Pieces of the Heart (28 page)

Caroline put the glass on the coffee table. Sitting beside her daughter, Mrs. Collier reached for the glass and handed it back. “You need to drink all of it. And when you’re through, I want you to get more and drink all of that, too.”

“Mom, really. I can take care of myself.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

Caroline sank back into the sofa without answering.

Mrs. Collier turned to Jewel. “In answer to your question, caffeine seems to have a negative effect on Caroline’s blood pressure and heart rate—which isn’t unusual with heart-transplant recipients. A little is okay every once in a while.” She sent a pointed glare in Caroline’s direction. “But too much can make her blood pressure soar and her heart beat at a much higher rate than it should—which is why we need to limit the caffeine. See, when a new heart is put in, a lot of the nerves are severed and the recipient loses a lot of feeling around the heart. A lot of times the recipient misses the signs of a heart attack because they simply can’t feel the pain. Which is why we need to eliminate as many of the causes as we can.”

“I didn’t have that much.”

Mrs. Collier narrowed her eyes. “How much? A pot?”

Caroline just stared at her mother and blinked.

“Oh, Lord, Caroline. Did you have two pots?”

Caroline gave her mom a little smile. “There’s still a little left in the second pot.”

Mrs. Collier sighed, then took the empty glass and stood. “Another thing with heart-transplant recipients is the danger of kidney failure. Caroline’s antirejection drugs can also harm her kidneys. Which is why she needs to drink lots of water to keep them as healthy as possible.” She turned and began striding toward the kitchen, her green floaty thing flying behind her like the cape of a superhero. “Of course, if one doesn’t care about oneself, then one can just ignore all the medical advice and then do what one wants.”

Her footsteps stopped abruptly, and both Jewel and Caroline leaned forward to see why she’d stopped.

Mrs. Collier stood next to Grandma Rainy by the craft table and they were both looking at the quilt that lay across the top. Jewel was about to turn away when she realized that her grandmother had tears slipping down her cheeks.

She moved to stand on the other side of her grandmother. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t need an answer as she caught sight of the quilt. The top row of eight squares, each one ten inches wide, had been completed. Each one showed a part of her mother’s babyhood, from the birth dates stitched on the first square to portions of baby blankets, clothing, and the actual shoelaces from her first pair of shoes. But the most special part of it was the tiny loon that had been stitched on each square. He seemed to be swimming from square to square, always seen in a different position, but sleek and beautiful and always pointing forward as if anticipating the next square.

Caroline joined them. “I would have done more, but I couldn’t remember where all the scraps came from.” She held up the yellow satin that had been cut into the shape of an evening gown. “I couldn’t remember if this was from her junior or senior prom.”

Jewel took the fabric. “Senior prom.”

The three women looked at her in surprise.

“I, um, remember my mother telling me about this dress, that’s all.”

Mrs. Collier pulled out a neatly pressed linen handkerchief from her lounge pants and gently pressed it into Grandma Rainy’s hand. “Take this before you make water spots on my table.” Her voice sounded suspiciously thick, and there was no disguising her sniffle as she turned to Caroline.

Surprising everyone, she hugged her daughter. Caroline’s hands lay at her sides as if she didn’t know what to do with them. Grandma Rainy tugged on one hand and put it at Mrs. Collier’s waist, and Caroline must have caught on, because she raised her other hand, too. They stood like that for a long time, and Caroline’s fingers clutched at her mother’s green robe as if hanging on to something precious she didn’t want to let go.

Mrs. Collier pulled away first. “It’s beautiful. I think it’s the best one you’ve ever done.” Her brows knitted together. “It reminds me a lot of the one you started for Jude. Remember that? I wonder whatever happened to it.”

Caroline stepped away and began straightening the table that now resembled a dumping ground for retired quilters. “I don’t know. It disappeared somehow after . . . when I was in the hospital. I have no idea what happened to it. I always thought that you had given it away with all of Jude’s clothes.”

“Oh, no. I would never have done that. It was so special. You’d spent so much time on it, remember? You had to sneak around Jude’s room to find all the memorabilia you wanted to include on it without him getting suspicious. And I don’t think he ever knew.”

Caroline sank down in a chair as if the caffeine had already run through her body. “No, he didn’t. And, actually, I never had it here anyway. I always kept it at Shelby’s.”

Both Caroline and her mother turned matching expressions to Rainy. “Did you find it in Shelby’s things?”

Rainy slowly shook her head. “No, and I would have remembered seeing something like that. I’ll ask Drew, since he has all of her things. Maybe he’s had it all this time and didn’t even know.”

Jewel felt the pricklings of a headache sneak up on her from behind, and it promised to be a big one. She couldn’t let her grandmother see it yet, though. She needed to run next door and look at the quilt in her mother’s trunk one more time. She was pretty sure she knew now what it was, but she wanted to make sure that it was the stitched outline of a loon she’d spotted in the corner.

Jewel sat down and realized that all four of them were sitting at the table with the quilt stretched between them. “Hey, look. We’re like an old-time quilting bee.”

Grandma Rainy nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Jewel. And I think that while Caroline’s on a roll, we should stay here and keep working.”

Jewel nodded enthusiastically. “I agree. And I think since this is sort of considered history and art rolled into one that I should be excused from school today so I can stay here and quilt. I could bring the place mats in after school today. They don’t need them until then anyway.”

The three of them stared at her with blank expressions, as if it had been too long since they remembered being in school and wanting to play hooky. After a moment the three of them said in unison, “Okay.”

Then Caroline said, “Grab a needle. I’m going to have you sew this yellow dress on this blue square here. I’ll let you pick whatever color thread you want to use. The point of these memory quilts is to use as much of your own style as you want to express the person being portrayed. Does that make sense?”

