Confessions from the Quilting Circle Page 5

  “The tent.”

  “A wine drinking tent,” Avery said. “Excellent.”

  They exchanged glances, and Lark was the first person to get underneath.

  “Remember when we’d have sleepovers with Grandpa and we’d come up here and tell scary stories until Lark cried?” Avery asked.

  “I didn’t cry!” Lark frowned. “And if I did it’s because I was a child and you were all being mean.”

  “We had a fort like this at Gram’s too,” Hannah said. “Just in the backyard.”

  The silence that stretched between them was heavier then. Filled with memories.

  “I remember that. She’d sit in it with us,” Avery said. “And tell us about the great Dowell family.”

  “So many legends about the men and how great they were at...hunting skunks.” Lark shook her head. “I always thought it was weird there were no stories about the women.”

  “What was always weird was having Gram and Grandpa just down the street from each other. But never speaking.”

  “You can’t really blame him,” Lark said. “She left him. As much as Grandpa was an old-school gentleman he held a grudge.”

  “I’ve always had a hard time with that,” Avery said softly. “I love Gram. I always have. When we were teenagers it was easier to be close to her than it was Mom but... But you see things differently when you have your own kids.”

  Lark bit down on the inside of her cheek as Hannah shot Avery a quick, irritated glance.

  “I’m perfectly capable of understanding why it’s upsetting that somebody left their daughter without having children of my own, thank you,” Hannah said, her tone tart.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Avery said. “It’s not. It’s just... I think about it a lot. I put myself in that position. And I don’t understand.”

  “Do you really not?” Lark asked. “You never wanted to just run away from everything?”

  Avery frowned. “No.”

  “I do,” Lark said. “I want to run away from things all the time.” Currently this conversation. “Neither of you ever just want to...detonate a bomb in the middle of everything and start over?”

  She was genuinely curious. For her, settling in the town was a big shake-up. As big as the first one, really. When she’d left home at eighteen for school. When she’d decided she wouldn’t live in Bear Creek, not again. When she’d figured out how to care less. How to go with the flow more rather than...rather than hoping so badly for something she might not get to have.

  “No,” Hannah said. “I worked way too hard to change what I’m doing now. I get chances to change scenery for a season or two, but BSO is my home. It’s my life.”

  “Never,” Avery said, shaking her head.

  “Never? You never want to act out of character? I don’t know, the idea I could unmake and remake everything tomorrow if I needed to is what makes me feel less claustrophobic on a bad day.”

  “But picking up and leaving isn’t acting out of character for you,” Hannah said.

  “Not true,” Lark said. “I think for me uncharacteristic is what I’m doing now. Coming home after all this time.”

  And it scared her. But if she thought back to where she’d been before she made the decisions, she felt calmer again. She’d reached the end of the road she was on. She was exploring a new road here.

  No one was forcing her to do anything. It was her choice, and she could make a new choice if she needed to.

  “So this is what your bomb detonation looks like?” Hannah asked. “Camping out in your grandpa’s attic and drinking wine? Super cool.”

  Lark made a scoffing noise.

  “No, I don’t ever want to do anything like that,” Avery said. “Gram hurt Mom, even if she never admits it. And I...it was wrong what she did. Taking off and leaving my responsibilities could never be a fantasy. Mom might not have been the easiest person to talk to, but she taught us all how to be responsible, that’s for sure.”

  Mary Ashwood had definite ideas of what she wanted for her daughters. Lark remembered the time her mother had told her she had to remember to think of others, to act with her head and not her heart.

  Too emotional and untamed and she’d end up like Gram. Lark hadn’t understood why that was bad. And that was the first time Mary had told her. That Gram had abandoned her as a child.

  She’d said it all no-nonsense and brusque. Just relaying the facts.

  But it had wounded Lark, deeply. To have her Gram knocked off her pedestal like that.

  But it had certainly made an impression on her. To know that the woman she admired so much was capable of hurting her mother so much. Her grandpa. Her uncles.

  If Gram could, Lark could too.

  So she had to listen to her mother. She had to make sure she never did anything quite so reckless.

  “Well. She knew that I would stay here. So I think it was pretty easy for her to support you.”

  “What does that mean?” Hannah asked.

  “I’m just saying, I don’t think it would’ve been quite so easy for her to let you go if I wasn’t here.”

  “Did you want to be anywhere else?”

  Avery shook her head. “No. I didn’t. Anyway. I’m not sure how we got started on this. It’s not important.”

  “I don’t know. I think the fact that you brought it up proves that it’s at least a little bit important,” Lark said.

  “I’m happy with my life,” Avery said. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

  “I know you’re happy. That doesn’t mean you never wanted anything else, though,” Hannah said. “You have a great house. And husband. And kids.”

  “I know you’re allergic to kids,” Avery said.

  “I’m not allergic to kids,” Hannah said. “They just don’t fit anywhere in my life.”

  Lark would have fit them in. But no one asked her.

