Confessions from the Quilting Circle Read online

  She’d learned she couldn’t let herself be pulled in too many directions. She’d learned you couldn’t love too many things.

  She’d put the past away, and she didn’t get it out and turn it over, not ever. That was behind her. The past had nothing to do with her future, and her future was what mattered.

  Which meant...making the past into something bigger than it was didn’t have any place.

  She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at the text box for the group chat called Sisters.

  All right, she typed. What night are we quilting?

  5

  The wagon is reserved for children, and sometimes women, but I prefer to walk. I am not sure what I’ve agreed to or why. Grief makes fools of all of us. Or perhaps it is still love, reaching out from beyond the grave. At least out here it is easy to forget who I am. Abraham Snow’s wife would not have made this journey. But his widow is.

  Anabeth Snow’s diary, 1864

  Avery

  “Grandpa is in his shop if you want to go see him, Hayden.”

  When her mom spoke, Avery’s son brightened visibly. Getting her fourteen-year-old to brighten was no easy task these days. Hayden was all height with none of his breadth yet. Taller than she was, but narrow. He could be sweet, but sometimes...sometimes his bursts of testosterone stole the boyish roundness from his personality and replaced them with angry, impatient edges that his maturity level couldn’t quite support yet.

  It was such a weird thing, watching this boy you’d created grow into a man. She’d watched her daughter transform from a small rectangular shaped girl into a girl with the shape of a woman, who looked so much like Avery it sometimes caught her off guard.

  Even stranger was realizing Peyton looked more like Avery did in her head, than she did in real life, because in her heart she still looked like that sixteen-year-old version of herself. Thirty-eight-year-old her wasn’t fixed in her head yet. And by the time she was, she supposed she’d be forty-five-year-old her and then that would be another thing to get used to.

  She could ignore time when it was her. Much harder when she looked at her kids. They were evidence of the passing years in a sometimes harsh way.

  Most especially when they made it clear they didn’t need her in the ways they once had.

  “Okay,” Hayden said, barely looking at her as he went back out the front door, and headed toward her dad’s shop.

  “He was desperate to get away from the women,” her mom said.

  “Yeah.”

  Hayden was mad, and not at her, at David. She wasn’t supposed to be the one to pick him up from practice today. But David had been busy with paperwork at the hospital, stemming from a surgery that hadn’t gone to plan. But Hayden didn’t care about the reasons. Only that his dad hadn’t been there for him.

  Avery really didn’t mind when her plans had to shift because of David’s work. She didn’t. She understood that his work was intense, and she’d chosen to marry him, knowing he’d be a doctor. But Hayden didn’t understand.

  She wasn’t what he wanted. Wasn’t the one who could fix it.

  That hurt. Made her feel helpless and...

  Tired.

  “We’re not going to stay long,” Avery said. “I have to fix dinner. But I wanted to talk to you. Because... Lark has an idea.”

  “Lark has an idea and you’re here to pitch it to me?” her mother said. “That doesn’t seem like a very good sign.”

  “Lark wants to finish Gram’s quilt. And she wants all of us to help.”

  She watched her mother’s expression shift into something bland, which meant she was thinking mean things and didn’t want to advertise it.

  Avery knew, because she often did the same thing.

  “I don’t really want to mess with my mother’s things,” her mom said.

  “Mom, I know.” Avery looked at her mother, and she felt... Well, immensely guilty. Because she knew that this was a sore spot for her mom. It was also why she thought she should be the one to talk to her about it. “I understand that your relationship with Gram was complicated.”

  “It wasn’t complicated,” Mary said, her tone firm. “She had a relationship with the three of you and there was no cost to being civil. If your grandpa could be civil, always, in spite of his hurt, I could be too.”

  Her grandpa had been extremely upright. He’d had a classic view on manners and the treatment of others.

  He’d passed it on to his daughter, who took his way of things as gospel.

  Her mother was old-fashioned in her values, but without being overtly feminine. She’d learned to cook of a necessity, but she’d never been one to sit and have girl talk. She wasn’t a big toucher, and she didn’t show her emotions easily.

  The admission that she’d had to work to be civil was a pretty big admission, actually.

  “I know. You let Gram back in for us.” She took a breath. “I know that you made as much of a relationship as you had because you wanted the three of us to know her. And I think that was incredibly kind.”

  “It is what it is,” she said. “And now she’s gone. It’s going to take a while to figure out exactly how I feel about all of this.”

  That was as close to a heart-to-heart as her mom got.

  “I know,” Avery said. “And I’m sorry. But I do think that Lark is right. We can do this together. Finish the quilt together. We can teach you how. I can’t fix what Gram did, that she wasn’t in your life. But we can make something new together, out of all these old things. That feels a lot like fixing something.” She blinked. “Or at least repairing it.”

  “I’ll never forget it,” Mary said. “When Mom came back, and wanted to see you. You were two years old. I could hardly believe she had the nerve to do that. But she...taught you things I couldn’t. Things she didn’t teach me, and I was never going to keep that from you.”

