Threading the Needle

by Marie Bostwick

  “Yes,” I said as I slipped in between the sheets and pulled up the quilt. “Tessa is my best friend and she’s practically like a sister. I’ve known her since I was about your age.” I reached over to turn out the lamp and found a little hand clutching at my wrist.

  “Madelyn? Could you leave the light on until I’m asleep? It’s nice up here in the attic but it’s kind of scary too. It seems like there might be ghosts up here.”

  I got up and flipped the switch to illuminate the string of white Christmas lights, thinking that they’d be dimmer, before getting back into bed and turning off the lamp.

  “Those are nice,” Bethany said, looking up at the ceiling. “They look like stars. Good night, Madelyn.”

  “Good night, Bethany. Sweet dreams.”

  She was asleep within minutes. I was tired too, but sleep eluded me. I stayed awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to Bethany’s breathing, the soft laughter that emanated from the floors below, and the voices of ghosts.

  When we sat down to our breakfast of homemade muffins and fruit the next morning, I learned that about half the group, Mary Dell included, had stayed up and quilted until long past midnight. Mary Dell looked as fresh as a daisy, but some of the others were definitely dragging. Still, that didn’t deter them from doing the same thing on Saturday night. I guess they wanted to squeeze every last drop of fun, companionship, and quilting from the weekend. And they seemed to do just that.

  The only somber moment came when Janelle, a counselor at New Beginnings, called to say that the results of the GED exams had arrived. Everyone passed, everyone except Ivy. She had gotten excellent scores overall but was two points short of the minimum score needed to pass the science test. When she heard the news, she sat down in a chair and burst into tears. Bella, Connie, and her classmates immediately surrounded her, murmuring sympathetically and patting her shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry. You worked so hard,” she sobbed, looking up at her teachers, “and I let you down.”

  Ivy’s eyes were streaming and her nose was running. Dana fished a tissue out of her pocket and handed it to her friend, looking as though she might start crying herself. Lauren ran into the kitchen to get her a glass of water.

  “Don’t be silly,” Bella said. “You didn’t let anyone down. You’ll pass next time.”

  “There’s not going to be a next time. What’s the point? All that stuff about atoms and photosynthesis and whatnot. I don’t get it. I’ll never get it. I’m too stupid to understand.”

  Connie got down on her knees, eye level with Ivy, and looked her in the face. “No, you’re not. Remember, Ivy, the rest of the girls had taken some science classes before they dropped out, so this was review for them, but it was all new material to you. You’ve come so far and learned so much. The progress you made in these past few weeks is amazing. I’m very proud of you. We all are. You’ll pass next time. You’re not stupid. The only stupid thing would be to give up after you’ve come so far. That’d be more than stupid, it would be tragic. You can do this, Ivy. I know you can.”

  Bethany pushed her way through the circle of sympathy and looped her little arm around her mother’s neck. Ivy looked up, her eyes still full of tears.

  “Mommy, do you remember when I was trying to learn the multiplication tables and I kept failing the test because I couldn’t get the eights and nines? And how mad I was because Mrs. Ramirez made me stay inside at recess to work on them? Remember what you said?”

  Bethany began speaking and Ivy joined in, finishing the sentence with her little girl. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

  “That’s right,” Bethany said solemnly. “You can’t give up now, Mommy. If you do, how can you help me with my science homework when I go to high school?”

  Connie tilted her head to the side. “She’s got a point there, Ivy.”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said, sniffling and swiping her fist across her eyes. “I guess she does.”

  “I’ve got a chocolate cake out in the kitchen,” I said. “I think we should have tea a little early today. Tessa, Margot, Abigail? Would you mind giving me a hand with the plates? We’re having a party.”

  The weekend flew by; I’ve never known forty-eight hours to pass so quickly. Tessa had insisted on setting up my sewing machine at that table under the stairs, but I never did any quilting and, as near as I could tell, neither did Mary Dell. With fourteen quilters to help, she spent all her time going from table to table, offering encouragement and advice. Though I did spend some time hanging around the fringes, admiring the quilts-in-progress, listening to the jokes and stories, telling a few of my own, most of my weekend was spent making meals, doing dishes, and cleaning rooms, although the girls insisted on tidying up after themselves, reusing their towels and making their own beds, which I appreciated. Even so, it was a big job. But I didn’t mind.