Jewel nodded, ignoring the pain inside her head, determined to learn as much about making memory quilts as she could. She wasn’t sure where the idea had come from, but it was there. It was a need to finish telling a story in a quilt. She wasn’t sure how it was going to end, but she knew she wouldn’t be doing it on her own.

Rainy and Caroline picked up their own needles, holding them up like a surgeon held up his hands before surgery. Mrs. Collier smiled with barely suppressed excitement as if just now realizing that her goal to get Caroline quilting had finally come to fruition.

“Just give me a minute to go change.”

Grandma Rainy lowered her bifocals to study her friend. “Margaret, how far did you have to chase the homeless woman to steal that outfit?”

“Oh, hush, Rainy. You’re just jealous because I don’t have to buy my clothes at the feed store.” Mrs. Collier left the room in her usual graceful way, but Jewel couldn’t help but notice that the woman almost skipped as she made her way across the room.

Grandma Rainy snorted as she turned back to the table and stared back at Jewel and Caroline. An odd look crossed her face for a moment, and Jewel thought that she’d detected her headache already. Instead she said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you two were mother and daughter—there’s something about the pair of you that’s very much the same. I just can’t figure out what it is.”

Caroline grinned. “Oh, it’s probably just our youthfulness. And the way our skin glows.”

Grandma Rainy snorted again. “Or it’s the bull you like to sprinkle in your conversation.” She fixed her stare on Jewel. “Is your headache bad yet?”

Jewel concentrated on threading her needle and shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m fine.”

She felt her grandmother’s stare on her as she knotted the thread, then picked up the bright yellow fabric and began to sew.

C
AROLINE PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR TO RAINY DAYS AND STEPPED inside. Rainy called out from the kitchen as Caroline maneuvered her way through the piles of handwoven rugs, homemade pottery, and stacks of place mats. She stopped short at the sight of the place mats and picked the top one off the pile to examine it. The little loon signature at the bottom told her it was definitely hers. Crumpling it in her hand, she marched into the kitchen.

Her words died in her throat as the door swung shut behind her. Rainy and Drew sat cross-legged on the floor, the loon, still with its wing in a white sling that strongly resembled a cloth diaper, waddling awkwardly between them.

“Oh, look—he’s walking again!”

Rainy nodded. “Yep. Took the bandage off his leg this morning. Pretty soon he’ll be ready to go swimming in the lake and then take the long flight to the coast. I think his mate has already gone. Jewel said she hasn’t heard anything for a couple of weeks. We’ll have to do it soon, though. Drew tells me the water in the lake is already pretty cold.”

Caroline forgot the loon for a moment, but remembered to feel mortified in Drew’s presence. She found she couldn’t look at him, because if she did she knew she’d see the pity in his eyes. She didn’t think she could take that. At least she had stopped herself from telling him the whole story. Because if she’d done that, he would be looking at her with pity and a measure of disgust thrown in.

She held the place mat out to Rainy. “Why is this in your store? I thought I was making them for the athletic club booth.”

“Yes, well, in your enthusiasm, you seem to have made a lot more than they think will fit in the booth. And they keep coming. You need to find another hobby, girl.” She winked at Caroline as she adjusted the aqua headscarf on her head. “Your mother suggested selling the excess here—all profits go to the athletic fund, of course—and to advertise that the person who’s making the place mats is auctioning off an entire quilt at the Harvest Moon festival.”

“My mother did that? She didn’t mention it to me.”

Rainy shrugged before picking up the loon, which had waddled over to her knee and was starting to peck at it. “Yes, well, she knows how you hate to have people make a fuss over you, so she thought she’d just go ahead and do it.”

“Why would she think something like that?” Caroline crossed her arms across her chest and tried not to notice how Drew was paying close attention.

“Well, I guess she’s remembering when you used to go to swim meets and you’d tell her to stay home. You said that her being there and fussing over you just made you nervous.”

She wanted to deny it, but she didn’t want Rainy to call her on a lie, either. She
had
said that. But only because she wanted her mother to really want to come. If she had, certainly her mother would have overridden Caroline’s objections and shown up at a swim meet. That kind of logic had made so much sense to a fourteen-year-old, but now only appeared like snowflakes on a mountain of misunderstandings.

Eager to change the subject, Caroline asked, “Have you sold any?”

Drew stood. “I sold twenty-three as of yesterday. At five bucks apiece, that’s not too shabby. Jewel’s working on a poster with a picture of her mother’s quilt to advertise your auction. Who knows, maybe you alone will be able to fund a whole new stadium just from the proceeds.”

Her gaze flickered up to meet his and then she just as quickly moved back to the place mat. “Oh. Wow. That’s good news. I’ll have to remember if I’m ever out of work, I’ll have something to fall back on. It’s a great boredom buster.”

Even Caroline hated the way she sounded. But seeing Drew here only reminded her of all the things she’d said the day before, and she felt the need to put up walls again. They protected her from prying questions and helped her move on with her life as painlessly as possible.

Caroline sat down on the floor, attempting to get at eye level with the loon. That way she wouldn’t have to look into the identical expressions of Rainy and Drew.
Damn.
When had she become so transparent that everybody could see right through her? She watched as the loon waddled toward her, its ungainliness reminding her of something.

She ignored Rainy and Drew and concentrated on the bird as it practiced walking, her mind churning. Was transparency actually a good thing and something you were entitled to as you grew older? For a brief moment she welcomed it, and even envisioned telling Rainy and Drew all of it. But Rainy’s frail frame and scarf-covered head pulled her back. There was some pain that always needed to be held back, especially if it could only spread around the pain.