  “Mom, we love you so much. Nobody wants you to be hurt by this. But we would like you to do this with us.”

  “It’s no fuss, Avery,” she said, her manner getting brusque and making Avery think it was at least a little bit of fuss.

  But she wouldn’t say that, of course.

  Avery looked at the time. She really had to go get moving on dinner.

  Suddenly, Avery wanted to sit down. At her mom’s kitchen table. And just stay. In this place where someone felt like it was easy to do things for her. Where somebody might fix her dinner. She had the strongest, strangest urge to go to her childhood bedroom and curl up in the bed in there.

  “Thanks, Mom. I have to go.” She took a step away from the kitchen, rather than moving toward it like she had just wanted to do. “I’m glad that you’re going to do the quilt with us.”

  “Me too,” Mary said. But her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. And Avery knew that like everything else, it was complicated.

  But complicated was just the way life was.

  You didn’t get to go hide in your parents’ house just because you were tired.

  And you just said that you never felt tempted to run away.

  All right, maybe sometimes she wanted a break. That wasn’t the same thing. And she wasn’t taking one. That was what really mattered. What you actually did.

  And Avery always did what she was supposed to.

  Mary

  Mary walked up the front steps of The Miner’s House with a bright ball of emotion burning inside her. She avoided this place. It had been her mom’s candy store, and except for dropping off and picking up the girls, she didn’t set foot in it. And, hadn’t had occasion to in more than twenty years.

  She could still remember her mom coming back. Mary had been pregnant and Avery had been a toddler.

  Addie had rolled in, in that convertible of hers at nine at night.

  Mary hadn’t seen her mother since her wedding five years earlier. She’d been
mad Addie had shown up for that when Mary had not sent her an invitation and she’d known it would be a problem for her dad.

  But she’d come all the same, and just like now, on a breeze of spearmint, perfume and cigarettes.

  She didn’t invite her in. She stepped outside instead, wrapping her robe more tightly around her body. “Mom. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m moving back. I’m... I’m moving home.”

  She hadn’t noticed how old her mom looked five years earlier. How deep the lines by her mouth were. Her red hair was the same, and she was still trim and full of energy.

  Her hair never changed. Mary had already vowed to gray gracefully instead of insisting on candy-apple red into eternity.

  “I want to know my grandchildren.”

  The words stabbed through her chest. “Why? And why now? Why mine? Why not move to Newport to get to know Bill’s kids?”

  “You have a daughter. I... I made a mistake, Mary. I made a lot of mistakes. Would you really keep me from knowing your kids?”

  She thought of everything she’d missed not having her mother in her life. Could she keep her kids from having a grandmother when she wanted to be there for them?

  Joe’s mother had passed when he was in high school and Addie was the only grandma. Their only chance at that.

  “I’ll think about it. Come back tomorrow.”

  It was her dad who’d told her grudges didn’t heal wounds. And she was sure he was right. But...either way she didn’t feel all that healed.

  It was nostalgic and terrible, a feeling of sadness and wistfulness rolled into one as she walked up the white steps and through the front door. She hated this. Hated all this grief. She couldn’t control it or compartmentalize it. It just sat there.

  The changes in the space shocked her enough to take over the feelings. “Lark,” she said. “Did you do this?”

  There was a heavy wooden bar where a shiny counter had once been, with tall stools positioned at it. Antique lights hung over the top of it. The entire thing felt warmer. Older and newer all at once.

  Mary was in awe of what her youngest daughter had accomplished. It wasn’t just all the work it had taken, it was...

  It was the bravery.

  Taking this place and turning it into something new.

  Mary had always had complicated feelings about the candy store. That her mother had settled here when it was far too late for Mary to benefit from it.

  That it was the place her girls had gotten along best.

  Mary hated to admit it, but she’d felt betrayed by that sometimes. That Addie had been able to find ways to bring the girls together. That she’d done it with arts and crafts, which had felt beyond Mary’s reach.

  With chats and sewing, feminine things. The sorts of things Mary had spent a lifetime feeling incompetent at and certain people around her knew it.

  But now the building had brought Lark home.

  “I did,” her daughter said, coming in from the back.

  She was so glad Lark was home. She worried about Lark because while her daughter had done what Mary considered to be an incredible feat—become a self-supporting artist—she was so isolated. So hard to reach when at one time she’d been so...

  She’d been different. And Mary had never been able to figure out what had changed. Lark would have never admitted anything had.

  And Mary didn’t know how to...talk to her girls. She’d never learned that. Talking about feelings. She was always more comfortable doing something. Putting a Band-Aid on a scrape. Fixing peanut butter and jelly to ease their hurts.

  And as they’d gotten older Band-Aids and peanut butter hadn’t been enough.

  More and more she’d felt like an outsider to their lives. And as they’d grown older they’d gotten closer to Addie.

  Addie knew how to talk to them, she supposed.

  Mary hadn’t known how.

