Round Robin (30 page)

A mist shrouded the woods that morning, and Gwen's breath came out in barely visible puffs as she ran. The only other sound was that of her footfalls on the wide dirt path. Spring was her favorite time of year in Pennsylvania. Other people preferred autumn, when the changing leaves covered the hills in brilliant color, but the renewal of spring soothed Gwen's spirit like nothing else. Winter had been vanquished at last, and the hot, humid days of summer were not yet upon them. The regular school year had ended, and the summer session had not yet begun. These few weeks provided her with a restful interim in which to take time for herself.

Perhaps she wouldn't go to campus at all today. She could work just as well at home as in her office. Or maybe she'd put her work aside entirely and quilt instead. She felt too nostalgic to work on her conference paper today, anyway. In the middle of the section on antebellum textiles, she was sure to go off on a weepy tangent about the clothing mothers sewed for their daughters before they parted forever. That would certainly make a fine impression on the review committee.

When she returned home, she showered and put on comfortable clothes—loose-fitting cotton pants and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, untucked. Far too many of her other clothes were getting snug around the waist. She would have to consider joining Bonnie and Diane for their evening walks. Better that than cutting back on treats such as the hazelnut biscotti she had with her tea for breakfast.

When she finished eating, she poured herself a second cup of tea and took it with her to the extra bedroom she and Summer used as a quilt studio. With a pang, Gwen realized that Summer would probably take her fabric and supplies with her when she went to school in the fall. Gwen had often wished for a more spacious workplace, but this was not how she had wanted to come by it.

She sighed and found the round robin quilt in her tote bag, where she
had kept it since receiving it from Judy. She unfolded it and spread it out on the table, then stepped back to take it in. It was beautiful, no doubt about it. The blues, greens, golds, and various shades of cream harmonized well, and the assorted patterns complemented each other. Judy's Mariner's Compass border was dazzling. When Agnes finally contributed her center design, the quilt would be a masterpiece.

Gwen rested her chin in her hand and thought. What should she add? The last border had to be striking; it also had to somehow tie all the other borders together. That was no easy task, but Gwen felt up to it. The challenge would take her mind off Summer's departure.

She raided her fabric stash, selecting colors and prints that would work well with those her friends had selected. But that was the easy part. The question was, how would she stitch all those colors together? She knelt on the floor by the bookshelves, paging through pattern books, pondering her options.

Some time later, she heard the front door open and slam shut. “Mom?”

“In here,” Gwen called out, rising awkwardly. She had been sitting with her legs tucked under her, and her right foot had fallen asleep. She was stomping her foot, trying to wake it up, when Summer entered.

Summer's eyebrows rose as she watched. “Summoning the muse?”

“Not this time.” Gwen laughed and hobbled over to hug her. Summer seemed taller and more slender every day, but maybe on a subconscious level Gwen was comparing Summer to her ever-broadening self. “It's a hardwood floor, so I think the most I can hope for is a dryad or two.” Summer smiled, but Gwen detected some tension in her expression. “What's wrong, kiddo?”

Summer threw herself into a chair. “How did you know?”

What a silly question. “I'm your mother, of course.” No matter how far away Summer moved, that, at least, would never change. “I picked up a few blips on my mom sonar. What's going on?”

Summer picked up a Bear's Paw pillow from the floor and hugged it to her chest. “It's about graduation.”

Finally, it was coming out. Ever since Judy received that letter from her
half sister, Gwen wondered if this moment would come. She'd thought about bringing up the matter herself, but she had put it off, hoping that it would just go away. Or rather, stay away, since he hadn't been around for more than two decades. “I think I know what's bothering you.”

Summer's eyes widened. “You do?”

“I think so.” Gwen hesitated. “Kiddo, if you want to invite your father to your graduation, it's fine with me.” They would have to find him first. The last Gwen had heard, he was running a coffeehouse and surf shop in Santa Cruz, but that has been ten years ago.

