Wedding Ring (6 page)

“Mowrey,” Cissy said. “I’m Cissy Mowrey. You’re Mrs. Henry. Mr. Claiborne’s told me about you.”

“Claiborne, huh?” Helen’s glare was unmistakable, even as twilight was turning into night. “He send you over here to spy on me?”

Cissy’s eyes widened. “No ma’am, he sure didn’t.”

“He’s the one who called your mother, isn’t he?” Helen demanded of Tessa. “I’ve never given those Claibornes a moment of trouble, and I’ve ignored their heathen ways all these years. And now look what I get for it.”

Tessa winced. “Gram, he called Mom because you needed help. And besides, none of that’s Cissy’s fault, is it?”

“What
are
you doing here then?” Helen demanded. “If you didn’t come to spy some more?”

“I seen—I saw these flowers by the roadside from Zeke’s truck this morning. They reminded me of that quilt you had on the porch last week.”

“What quilt?”

Tessa watched Cissy search hard for an appropriate answer. The girl certainly had common sense. Clearly she saw the minefield and was trying to avoid it.

“That gold quilt, you know, like a big, giant sunflower. Lots of different golds. Like these flowers here.”

“Why were you looking at my front porch, anyway?”

“Gram!” Tessa had had enough. “Good grief, if you hang a quilt on the porch, especially a big, bright one, anybody who drives by is going to see it.”

“I don’t put my quilts outside to show them off. That’s where I dry them. Nobody else’s business.”

Before Tessa could chide her grandmother again, Cissy broke in. “Oh, I know it’s not really my business, but I just really couldn’t help looking at it, you know? It was so bright, so, well, lively? It made me smile. Then I saw these flowers—” she gestured to the dandelions, which had just closed up shop for the night “—pretty sorry looking right now, I guess, but they made me think about the quilt, and I, well, I wanted some of that color for myself.”

Even Helen could find no fault with the girl’s explanation. She continued to glare, but she sealed her lips.

“See, my grandma made quilts,” Cissy continued, when Helen didn’t answer. “I lived with her ’til she died. She promised to teach me how, but she, well, she didn’t get very far before she passed on. Hers weren’t as pretty as that one, but they were hers. You know?”

“Your grandma, she was from around here?” Helen asked grudgingly.

“Down in Augusta County.”

“Then I wouldn’t know her.”

“No ma’am, I guess you wouldn’t.”

“You have her quilts?”

“They got sold. All her stuff was sold at auction after she died. I just have some bits and pieces nobody wanted.”

Tessa could feel herself getting sucked into the girl’s life story, and that was the last thing she wanted. She decided to end the conversation. “Do you need a ride home, Cissy?”

“Oh, no, the doctor says I should walk every day. I’ll just take my time.”

“Have a good one, then.” Tessa took her grandmother’s arm and firmly turned her back toward the house. Helen said a grudging goodbye, and they walked up the drive in silence.

“That girl’s a baby herself,” Helen said. “What is she doing having a baby? What kind of mother could she be?”

Tessa didn’t even want to think about it.

A
fter she went back inside Helen tried to sew, but she couldn’t manage it. She had always worked on more than one project at a time so that when she tired of one pattern she could pick up a different one. It was a luxury of sorts not to finish one quilt before starting another, one of the few things she did simply because it felt good. Pleasing herself that way felt almost sinful, but there it was. She was going to keep on doing it.

Tonight, switching to applique from hand-quilting hadn’t helped. Her eyes were tired, and the tiny stitches anchoring each Christmas rose blurred, even when she hung her magnifier around her neck. Her hand ached, too, more than she could simply ignore. She was too old to sew for so many hours a day.

As she put the block she’d been working on in her sewing basket, the others came inside from the porch. Nancy went upstairs, but Tessa stayed down and fiddled with the screen door.

Now that the other women had come inside, Helen wanted to close herself off, but her bedroom felt more like a tomb than a refuge. Her screens still needed patching, and only one window could be opened without letting in every stinging insect in the county. She had planned to patch them, just never gotten around to it. There were a lot of things that fell into that category these days.

The living room was inviting, not that she was about to admit it out loud. She wasn’t going to let Nancy and Tessa get away with dumping her stuff in the trailer. She aimed to go outside, climb in and sort through it before they hauled it away. She just hadn’t gotten around to it quite yet.

She supposed it was the summer heat and that was all there was to it. It was hotter these days than she ever remembered. It was that greenhouse effect. If people just hadn’t been so greedy, if they hadn’t wanted every little thing that came down the road, if they’d learned to make do the way she had, then the world wouldn’t be a greenhouse. The rain would fall the way it was supposed to, and she could keep busy.

She hadn’t sat on her sofa for a while. It was old, but still comfortable enough if she avoided the place where the springs poked through. She could fix that, too, if the weather would just break.