  Mary Dell and I did have a few moments together, sitting at our table under the stairs, resting our feet.

  “Tired?” Mary Dell asked.

  I nodded. “A little bit. It’s worth it, though. Everybody seems to be enjoying themselves.”

  “They sure are. Give a quilter a sewing machine, some fabric, and time to stitch it, and she’s just as happy as a hog in mud. Madelyn, honey, you spend all this time with all these quilters, you’ve got an eye for color and fabric, and Tessa told me how good you are with embellishing—how come you’ve never tried it yourself?”

  “I don’t have time, Mary Dell. My plate is full as it is. Too—and don’t say this to Evelyn, I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings—but I’ve never seen the point in buying fabric just to cut it apart and sew it back together.” I smiled as I said this last bit, but Mary Dell didn’t laugh, just looked at me with a soft smile.

  Why did I know that she knew there was more to the story than I’d been telling? I took a deep breath.

  “And, you know,” I said with a shrug, “quilting just doesn’t hold good memories for me. My grandmother was a quilter. She tried to teach me how to do it a couple of times. It never went well. I’ve never been much good at following directions or rules. I kept trying to take shortcuts, change patterns, invent my own blocks. That always made her so mad. One day, we were cutting out blocks—the old-fashioned way, back when you traced around templates, penciled in stitching lines, and then cut out each individual patch with a pair of scissors. Anyway, we were cutting out blocks and I wasn’t doing it the way she wanted me to, so she reached across the table with a wooden ruler and smacked me so hard on the hand that it broke. I kind of lost interest after that,” I said with a hollow laugh.

  “If you think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that I ever joined the quilt circle, even as the ‘Louise.’ Guess it goes to show what a great bunch of women we’ve got in there,” I said, tilting my head toward the living room where most of the group was working.

  Mary Dell smiled, not with her customary beaming grin, but with warmth. “Well, that all makes sense and I can see you’ve got your reasons. Tessa told me a little about your grandmama. Sounds like she was meaner than a whole skilletful of rattlesnakes. But let me ask you something: Just how long were you figuring to let Edna rob your joy? She’s been dead for months, hasn’t she?”

  Before I could respond, Cathy’s voice called from the living room, asking Mary Dell to come see why her points wouldn’t meet up.

  “Be right there!” she called back, then got slowly to her feet. “Maybe it’s none of my business, honey, but if it were me, I’d tell that old rattlesnake to hush up and rest in peace.”

  She gave me a wink and headed to the living room to check on her other students.

  By three o’clock on Sunday, everyone had finished their projects. The whole gang lined up on the front porch for a group photo, holding up their wall hangings as I called out, “Ready? Say ‘fabric’!”

  “Fabric!” they shouted and I snapped the picture. Everyone, including me, was smiling. After that, and over my protests, they all pitch
ed in and helped me change sheets, take down the sewing tables, run the vacuum, and dust the furniture from cellar to dome, leaving everything almost as clean as it was when they’d arrived. We’d have to move the furniture back in from the garage, but Jake and Lee were coming to help with that on Monday morning.

  By five, I was standing in the foyer, giving out hugs and kisses, saying good-bye, thinking about doing it again next year.

  Mary Dell was the last one out the door. Carrying her pink cheetah bag, she stopped to thank me, locked me in another all but bone-crushing hug, then shoved a pink gift bag tied with orange and blue ribbons into my hands, declaring it was just a little something, before clattering down the porch steps in a pair of zebra-striped platform heels and jumping into Evelyn’s waiting car, waving and woo-hooing as they drove off. I stood on the porch and waved until they turned the corner at the top of Oak Leaf Lane, then sat in one of the rocking chairs to open my present.