  Lark smiled, easily, the way that Lark always did. Lark was her sunny child. She’d always had so much energy, and her moods were aggressively cheerful, until they weren’t. Lark’s meltdowns were rare, but they had always been epic. She had never been halfway on anything.

  When Lark had gotten an idea she’d been halfway finished with it before she’d ever thought to ask. One time she’d cut up half of their family photos making a scrapbook when she’d been ten. Mostly that had just meant all of Mary’s nice photos that had been waiting for a home in a photo album had been cut into shapes deemed artistic by a child, and destroyed in Mary’s opinion.

  Lark had once started a dog washing business without asking. Mary had discovered it when she’d come home to find a terrier in the bathtub and Lark making bandannas out of an old swimsuit.

  Lark never meant to be bad. She never meant to cause problems. And any opposition to her schemes had been met with meltdowns.

  Mary found herself missing Lark’s tantrums.

  She couldn’t figure out why Lark being less moody made her feel more concerned. Had never been able to pin that worry down.

  “It looks... It looks wonderful,” Mary said.

  The door opened behind her, and Hannah came through, along with Avery.

  Hannah was a statement, as always, her bottle red hair never faded. She suspected her daughter touched it up at least once a week. She was dressed head to toe in black, and somehow managed to command attention, even wearing dark colors. But that was Hannah. Quietly intense and dramatic, but rarely showing it.

  She was outspoken and quick to voice an opinion but when it came to deeper emotion she kept everything bottled up, and sometimes Mary could see that she was silently drowning, but also knew that asking her about it would only push her into deeper water. Further away.

  It frustrated her that in many ways she and Hannah were probably the most alike, and somehow that made her the hardest to know.

  It was one reason she’d been so thankful for Hannah’s boyfriend, Josh Anderson. She’d had to pretend she didn’t know Hannah was sneaking out to be with him some nights. But she hadn’t wanted to push Hannah further away, and she’d so hoped that Josh reached her in ways she couldn’t.

  For a while, it had seemed he had.

  Until Hannah had dumped him. Broken his heart.

  Mary had gotten an earful from Cathy Anderson after that.

  It had been the last time she’d spoken to the other woman.

  Mary had told her that while she liked Josh well enough she didn’t meddle in the affairs of her kids. And that Hannah had to do what she thought was right.

  It didn’t matter if Mary couldn’t understand what Hannah’s heart wanted.

  Avery was both intimidating and a triumph for Mary. Evidence that having Addie back in their lives had done some good, but also...a feminine, pretty supermom type that Mary herself had always been intimidated by when she’d been raising her kids.

  She’d never meshed well with groups of women. But she’d been raised in a house of men.

  Her father had been a quiet man. A good man. But a man who had expected that when life was hard you picked up and carried on.

  It was Addie who hadn’t been able to do that.

  Mary’s mother had been so...volatile toward the end. Crying, laughing or shouting and nothing in between. In response, Mary’s father had gotten more and more even-keeled till he was like a river that barely moved.

  She knew he’d been hurt when Addie had left, but he’d stayed steady.

  Mary had wanted to do the same.

  “I have all the fabric laid out in the sitting room,” Lark said.

  Lark was fluttering. And she led them all from the entryway into a little room that had chairs set up in a circle.

  “And look what I made!” Lark produced a large box, and inside were blossoms and vines, twined into...

  Lark pulled one out and put it on her head, p
ale white and pink blossoms like cheery punctuation marks on her head. It reminded Mary of Lark’s near daily tea parties when she’d been a girl.

  Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been cut into tiny triangles, and milk poured into teacups. Lark had always been about the experience. Had always wanted even mundane moments to be parties. She’d guided and directed it all, and Mary had indulged it because when Lark was full of sparkle it was impossible to deny her.

  Lark had brought something out in her then that she’d never been able to find before. Or since.

  “Crowns!” Lark said.

  “No,” Avery said, her lips firming into a line.

  Hannah lifted a shoulder, then rooted around in the box until she found a crown with yellow flowers, which she perched on top of her bright red hair. “I’m here. I’m quilting. I might as well.”

  Mary looked at her daughter. “You can’t possibly expect me to wear a crown while trying to do something I’ve never done before in my life.”

  It was too easy to imagine herself. Her face wet with tears while her mom yelled at her about the ruined sampler.

  She’d only wanted to learn to needlepoint like Addie.

  It’s ruined now! Mary, why do you have to ruin everything of mine!

  She clenched her hands into fists.

  She could remember the yelling. Her tears.

  I don’t have the patience to teach you and God knows you can’t learn.

  And the next day she’d been gone.

  Mary knew full well it wasn’t why.

  She knew it with her head.

  It was a lot harder to know it in her heart.

  “Mom,” Lark said, heading over to the box and plucking out a delicate pink crown. Then she closed the distance between them, and set it on her head. “That is the best time to wear a flower crown. When you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. That’s why I wear one every chance I get.”

  Her daughter’s eyes glittered, but there was something else there too. A something that had been there for years, that Mary couldn’t ever quite reach.