“I can fix any damn thing you set in front of me, see if I can’t!”

“I’m sorry, Gram, what did you say?”

Helen was brought up short. What exactly
had
she said? And didn’t she know better than to talk to herself in front of other people? Just when had that started?

Tessa joined her, standing beside the sofa looking, for all the world, like finding her grandmother there was the normal state of things. “What can you fix?”

“I’m going upstairs.” Helen struggled to her feet. She meant to sound firm. She sounded tired instead.

“Oh, don’t. It’s still hotter than the hinges of Hades up there.” Tessa rested her fingertips on her grandmother’s arm. “I bought lemonade at the store. Why don’t you stay down here where it’s cooler and let me get us some?”

“Where’d your mama go?”

“She’s upstairs changing again.”

“Oh, did she get a speck of dust on her skirt?”

Tessa laughed. Helen thought it was a fine sound and one she hadn’t heard nearly often enough in the past few years. Tessa had lost weight and her sense of humor after Kayley’s death. Both had just dropped away, until she was skin and bones physically and emotionally.

That was to be expected, of course. Helen understood far too well, although in her case, the weight had sure come back with a vengeance when the shock of Fate’s death wore off. Of course, losing a husband, even losing one like she had, was something different than losing a child.

Today children grew up more often than they didn’t. It hadn’t always been so, of course, but even she, of a generation that had seen its share of tiny graves, had scarcely been able to believe that her great-granddaughter had been healthy and laughing one moment and gone from this world the next.

“You’ll stay for lemonade?” Tessa said.

Helen felt the way Lee must have every time he had to give ground to Grant. “Then I’m going right off to bed.”

“Can’t blame you for that. Days start early around here.”

Helen lowered herself to the sofa again. Maybe the living room wasn’t much to look at, but it was hers. It was a small room that hadn’t been painted in a long time, but the walls were still white enough to suit her. Landscapes in sagging frames left from her mama’s day dotted them. The fireplace hadn’t drawn well for a decade, and smoke had blackened the bricks. The mantel held several old clocks. She guessed she had just put a new one up when the old one stopped ticking and forgot to cart the old ones away.

Despite its many flaws, the room did look better when you could see more of it. She had to admit that much. There was no excuse for what Nancy and Tessa had done to her, that was certain, but even a blind hog found an acorn now and then. And the fact she could sit down in here now, well, that was her own personal acorn, she supposed.

Nancy bustled down the stairs, smoothing a fresh green skirt over her hips as she descended. She stopped at the bottom and stared at her mother. Helen waited, just waited, eyes narrowed, for her daughter to say something about her sitting on the sofa. That was all it would take and Helen would hightail it out of there.

“Tessa said something about lemonade earlier,” Nancy said. “Want me to make sure she gets a glass for you, too?”

“She knows where I am.”

Nancy’s hair bobbed up and down as she nodded. Helen was reminded of the teenage Nancy and her silly hairdos. Teasing and curling and teasing some more until the bottom flipped up just so. The hours that girl had spent trying to make herself into something she wasn’t. It was remarkable, in a way, that she had managed so well, at least on the surface.

“Tessa said you had a nice chat with the girl from down the road.” Nancy looked for a place to sit, but nothing was as accommodating as the sofa. She took a few, tentative steps toward her mother.

“Just come on over,” Helen growled. “I never bit you once, not once when you were growing up.”

“Maybe not, but you sure tried a time or two.” Nancy settled herself beside her mother. “Oh, good. Now there’s a
spring
biting me.”

“Keep you awake, more likely than not. Long enough to get that lemonade.”

Nancy shifted left and sighed in relief. “Her name’s Cissy?”

“That’s what she says. Pregnant as a broodmare in March. And no ring in sight.”

“Mother, you didn’t mention that to her, did you?”

“You think I don’t know how to bridle my tongue when it’s called for?”

Nancy lifted an eyebrow. “Yes, that’s what I think.”

Helen couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Well, I did this time, so there.”

“You know her story? What she’s doing there?”

“I don’t gossip with my neighbors. Don’t hold with it and never did.”

“Maybe not, but at least you used to see them now and then. You used to get out.”

Helen sighed. It didn’t sound like a criticism, although it might have. “I guess I did, didn’t I?”

“I can see how it happens, you know. Sometimes I have to push myself out the door.”

“You? You expect me to believe that?”

Tessa entered with a tray and three brimming glasses laden with ice. “Believe what?”

“That sometimes I’d just rather stay home and be by myself than go out in public,” Nancy said.

“We’re telling fairy tales for entertainment tonight?” Tessa said lightly. “I didn’t know.”

Nancy made a face. “Neither of you knows me, not the way you think you do.”

“Who would know you better?” Helen took her glass and nodded grudgingly in thanks.