“Invite
him
?” Summer exclaimed. “Why would I want to do that? Why should he get to swoop in and snatch half the credit when you're the one who earned it?”

Pride surged through her, but Gwen decided to be modest. “In all honesty, you're the one who deserves the credit. You worked very hard. I'm very proud of you.”

But Summer was not mollified. “Who needs him? He probably doesn't even know my name.”

Gwen considered. “I'm almost certain he does.”

“Almost certain. How wonderful,” Summer retorted. “If he somehow shows up, promise me you'll pretend you don't know him. He might not recognize you, and he definitely won't recognize me.”

Gwen nodded, surprised by her daughter's vehemence. “He won't show up. I'm not even sure if he knows where we live.” She hoped Dennis wasn't a fan of
America's Back Roads.

“Good.” Abruptly, Summer rose and gave her mother a wry smile. “Get a load of Miss Whiner here. I'm sorry I've been such a grump lately.”

“That's all right.” Gwen hugged her. “You're entitled.”

Summer laughed, and after admiring the round robin quilt and discussing options for Gwen's border, she was on her way, off to meet some friends for lunch.

Only after she left did Gwen realize that Summer had never explained what was bothering her.

Whatever it was, at least she wasn't gloomy over Dennis. She never
had been before, not even when she was a little girl and her teachers assigned essay topics like “My Daddy's Job” or had the students make Father's Day art projects. Dennis had never been a part of Summer's life. She had truly never known him, since Gwen and Dennis had split up months before Summer was born.

Once, Summer had asked her why they divorced, and Gwen told her quite honestly that a more baffling question was why had they married in the first place. Admittedly, much of that flower child time was a bit hazy to her now, but one would think she'd be able to remember something as significant as that. Maybe they had been caught up in a wave of universal peace and love that blocked out all reason. Gwen could just picture the expression on her daughter's face if she told Summer
that.

Gwen liked to joke that she and Dennis had been married for about five minutes, but it was actually closer to a year. She was taking time off from college, intending to expand her mind by hitchhiking across the country and engaging in other experimental behavior she now prayed that Summer wouldn't dream of trying. She met Dennis at an antiwar rally, and somehow found him attractive as he stood in the middle of the Berkeley campus yelling epithets and burning Lyndon Johnson in effigy. Later she realized she had confused agreement with his politics with admiration for him, and his passion for justice for passion for herself. At the time, however, she thought she'd found true love.

After their barefoot ceremony—it was too cold to go barefoot in February, but Dennis insisted—they traveled the country with two other couples in a van plastered with peace signs and antiwar slogans. Gwen wasn't sure how they had managed to support themselves, since self-preservation had been the least of their concerns. They went where they chose, with nothing to hold them down, nothing to bear them up but each other.

The carefree times ended when Gwen realized she was pregnant. She had always possessed a strong pragmatic streak, and after a long dormancy it finally began to reassert itself. Suddenly she began to care about where their next meal would come from, where they would live and how, what kind of life she wanted for her child, what kind of mother she
would be. Dennis's drug use, which had been only a minor irritant before, began to trouble her. When she tried to get him to quit, he told her she was just jealous because the two times she'd tried grass, she'd gotten migraines. “Relax, baby,” he said, blowing smoke in her face. Then he bent over to speak to her abdomen. “That goes for you, too, baby.”

Something about the way he threw his head back in a fit of helpless giggling raised Gwen's ire. The next time they stopped for gas, she stuffed her few possessions into her backpack and left without saying good-bye to Dennis or her friends. How long had they waited for her, she wondered, before they realized she wasn't coming back?

She went home to her parents, who made her feel profoundly guilty by weeping when she arrived. She hadn't meant to abandon them, but it wasn't easy to write letters on the road. When Summer was a year old, Gwen returned to college; by Summer's eleventh birthday, Gwen had earned her Ph.D. and a position on the faculty of Waterford College.

