

  “I don’t know what would have happened if Nina hadn’t intervened. I still don’t know why she did that.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you it’s nice to have you back again, for however long you’re here.”

  “It’s nice—if somewhat different—to be back in Twilight. I missed it more than I realized.”

  “Good night, Trixie Lynn,” he murmured, “and welcome home.”

  Home.

  It sounded so good. But she wasn’t going to fool herself into thinking she belonged here. She knew she did not. She’d lived here for one short year of her life. That didn’t make it home.

  She pressed her ear against the fence, listening to the sound of Sam’s footsteps climbing his back steps. She heard the back door creak open, then shut closed. “Good night to you, Sam Cheek. Sweet dreams.”

  Then, battling an unwanted nostalgia, she picked up her script and went to bed with visions of Jon Grant and Rebekka Nash swirling in her head.

  The next week and a half passed in a blur of activity. By day the Twilight Playhouse bustled with activity as the cast (mostly drama students from Tarleton who eagerly worked for free) rehearsed and the crew (mostly local tradesmen volunteering their time) built sets. By evening Emma quilted with the True Love Quilting Club, learning far more about the art of quilting than she ever dreamed possible. And by the dark of late night, she read her lines through the backyard fence with Sam.

  It surprised Emma how much she looked forward to the nightly quilting bees. The women of the True Love Quilting Club were warm, funny, accepting, and generous. They filled her in on all the town news—who was in the hospital with what disease, who was pregnant, who was getting married, who was getting divorced, who’d passed away. They were wise and witty and warm. They teased and argued and debated and celebrated. They were good listeners too, encouraging Emma to tell them about New York as they labored over the quilts. Nina seemed particularly hungry to hear stories of the theater. Asking about the plays she’d seen, the people she knew.

  Within a matter of days Emma felt as if she’d been living in Twilight her entire life, as if the past twelve years in Manhattan were nothing but a faraway dream. They made her feel comfortable and safe, which was saying a lot about them. But feeling comfortable made her uneasy, which was saying a lot about her. She’d suffered many losses in life, had struggled hard with little reward. She didn’t trust comfortable. It was really just chaos lurking beneath a smiling face. Sooner or later it would all be taken away. Getting too comfortable here was a big mistake and she knew it, but when they smiled at her, she was like a cold, wet kitten to a warm, dry hearth.

  They taught her how to quilt. Not just how to sew, but how to create. She learned that basically a quilt was nothing more than a bunch of squares called blocks all sewn together and that each block had three layers. The top layer was the pretty pattern, the inside layer was the padding that made the quilt soft, and then there was the quilt back. But they were also true quilt artists, going beyond the traditional quilts to make contemporary art. The idea was to start with the traditional quilt and gradually get more intricate and complex as the world they lived in (and the wars Twilight had fought in) grew more intricate and complex. They started first on the quilt featuring the War Between the States and the subsequent reunion of the first sweetheart lovers, Jon and Rebekka.

  “How’s the play shaping up?” Belinda asked Nina and Emma the Friday after their second week of rehearsal.

  “We’re finding our sea legs,” Nina said at the same moment Emma enthused, “I love it.”

  Finding our sea legs? What did that mean? It sounded like Nina didn’t think the rehearsals were going as well as could be expected. That surprised Emma because she’d found herself easily slipping under the skin of Rebekka Nash. She’d done a little research on the first lady of Twilight and discovered that she and Rebekka had a lot in common. They’d both been only children and they were redheads. Rebekka had lost her mother at a young age and she’d been raised by an emotionally distant father. That strummed a chord in Emma.

  Rebekka had been an unusual woman for her time, preferring to stay single instead of settling for a man she did not love. Tough and strong-minded, she had a career, making chic sunbonnets that she sold in Fort Worth, and she had several avocations—singing in the church choir, raising award-winning roses, and training herding dogs for the local sheep farmers.

  Belinda raised an eyebrow. “Problems?”