  I untied the bows from the gift bag and pulled out the tissue paper to reveal three pencils, a pad of graph paper, and two books, Quilting Outside the Box by Julie Lebreaux and Scrappy and Happy: Design Your Own Paper-Pieced Quilt Blocks by Mary Dell Templeton.

  “Oh, Mary Dell. You just don’t give up, do you?” I laughed and flipped through her book, glancing at the photographs of the different quilts, lingering over some of the more unique selections, until I found a note on the inside cover.

  Dear Madelyn,

  Thank you for your kind hospitality. You’re the Hostess with the Mostess, ma’am. Soon, I’m sure everybody will know it.

  In Stitches,

  Mary Dell Templeton

  P.S. There are more presents for you on the kitchen table. Hope you like them.

  P.P.S. When you get a minute, can you send me the recipe for those peach muffins?

  Curious, I put the gifts back in the bag and carried it with me into the kitchen, where I found a good-sized cardboard box tied with a bow, and a six-pack of Dr Pepper.

  Inside the box were hundreds of fabric scraps in every color and shade imaginable—blue, yellow, red, pink, orange, peach, green, turquoise, brown, beige, purple, and everything in between. They were the scraps left over from the group’s wall hangings.

  Fifteen sets of scraps from fifteen different quilters made quite a pile of fabric, and quite a world of possibilities.

  50

  Tessa

  June

  “That’s what you’re getting?” I asked. “Black? Plain black? That’s it?”

  That’s it. Nothing else,” Madelyn said. She laid the fabric bolt down on the cutting table and looked at Virginia. “Can I get two yards of this? Oh, and a spool of black thread.”

  I sighed with disappointment. When I told Madelyn that I needed to run down to the quilt shop after work to pick up some batting for my “Texas Hold ’Em” wall hanging and she’d announced that she was coming along, I’d hoped that this was her way of announcing she’d decided to give quilting a try after all. She’s told me ten times that she’s never going to become a quilter, but never is a long time. I hoped that hosting the quilt retreat had changed her mind.

  But when we walked in the door and she made a beeline for that plain Amish black, my hopes were dashed. She obviously needed the fabric for some other project. After all, you can’t make a quilt out of plain black, can you?

  I shuffled off to find my batting and almost ran into Margot, who was trotting out of the back office with a grin a mile wide.

  “Well! That was quick!” she exclaimed, beaming at everyone.

  “What was quick?”

  “The way you two got down here. It wasn’t five minutes ago that I left the message.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “The message,” she repeated. “About coming on down here so we could watch together. Mary Dell’s producer called and asked me to call Madelyn and tell her to watch today’s show. I called the inn but no one answered, so I left a message on voice mail. You didn’t get it?”

  Madelyn shook her head and took her purchases over to the checkout counter for Dana to ring up. “We just stopped in to get some fabric. Why would Mary Dell care if I watched her show?”

  “Don’t know. With Mary Dell you never can tell. She likes to surprise people. Anyway, you’re here. Come into the office—we’ve got a television in there. It’ll be on in just a couple of minutes.”

  Forgetting all about my batting, I crowded into the office with Madelyn, Margot, Virginia, and Dana. Margot told us that Evelyn was over at the Grill on the Green, helping Charlie pick out new tablecloths for the restaurant, but she called Ivy down from the workroom where she was cutting and packing Internet orders.

  Margot turned on the television and we gathered around expectantly as the theme music for Quintessential Quilting came up and the camera moved in for a close-up of Mary Dell and Howard, who told the audience that on today’s show they’d be talking about using color wheels for quilt design and fabric selection, quick and easy tips for paper piecing, and that they were very excited because they had a special guest, Julie Lebreaux, quilt designer and author of Quilting Outside the Box.

  When she heard this, Madelyn sighed impatiently and sat down in the nearest chair with her arms crossed over her chest. “Okay, Mary Dell. I appreciate the thought, but enough already. I get it.”