“Gram, what quilt was Cissy referring to?” Tessa said. “It sure made an impression on her.”

“Don’t carry on like you’re interested. You never have showed the least bit of curiosity about my quilts.”

Tessa settled herself in an armchair that Helen remembered her own grandmother sitting in. “Well, I haven’t seen that many. Just the ones you gave me, and the ones you were working on whenever I visited. What have you done with all the quilts you made?”

“Packed away some of them. Others went here and there.”

Nancy set down her lemonade and picked up a magazine from a stack of recent issues. She used it to fan herself. “Your grandmother used to make quilts for every baby at church, even if the family was brand new in town. And if somebody got burned out or their house got flooded, Mama was right there with quilts.”

“What quilt was Cissy talking about?” Tessa asked. “Will you show it to us?”

“Don’t see much point. For all I know you’ll grab it and throw it in that horse trailer, along with everything else.”

“Mama,” Nancy said. “There’s no chance of that and you know it.”

Helen hadn’t been called “Mama” in more years than she could count. Nancy had begun using the more formal “Mother” about the time she had decided to abandon Toms Brook and everything it represented. Helen was surprised how much she’d missed it.

Nancy got to her feet. “Tell me where it is and I’ll go get it.”

“Only if you promise not to touch another blessed thing in my room.”

“Not a thing.” Nancy crossed her heart. “Okay?”

“In the trunk at the end of my bed. It’s the one on top.”

Helen sipped her lemonade while she and Tessa waited for Nancy to return. When Nancy came back, she was carrying several quilts.

“Thought I’d show off a little,” Nancy said. “Tessa should see these.”

The night air was too hot for much complaining. Helen just grumbled incoherently to show she wasn’t happy.

“First this.” Nancy spread open Helen’s most recent North Carolina Lily quilt. Helen had probably made half a dozen of that pattern over her lifetime, most in the traditional reds and greens on a white background. This time, though, she’d followed her own heart and made the lilies of bolder shades of pinks, purples and teal, and set them on black.

“Wow,” Tessa said. “That’s gorgeous.”

Helen watched her granddaughter get up and move closer to hold an edge so she could see the quilting.

“It is, isn’t it? Mama, when did you start experimenting with color like this?” Nancy asked.

“When I got good and tired of doing everything the same old way.”

“Well, your same old way wasn’t a bit shabby, but this is spectacular.”

“These stitches are smaller than a flower seed,” Tessa said. “How do you do it?”

“I practice. A lot.”

“Help me hold up the next one,” Nancy told Tessa. She unfolded the second quilt. It was a Log Cabin Star in red, white and blue. Helen had appliqued glaring American eagles in each corner of the wide navy border and quilted galaxies of stars in between.

“When did you make this?” Nancy paused; then she asked, “After September 11?”

“It kept me busy.” Helen didn’t add that she had quilted a star for each person lost at the Pentagon. It had been her way of saying goodbye to the people who had died in her home state. She knew, better than most, what their families would be going through.

“It’s beautiful,” Tessa said. “It’s…” She shrugged. “Emotional.”

“Don’t get all big-eyed about it,” Helen said. “It was just something to do when there wasn’t nothing but the news on television.”

She watched her daughter and granddaughter exchange looks.

“Get to that last one so I can go on up to bed.” Helen was embarrassed.

The two younger women folded the second quilt and put it with the first. Nancy shook out the last one. “Incredible,” she said. “Will you look at this, Tessa?”

Tessa whistled. “I need sunglasses.”

The quilt was bright. Helen wasn’t sure what had possessed her. It was a single flower with a multitude of petals that circled round and round. The background was minimal and the border merely a frame that set off the center. The flower took up most of the surface.

She had pieced it last winter, on the gloomiest days when she had yearned for sunshine. She had used nearly every yellow, gold and orange scrap she possessed. The result was, well…bright.

“I love this one,” Nancy said. “Who wouldn’t love it? It’s a smile in quilt form. This would keep an Eskimo warm in an igloo.”

“I don’t know a single Eskimo,” Helen scoffed.

Nancy bundled the quilt against her. “I had a quilt like this as a little girl, didn’t I? What do you call it?”

“Giant Dahlia.”

“Mine was pink. Do you remember?” she asked her mother.

Helen was surprised that Nancy did. “You were just a little thing. You like to have wore it out before you turned ten.”

“I didn’t want to part with it, even though the batting was all falling out.”

“One day I washed it and there was nothing left but shreds when I was done.”

“A sad day,” Nancy said. “I cried.”

“You cried more than any little girl in five counties.”

Nancy hugged the quilt a little tighter.

“I can see why Cissy noticed it,” Tessa said. “Gram, you’re an artist. I’ve never seen anybody use color with more success.”