  “Emma’s conquering her fear of dogs,” Nina said. “We still haven’t introduced Patches back into the mix, but Sam is taking Emma to a dog herding exhibition tomorrow. We have high hopes that Emma and Patches can learn to work together.”

  “Oh.” Belinda’s eyes lit up. “So you and Sam, huh?”

  “Nothing’s going on there,” Emma rushed to assure her. “He and Patches are just helping me to overcome my…er…nervousness around dogs.”

  “Um-hmm.” Belinda nodded as if she knew a big secret.

  “So Nina, how’s it working out with Beau?” Terry asked, pulling the quilting thread through her block of the quilt.

  Everyone else stopped sewing and looked over at Nina. There was a bit of drama Emma didn’t fully understand. She’d learned Beau had been much beloved as sheriff until he’d violated the town’s trust. Some people sided with Nina, believing he should be forgiven. Others thought he should have been run out of town. The quilting club was split right down the middle on the issue. Nina, Belinda, Marva, and Jenny came down on the side of forgiveness. Patsy, Terry, Raylene, and Dotty Mae favored exile.

  “He’s doing great,” Nina said, a warning tone in her voice. “I’m really impressed with his progress.”

  “What do you think of him, Emma?” Terry asked.

  “He seems nice,” she hedged. She wasn’t about to take sides on an issue that had nothing to do with her. Beau had been easy to work with and he was a pretty good actor for an amateur.

  “Here’s the important question,” Raylene said. “How does he kiss?”

  “Raylene!” Marva scolded.

  “What? I’m just saying what everyone else was thinking.” Raylene tossed her head.

  “We haven’t rehearsed the kissing,” Emma said.

  “No? Well, that’s a letdown. So who has some good gossip?” Raylene asked.

  Everyone shook her head.

  “No one? Seriously? Nothing?”

  “G.C. passed a kidney stone,” Marva said.

  “Eeh.” Raylene plugged her ears. “That’s a case of too much information. Besides, it’s not gossip.”

  “I heard that passing a kidney stone is quite painful,” Jenny said.

  “I’m sure it is,” Marva said. “He was pacing around the house, clutching his side for two days, but then he had the gall to compare it to childbirth. As if!”

  “Actually,” Terri said, “Ted says that in the pain department it’s pretty equivalent.”

  Raylene rolled her eyes. “Another man’s opinion. What we need to confirm this is a woman who had passed kidney stones and given birth. Anyone?”

  No one spoke up.

  “So G.C.’s kidney stones are the best we can do?” Belinda asked. “Ladies, we’ve sunk to an all-time low.”

  “You’re the one who reads the National Enquirer. Anything interesting in there since you read about Emma?”

  “Not particularly. Madonna’s adopting another kid from some foreign country.”

  “That one’s a publicity hog,” Raylene said.

  “Now, now,” Marva chided. “You don’t know what’s in her heart.”

  “Am I the only one bold enough to say what everyone else is thinking? Why do I have to keep being the lightning rod?” Raylene groused.

  “’Cause you do it so well.” Nina stretched her neck from side to side, working out the quilting kinks.

  The group fell silent for a moment, everyone stitching on the quilt. Even in spite of the teasing and arguing, or maybe because of i
t, Emma could tell how much these women loved and depended on each other. It made her feel unexpectedly sad.

  “How’s Jimmy?” Marva asked Patsy.

  Jenny leaned over to whisper in Emma’s ear, “Jimmy is Patsy’s husband. He has Alzheimer’s so bad she had to put him in a home. Such a shame.”

  “Jimmy’s the same.” Patsy sighed. “Yesterday he called me by his sister’s name. That’s actually an improvement. The time before, he accused me of being a spy for the CIA.”

  “Anything new with Hondo?” Raylene asked.

  The whole group sort of froze in mid-stitch.

  “Sheriff Hondo Crouch,” Jenny whispered to Emma, “was Patsy’s high school sweetheart, but things didn’t work out for them. Lots of dark, brooding history. But she’s still in love with him.”

  “Jennifer Cheek Cantrell, I am sitting right here and you don’t whisper very quietly,” Patsy scolded. “And for your information I am not in love with Hondo Crouch.”