  It was weird, how they could feel so linked by their past, by the fact they were sisters, and yet have no real idea of who each other was now.

  There had been a time when they’d known exactly what each other thought about everything. And then Avery going through puberty had widened the gap hugely, then Hannah going after her and leaving Lark behind.

  It hadn’t left a lot of time for sisters.

  Lark had her own group of friends. Friends who were incredibly important to her. Friends who had introduced her to the benefits of hard cider and Doritos as a flavor combination.

  Of course, that group had dissolved too.

  “Kids don’t fit into your life,” Avery said. “You rearrange your life to fit kids into it.”

  “A fantastic reason to go on without then,” Hannah said. “I’m just teasing. But my only goals right now revolve around the symphony.”

  Hannah had always known exactly what she wanted. She’d always had her music. And she had always known which direction she was headed. Lark felt like her life had been one big redirect after another. Thinking she was on one path, ending up on another. Flying off of the new one spectacularly and landing somewhere entirely different.

  Avery had gone to school for English, but she’d also always been very clear that she wanted to get married and have children. She’d come back to Bear Creek with a degree and a fiancé.

  It made Lark feel like the cuckoo in the nest. If it weren’t for Gram she would have felt like she was an entirely different species to her family.

  “I like kids,” Lark said. “And the idea of being in a shop the way that Grandma was... It makes me happy. I want it to be filled with people. Laughing and talking and creating. I want it to be...” She looked at the piles of things they had gone through already. “Her. Everywhere Grandma went she created something. It was like her hands were magic. That was what I learned from her. That hands could make magic, right here in the real world. And I want to give that
to other people.”

  “I can mend socks and make costumes and do all kinds of things thanks to Gram,” Avery said. “I’m not sure I find the kind of magic in it that you do, Lark, but it does make me feel closer to her.”

  “All this stuff,” Lark said. “It’s such a treasure chest.”

  “Loose ends,” Hannah said, wrinkling her nose. Lark noticed her sister didn’t have a comment on what it had meant to her. But she was right about one thing.

  A lot of loose ends. So many of them. Down in Lark’s own soul. And even in the story of their grandmother. And Lark found herself wondering if there was a secret in the things her grandmother had chosen to make. In the things she hadn’t finished.

  The family she didn’t talk about. The wounds that she carried. How a woman who clearly loved so much, the kids in town and her grandchildren, had left her husband and her children for as many years as she had.

  As Lark had gotten older, and understood more deeply why there was friction between her mother and grandmother, as she’d realized she loved both women and that Gram’s actions were hard to reconcile, she’d wondered about her life. She’d wondered about why.

  “We need to finish the quilt together,” she said.

  “I don’t really quilt,” Avery said.

  “You know how. And, I’m making a whole space just for this kind of thing. Wouldn’t it be great if we got together every week and worked on this? It’s Grandma’s memory quilt, and what better way to finish it than as a family?”

  “I... Yeah,” Avery said. “That does sound fun. We can spend time together.”

  “We’re going to be spending time together while we renovate The Dowell House,” Hannah pointed out. “And it’s going to be a lot of work.”

  Avery held up her hands, which were freshly manicured. “Do I look like I’m getting involved in actual manual labor? We are going to end up paying someone else to do most of it.”

  “I know,” Hannah said. “But it’s still going to be time-consuming to oversee it.”

  “We have time to sit together and make a quilt,” Lark said. “If we don’t make the time...” She closed her eyes. “I feel like I’ve barely seen either of you since I left home.”

  “Because you haven’t,” Hannah said.

  “I didn’t see Gram enough. And now it’s too late.” Lark appealed to her sisters. “Remember sitting on the front porch of The Miner’s House? And we would each get a little quilt square? And we’d actually sit together and we didn’t fight or anything. It was good.”

  “I don’t do this stuff anymore,” Hannah said. “I might not be performing while I’m here but I can’t stop practicing. I have to get everything with the house organized, I don’t know that I want to undertake...quilting.”

  “Come drink wine then,” Avery said. “You have to put your violin down sometimes. Do it at this appointed time.”

  “Why don’t you want to do it?” Lark asked. “You liked it when we were kids.”

  “Until I found the thing I loved doing. Anyway, you know what I’m allergic to? Domesticity.”

  Avery rolled her eyes. “Well don’t get too close to me. I might get some on you.”

  “You take everything awfully personally,” Hannah said.

  “And you’re taking a little bit of quilting awfully seriously.”

  “Mom’s not going to be super into it either,” Avery pointed out, ignoring Hannah now.

  “She barely knows how to thread a needle. And you know she’s going to get mad about it because she hates it when she doesn’t know how to do something.”

  Something shifted inside Lark’s chest. “We’ll teach her. Because Gram didn’t. But she did teach us. And it’s not lost. It’s not too late.”

  Conviction burned in her chest, along with something else. A deep need to share this. To pass it on. Like the stitches on the quilt would stitch up something inside of her. Close something off that had been there, frayed and gaping for years.