Sometimes old friends passed through town, and they would talk long into the night about those days, about how they had tried to change the world and how they had indeed changed some small part of it. Some of their fellow travelers were still fighting the good fight; others had traded in their love beads for IRAs and BMWs. Occasionally these visiting friends had news of Dennis: He had remarried, he had divorced, he had opened a head shop, he was in Oregon chained to a giant sequoia to save it from loggers. He had never contacted Gwen to inquire about their child, and she had never asked anyone to pass along a message.

Should she have? Should she have insisted that he play a role in his daughter's life?

The questions plagued her, but one look at Summer assured her that she had done all right. Summer was the kind of daughter every mother wished for. She was thoughtful and smart and strong, and Gwen admired her. Yes, she must have done something right somehow, despite their rather precarious beginning as a family.

Summer insisted she didn't want Dennis at her graduation, and Gwen knew she was telling the truth. But if that wasn't what was bothering her, what was?

As the weekend approached and Summer said nothing more on the subject, Gwen decided that it must have been pregraduation jitters. By Saturday afternoon, Summer must have overcome them, because she was the picture of happiness at the graduation party the Elm Creek Quilters threw for her. Husbands were invited as well, and Judy and Diane had brought their children. While Craig and Matt supervised the grill, the others sat on the veranda and talked, or threw Frisbees on the front lawn. Michael and Todd took turns riding a skateboard around the circular driveway, and Gwen persuaded them to teach her how. She nearly broke her neck after a kick-turn went awry, so she decided to sit on the grass and watch the boys instead.

“What did you do with the skateboard ramp?' she asked them.

“We took it down and stored it in the garage,” Michael said.

“Did you find a new place to ride?”

He shrugged. “You mean like other than our driveway and here? No.”

“You must be disappointed.”

“Wouldn't you be?” He came to a stop in front of her. He looked so dejected that Gwen was tempted to give him a comforting hug, but she wasn't sure he'd welcome it.

“Yes, I'm sure I would,” she said. “So what are you going to do now?”

He shrugged again. “I dunno. I don't think there's anything I can do. I mean, they're like the city government and everything.”

“They're not just ‘like' the city government; they
are
the city government.” She saw at once that the remark had gone over his head, but she was warming up to her subject and didn't want to pause to discuss his grammar. “They're elected officials, not gods. Law is a social construct, and in this country, at least, it's subject to the will of the people.”

He sat down beside her, his brow furrowed. “You mean like voting and stuff?”

“That's right.”

“But I can't vote yet.”

“More's the pity,” Gwen said. “We might have fewer stupid laws if you could. I bet you and your friends would shake things up around here, wouldn't you?”

He grinned. “Maybe.”

“When I was a little older than you, my friends and I did more than just vote. We held demonstrations, sit-ins—anything to get our message out. We were trying to make our government get out of Vietnam.”

“I know about that. We studied it in history class.”

“Great,” Gwen said, feeling ancient.

He regarded her seriously. “Were you a hippie?”

“Yes, I suppose I was.” She was about to begin a long, nostalgic lecture about the passion for justice young people had felt in her day and how it compared to the callow selfishness of today's youth, but Matt chose that moment to announce that dinner was ready.

They ate on the veranda, seated in Adirondack chairs or on the stone staircase. Afterward, the Elm Creek Quilters gave Summer her gift, a signature wall hanging quilt they had worked on all winter. Summer gasped with delight as she opened the box and took out the beautiful quilt. Gwen had pieced a large Mariner's Compass block to symbolize Summer's life journey, and around it she had sewn solid, off-white borders on which everyone had written her congratulatory messages. Gwen became teary-eyed as Summer read the loving wishes aloud. Summer hugged each of them, even Andrew and Matt and the other Elm Creek husbands. Todd didn't want a hug, but Michael politely agreed to accept one.

The men must have sensed that their wives were about to talk quilts for a while, for they broke off into conversations of their own.

“I don't know how you managed to keep this a secret so long,” Summer said as she carefully folded the quilt and returned it to its box.