  Raylene snorted. “Yeah, and I don’t have a bottle of airplane-sized vodka in my purse.”

  Patsy and Raylene glared at each other, and everyone slid to the edge of her chair, on the verge of running for cover in case World War III broke out right there in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church.

  Haughtily, Patsy lifted her chin up, narrowed a look at Raylene that could have killed her if she didn’t have such a tough hide, and said, “Out of respect for our servicemen and women, I’m going to ignore that. This quilt needs to get made.”

  “Well, it’s true, Patsy, you know you’ve loved that man since you were seventeen.” Raylene’s voice softened.

  Patsy’s bottom lip quivered. She ducked her head and stared at the block of quilt in front of her. “Are we going to quilt or not?”

  Everyone went to quilting, and for a long time, no one said anything. Dotty Mae was the first one to break the silence. “Did anyone else see the article in Quilters’ Monthly about the woman who was making quilts for the local nursing homes and ended up finding her long-lost mother living in one?”

  “What happened?” Marva threaded her needle.

  “Turns out the mother had gotten some kind of amnesia years ago and someone found her wandering dazed and confused along the highway,” Dotty Mae continued. “The state didn’t know what to do with her, so they called her Jane Doe and stuffed her in a nursing home. It was supposed to be a heartwarming story because the mother had been the one to teach her daughter how to quilt, and now quilts had brought them back together again, but I thought it was real sad. Here that poor girl was thinking all these years that her mother just up and ran out on her. Come to find out they’d been living in the same city all along.”

  Emma sat staring at the midnight blue star she was quilting, and a sudden thought occurred to her. What if something like that had happened to her mother? What if right now Sylvie was lying in some nursing home confused and forgotten? The idea of it made her gut tighten.

  Why should you worry about Sylvie? She didn’t worry about leaving you confused and forgotten when she went off to Hollywood with Cadillac Man.

  Maybe not, but a bad case of amnesia would explain why she’d never contacted Emma again. Never sent letters, never called. Then there was the other alternative. Sylvie was dead. Maybe Cadillac Man had killed her and cut her body into pieces and stuffed her into his trunk. A Cadillac trunk was big enough to accommodate a dead body.

  Yeah, right, you wish you had a decent explanation for being abandoned by your mother. Traumatic amnesia. Dramatic dismemberment.

  The real truth was probably a lot more mundane. Sylvie didn’t give a shit. And yet, stupid hope flickered. Maybe, just maybe, her mother was out there somewhere needing her.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Terri argued. “Surely the media covered Jane Doe’s disappearance. How come the daughter didn’t hear about it?”

  “It was a big city. Atlanta, I think, and the girl and her mother had had a big fight about her going to Europe with a boyfriend. The girl left and that’s when something bad happened to the mother, they still don’t know what caused the amnesia. Wanna know how the girl first recognized her mama after all those years?”

  “How?” Belinda asked.

  “Through a quilt she had on her bed. The woman and her mother had made that quilt together when the woman was just a teenager.”

  “I don’t see how that can happen these days, what with fingerprintin’ and DNA testing and all,” Raylene said. “I mean they make you give your thumbprint to get your driver’s license. You’re on file somewhere. The government don’t want you wanderin’ around unidentified.”

  Patsy held up a hand like a stop sign. “Don’t get going with Earl’s crazy conspiracy theory stuff.”

  “Well it doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or not,” Dotty Mae said. “It’s the way it happened. She fell through the cracks. People fall through the cracks all the time. Somebody drops the ball, doesn’t do their job, and wham, you’re stuck in a nursing home with no name, waiting for your long-lost daughter to come and find you.”

  “At least she had her quilt,” Jenny said.

  “Yes,” they all commented in unison, and nodded their heads as if having a quilt made up for everything.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Next to dogs, quilts are a woman’s best friend.

  —Delia Franklin, Dr. Sam Cheek’s receptionist

  Emma dreaded the sheepdog herding trials.