  “Okay,” Avery said. “I’ll do it. I’ll convince her.”

  Lark raised her glass. “Excellent. The Ashwood family quilting circle will commence this week.”

  4

  He says he wants to marry me. That will mean...staying here. I can’t bear the thought of it. I love him, but I cannot imagine that life. In a kitchen, looking at the same view I’ve seen all my life with children tugging at my hem. Even he could not make it bearable.

  Ava Moore’s diary, 1923

  Hannah

  It seemed somehow quintessentially Bear Creek that there would be a generalized handyman. Who not only did basic plumbing, but other odd jobs. Drywall repair, electrical. It was the kind of thing some people found charming about small towns. And if Hannah squinted and tilted her head slightly, she could almost see it.

  But mostly she found the lack of options here just...a lot of work. It wasn’t like in Boston where she could order groceries, dinner, a car or a date all with her phone.

  Though she supposed a handyman who was basically a human Swiss Army knife was a convenience of a sort.

  And it was of course exactly what they needed to get The Dowell House functional again.

  The wiring was finicky, owing to the fact that their grandfather had done a fair amount of work on the place on his own. And absolutely shouldn’t have. The man wasn’t qualified. Sometimes a light switch in one corner of the kitchen turned a light out in the parlor, and it was things like that that were going to make it difficult for guests to enjoy a stay.

  What had surprised her was that there had been a website with a contact form, and she’d been able to contact the business through the internet and make an appointment that way.

  In her opinion everyone should do it like that. If she could avoid a phone call, she would.

  She wanted efficiency. Not small talk.

  She was puttering around the kitchen when she heard the sound of a truck, a big truck, with a rumbling, clanking engine pull up to the property.

  “You would think a handyman might make his truck sound like it wasn’t on its last gasp,” she muttered as she went over to the window and looked outside. It was indeed a big dually, all white and chipped with red lettering on the side that said All Around Handyman.

  “Not a mechanic, though,” she said against the window.

  The figure inside shifted, and got out of the truck, rounding to the passenger side so that Hannah could get a better look at him. He was not, as she had imagined, a middle-aged gray-haired man with a beer belly. Rather the guy was young, with dark brown hair and broad shoulders. And when he turned to the side, she felt like she had taken a punch straight to her solar plexus.

  That profile was as familiar as her own.

  More.

  She blinked rapidly, shocked that tears were filling her eyes. Tears. Over the ex-boyfriend that she had broken up with nineteen years ago.

  It was just shock. She wasn’t remotely heartbroken over Joshua Anderson. Not back then, not nineteen years later.

  Then he turned fully, facing the kitchen window, and looked up. She felt like she was sixteen years old all over again.

  And she knew that the face she saw, superimposed over whatever his actual thirty-six-year-old face looked like, was just the boy that she had fallen for, hard and fast, clawing tooth and nail to try not to. Because she had always known she was going to leave, and she had never, ever wanted to have a relationship with a local boy.

  But she could remember then. That he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. That he had scrambled everything up in her brain, in her chest, and turned her well-ordered existence into a series of compromises and what ifs.

  She’d been crouched in a corner at lunch, her sheet music in front of her as she ran through it all mentally. Over and over again.

  “Why do you always eat alone?”

  She looked
up and her heart dropped. He was...devastating. She’d never understood that term to describe a boy before. Lark used it with ease. Every boy with eyes a certain shade of blue devastated her.

  But Hannah herself had never been devastated until that moment.

  “I’m busy.”

  He didn’t take the hint. He sat with her. He didn’t talk while she was looking over her sheet music, he just sat. Then he walked with her to class.

  “I’m Josh.”

  And I’m too busy.

  “Hannah.”

  She’d thought that was the end, but it was the beginning. Slowly those lunch dates had become daily, and she’d started talking to him instead of looking at her sheet music. She’d started spending some nights out with him.

  Kissing him had made her breathless in a way only music ever had before.

  Until she’d realized what was happening.

  That he was a distraction and she’d fallen right into him in the most basic of ways.

  She needed a cigarette. Badly.

  She was suddenly doing mental calculations to figure out how she could sneak one outside while he was still here.

  He walked along the side of the house, toward the front, and she followed, concealed now by the wall until she stopped in the living room, peering through the window from a great distance, watching as he rounded the corner and stepped onto the flagstone path that led up to the door.

  Each footstep he took seemed to echo inside of her chest. And by the time he knocked on the door, she was so wound up that even though she had been expecting it she jumped.

  She was being ridiculous.

  Nineteen years since they’d broken up.

  It had been nearly nineteen years since she’d so much as seen him. And, by extension, since he had seen her naked. Which meant it was probably not in the forefront of his mind. Though, now all she could do was imagine him naked.

  She cut off that thought and went straight for the door, walking to the entryway and taking a brief moment to look at him through the one-way glass, which allowed her to see a purple and green tinted version of him, while she knew that he couldn’t see her at all.