“Do you need more material?” she asked.
“Oh no, ma’am. No. Maybe if any of these sell, I might buy some.”
“I could let you have some and deduct it later from the money you’ll have coming.”
“If the quilts don’t sell, it’d be a debt.”
“I’m sure they’ll sell.” Dorcas was already thinking of a dealer in antiques and crafts who would handle something this fine. She could sell him the lot, she was sure. “You should look on it as a business investment.”
“Well — if you’re sure it’s all right.”
She chose a soft green that Dorcas herself loved, a pale shade with darker green designs of ferns and feathery growing things. With it she placed a strawberry pink. Exactly right, Dorcas thought. The colors of spring and growth. She watched Lillian Shaw’s hands move over the bolts of cloth as though making their selection partly by touch, loving the smoothness and feeling the quilt already made.
“What pattern will you choose for this one?”
“Tree of Life,” Lillian Shaw replied without hesitation. In her head it was already made, Dorcas thought. The two of them looked at each other again, and it seemed to Dorcas that with each look she knew something more about the woman. She knew right now, for instance, that it was important to Lillian to take this material home with her — the pale green, the young glowing pink. That she needed it. Because Lillian sewed her quilts for the same reason women of an earlier time must have sewn theirs in the long howling winters, in the cold lonely cabins. To keep from going mad.
“She’s a real artist,” Dorcas told Richard that night. “Only very poor, I could tell.”
The two of them, so rich in blessings, considered this.
“Artists often are,” Richard ventured.
“And not happy.”
“You could tell that, too?”
“Yes.” Then Dorcas mentioned the evening class that had been suggested. It gave Richard a chill, thinking of lonely evenings without Dorcas.
“Maybe you could get this woman to teach it,” he said.
Dorcas had been giving this some thought herself.
“What a good idea, Richard,” she said, and put her white arms around him in the darkness.
“Two evenings a week, say. Perhaps two hours each time. And you’d be paid,” Dorcas said. “We’d charge a fee.”
Lillian Shaw, who had come into the shop for thread, considered it. “Could I, do you think?”
“Of course. Just show people how you do it yourself. How to measure and cut, that sort of thing.”
“Can I let you know?” Lillian said. “I’ll have to—” She did not finish saying what she had to do, but Dorcas thought she knew. There was someone she had to ask.
“Yes, of course,” Dorcas said. Then she added, “Do you live far? Would it be hard for you to come in, evenings?” It was winter now, and dark early.
“I live out on the Spoon Hollow Road,” Lillian said. “But my boy could probably bring me.”
It was the most she had revealed about herself. She had a home which could be located; she had a son old enough to drive.
“Fine,” Dorcas said. “You can let me know.”
Two days later Lillian came in and said she would give it a try.
The small group of students overflowed with enthusiasm. Lillian got on well with them. She began to smile now and then. The money was not much, but it seemed to satisfy her. Dorcas augmented it by giving her material for sewing. Twice a week in the early evening Lillian was brought to the shop by a boy in a rusty pickup truck. The boy had straight light hair which fell across his forehead, and he wore a plaid lumber jacket but no hat or gloves. Dorcas, watching through the window, could see the redness of his hands, the bony raw look of his wrists. She saw too that each time he left Lillian he waited until she was inside the door of the shop before leaving. His eyes followed her with a look of concern until she turned and gave him a little wave before going inside. He was always there to pick her up two hours later.
“His name is Edward,” Lillian explained.
“He seems a fine boy,” Dorcas said. Lillian looked pleased.
“He wants to join the Marines.”
“Oh?”
“He wants to get on. You know, learn things. The Marines, they teach you things.”
“When will he go?”
Lillian looked troubled. “I don’t know. I want him to go now, but he says no, not yet. He worries—” She broke off and did not finish.
Then one night it was not Edward who came for her but a man, a large man whose massive shoulders filled the doorway, whose head almost touched the bell when he stood up straight. He wore a checked flannel shirt and a down vest over it. His eyes were narrow and cold as he looked around the shop — at the colors ranged on the shelves and spilling over the big cutting table, at the group of learners in their sewing corner. Their voices stilled one by one as they felt the draft from the door and turned. Dorcas, who had come downstairs for a spool of thread to match a shirt she was mending for Richard, paused with the spool in her hand. The man swayed very slightly. A smell of drinking had come into the shop with him. His jaw was set. Like a rock, Dorcas thought.
Lillian, who was leaning over Mrs. Rodman’s shoulder, pointing to a corner that was not quite true, was the last to notice. When she straightened and turned toward the door she went white and, without a word, walked to the corner where her worn brown coat had been tossed over a chair.
“I must go,” she said. They were the only words she spoke as she pulled on her coat and her knitted hat and went out the door with the man. He had left the door open all the time he waited for her, and the shop was cold now. Dorcas, still clutching the spool of thread, swallowed and turned to the students.
“I believe that will be all for this evening,” she said.
She too was white by the time she returned to Richard upstairs.
“But what are you afraid of?” he kept asking after she had told him about it. “What is it?”
Dorcas only shook her head and pressed herself closer in his arms, shivering.
Two days later Lillian came to the shop again, but in the daytime. She had walked, Dorcas guessed by the look of her, for her knitted hat was pulled down over her forehead and her scarf wrapped her almost up to her eyes. Dorcas fluttered around her and said, “Lillian, you look frozen. Come sit down. Take your things off, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“I don’t need anything,” Lillian said, and as she unwrapped herself slowly Dorcas could see the swelling around her eyes, the bruises over her cheekbones, the split upper lip. And Dorcas, who had very little experience in such matters, whose life had been painted with a palette of soft colors, began to tremble.
“Are you all right, Lillian?” And then, even though she knew, “What happened to you?”
“I won’t be able to teach the class any more,” Lillian said. “My husband doesn’t like me to be out at night.”
“But surely—” Dorcas began, and saw Lillian close her eyes slowly, as if against some pain too great to be looked at. “But you can still come in the daytime. You’ll be needing material now and then, and if I sell those quilts of yours you may want to bring me more. If you have more, that is—”
Lillian’s eyes came open, but slowly, as if Dorcas’s determined optimism wearied her. “Oh yes,” she said. “I have more.”
“Well then — if you want to part with them, that is—”
“Part with them?” Bitterness crept in now. “Oh yes, I’d part with them all right.”
“Well then, you see? We will be seeing each other.” Dorcas, recognizing what was in the other woman’s eyes, still could not help painting with her own set of colors, trying to brush in pale rose, sunny yellow. “It’ll be all right, Lillian, you’ll see.”