  Margot shot me a questioning look, but I just shrugged. I didn’t know what Madelyn was talking about either. We followed Madelyn’s lead and sat down to watch the show, sort of. I was watching Madelyn more than the show, wondering what was going on and why Mary Dell was so insistent that she watch. Twenty-five minutes into it, I still had no idea. The doorbell on the shop jingled, signaling the arrival of a customer. Dana said she’d take care of it, but after a couple more rings of the bell she stuck her head through the door and, with an apologetic expression, asked if Virginia could give her a hand. After Howard’s segment on color wheels, Ivy said she really had to get back upstairs and finish packaging the orders or she wouldn’t be able to get them in today’s mail.

  So, as the interview with Julie Lebreaux was wrapping up, only Madelyn, Margot, and I were left. When that was done and the cameras returned to Mary Dell and Howard for the end-of-show recap, Madelyn grumbled, “Well, that was a waste of time. I’ve already got the books.”

  She got up from her chair and started to leave the room just as Mary Dell looked into the camera and said, “Before we say good-bye, I’ve just got to tell you about a little trip I took to New Bern, Connecticut, where my old friend Evelyn Dixon, owner of the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, lives.”

  Everybody froze. Madelyn moved slowly back to her place and, with her eyes glued to the television screen, sank into the chair as Mary Dell continued speaking.

  “Just last month, Evelyn and a group of her customers and gals from her quilt circle invited me to join them for a quilt retreat at a beautiful little hotel just a short walk from the quilt shop and downtown New Bern called the Beecher Cottage Inn.”

  When the picture came up on the television screen, Madelyn leapt out of her chair and all three of us—Madelyn, Margot, and me—started screaming, jumping up and down, and hugging. Dana and several customers came running to see what all the commotion was about. Virginia, who was pretty spry for eighty but couldn’t match the others for speed, brought up the rear.

  Virginia shouted to be heard over the din. “What’s going on here? Did somebody get hurt? See a mouse? What?”

  Unable to contain her excitement, Margot waved her hands, squealed, and pointed to the screen. “Look!”

  The photograph, taken in full sun that shone through the new leaves of the trees, made the inn look particularly warm and welcoming, an idyllic spot for a weekend getaway. Looking closer, I noticed the brand-new picket fence, and pots of pink and yellow tulips that Madelyn and I had put on the porch just before the quilters had arrived. Mary Dell must have gone outside while everyone was busy quilting and snapped the photo herself. She’d shown me her new di
gital camera, a present from her beau, Hub-Jay, and had been very enthusiastic about trying it out. Now I knew why.

  After a moment, the exterior shot of the inn was replaced by a montage of interior photos: pictures of the bedroom, fireplace, and bathroom for Room Two, the room Mary Dell had stayed in; of the dining room set for afternoon tea, followed by several shots of the living room, set up with sewing tables and various shots of women quilting, laughing, and generally enjoying themselves. However, none of the shots included images of any of the women from the New Beginnings program. Mary Dell had been careful to make sure that their identities and whereabouts would not be revealed to anyone who might be looking for them. Mary Dell was a smart cookie.

  Every new photo unleashed a fresh round of squeals, applause, and commentary from the audience that stood squashed together in the tiny back office. When the camera returned to Mary Dell and Howard, Madelyn waved her hands over her head and shouted, “Hush! Quiet, everybody! I want to hear what they’re saying!”

  The women settled down and listened as Howard turned to his mother and said, “Looks like you had a good time up in Connecticut, Mama.”

  “I sure did,” she drawled. “Honey, I haven’t had so much fun since Patton was a private. Next time you’ve got to come with me.”

  “I’d like that, Mama. New Bern is a nice place to visit.”

  “It sure is, and now that the Beecher Cottage Inn is open for business, it’s even nicer.” Mary Dell turned and looked straight into the camera. “If any of you are looking for a place to hold a small retreat for your quilt circle or guild, or just to get away and do a little stitching with your friends, you should check out the Beecher Cottage Inn. We’re putting the phone number and Web address up on the screen, so be sure to write that down. Give my friend Madelyn a shout and tell her I sent you. I know she’ll treat you right.”