  Come prepared to amaze yourself, Sam had said. In between the playacting and the quilting, the thought had circled Emma’s brain for the last ten days. Easy for Sam to say. He had no idea just how dogs struck terror in her heart.

  On the other hand, he was right. She did need to conquer this fear if she wanted to be in this play. She’d tried to convince Nina to cut the Border collie from the script, but Nina wasn’t budging. Rebekka had raised and trained sheepdogs. Rebel’s role was essential. It was historically accurate. Emma simply had to deal with it.

  Fine, great, okay. She could do this. Emma drew in a deep breath and gave herself a pep talk in front of the mirror in the pink VIP bathroom at the Merry Cherub. All around her, angels looked on. She could almost hear the theme from Rocky being played on a chorus of harps.

  She finished her makeup and dressed simply in blue jeans; a baby-doll, teal T-shirt—emblazoned with the slogan “Everything’s Better at Twilight”—that she’d bought at the Teal Peacock; and a pair of sneakers. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail. Today she was playing girl-next-door, plucky and brave. That’s how she would survive this day. By acting the part.

  A few minutes before eight, she clamored down the stairs and headed for the kitchen, her mind on one of Jenny’s delicious banana muffins, only to find Sam sitting with his sister at the kitchen table. Ulp. He was here already and she hadn’t finished psyching herself up for the meeting.

  And he was looking damn good in faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved blue chambray shirt. He had on cowboy boots, and Patches lay at his feet. The minute Emma walked into the room, the dog raised his head.

  Sam made a soft shhtt noise and the Border collie immediately lowered his head.

  Awesome. What she wouldn’t give for that kind of control.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Morning.” He grinned at her.

  “Um…you’re early.”

  “Jenny told me she’d made banana nut muffins. They’re my favorite.”

  “Have a seat, Emma,” Jenny said, getting up from the table. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

  “Shouldn’t we be going?” Emma asked Sam. Sitting here sharing breakfast did not seem like a good idea when she was trying hard not to have the hots for this guy. Seriously, come on, who wouldn’t have the hots for him? With those dark eyes and those full lips and those earlobes just made for nibbling.

  Stop it!

  “I’ll put your coffee in a travel mug,” Jenny called over her shoulder. “You’re going to come back a changed woman.�
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  “How can you be so sure?” Emma said, snatching up a banana nut muffin from the basket on the table. They were still warm.

  “When it comes to animals, Sam’s got the magic touch. You’re going to be amazed at yourself.” Jenny returned and handed her two travel mugs. “The orange one is Sam’s. Decaf, black, no sugar. The green one is yours. Fully loaded—caffeine, three sugars, a tablespoon of heavy cream.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No wonder you’re so nervous all the time,” Sam said. “Drinking that muck.”

  “I have a fast metabolism,” Emma said. “I need it to keep me going.”

  “Needing it isn’t healthy.”

  “Ah, don’t tell me you’re the caffeine police.”

  “I’ll cut you some slack today,” he teased, “seeing as how you’re about to eat a rat.”

  “What?” Jenny looked startled. “Eeew.”

  Sam smiled at Emma, and she grinned back at their private joke. “Figure of speech,” Sam explained to his sister. “You ready to go, Trixie Lynn?”

  Growing up, she’d hated the name Trixie Lynn, but when Sam said it, well, it sounded kind of good. With coffee cups and muffins in hand, they went out the door. Patches immediately circled around beside Emma, and she shied behind Sam.

  “No,” he said, “don’t shrink away. Let him know who is boss.”

  “He already knows he is.”

  Sam balanced his muffin on the top of his travel mug and slapped his left outer thigh twice. “Heel.”

  Patches ducked his head and trotted over to Sam’s left side.

  “You make it look so easy.”

  “By the end of the day, you’ll be doing it too.”

  She took her sunglasses from her purse and slipped them on.

  “Optimistic fellow.”

  Sam just laughed. They walked around the back of the Jeep, and Sam opened the rear door so Patches could jump in. Then he followed Emma around to the passenger side and he opened her door too.