When a colorful row of wood houses suddenly appeared on either side of the road, I pulled over with relief. Civilization. I almost ran into a small sign planted in the sloping lawn of a boxy house with peeling sky-blue paint. QUILTS AND ROCKS! SE VENDE! BARATO!!! Maybe not quite civilization. My high school Spanish translated: FOR SALE! CHEAP!!!
My eyes traveled past the litter of rusty tools and a huge pile of limestone rocks to the west side of the home. Wildly colorful, Mexican-inspired quilts fluttered on the clothesline like free-spirit Picassos. This house seemed as good a place as any to knock first.
I slipped out of the car, sidestepped a broken tractor seat and an old-fashioned hand pump, and delicately maneuvered up crumbling concrete steps to a small porch. I peered through the patched screen door, but could only make out the dark shapes of a couch and a chair. Every shade was drawn to shut out the sun. Somewhere in a back room, an industrial floor fan roared like an airplane taking off.
Just as I was about to knock, the chair moved. Or rather, a shadow rose out of the shadows. I found myself eye to eye with a fiftyish Mexican man on the other side of the screen. He wore a guarded expression and a faded red-and-blue-checked work shirt. A silver crucifix hung around his neck. Catholic. One of my people.
“I was about to knock,” I said quickly. I offered him a practiced smile, which he ignored. His gaze traveled from my sweaty face to my belly to the old pink Skechers on my feet. I hadn’t taken much care with my appearance this morning, throwing on maternity jeans with a kangaroo pouch that the website promised would expand with me up to forty more pounds. This seemed possible, even probable, at the rate I was eating iced animal crackers out of the bag. I’d also pulled one of Mike’s faded old T-shirts over my head, emblazoned with the New York Fire Department logo.
Definitely pregnant, possibly lost, certainly harmless. That’s what I read in his face when he stepped out on the porch and let the door slam behind him.
“Do you know Maria Valdez?” I asked. “Por favor. I’m looking for her. Por Maria. Me llama Emily.” I pointed to myself unnecessarily. The man was silent for so long I considered turning around and trudging back to my car.
“I speak English,” he said, finally. “I’m Rafael.”
“Good. Great.” I felt myself blushing. Awkward. “I need a babysitter.” I patted my belly. Lying again.
“There.” He pointed across the road to several small boxy houses.
“Really? The pink house? The yellow?” I couldn’t believe this was going to be so easy.
“Yellow.”
“Gracias, sir.” And then, impulsively: “Cuanto? For a quilt?”
“You want to look?” He asked it almost shyly. A paying customer. There couldn’t be many of us meandering by.
“Yes. Please.”
He stepped off the concrete porch, avoiding the stairs entirely. “Cuidado,” he told me, offering a hand down.
Six masterpieces hung by common wooden clothespins, one every few inches, like a row of sparrows on a telephone line. I stopped at the first quilt, stunned, and moved slowly down the row, my fingers running lightly over the intricate quilting.
Each block was powerfully original and yet clearly born from the same artist’s hands. Bold colors and clever, whimsical designs alive with frogs, flowers, turtles, fish, and birds. At a distance, the patches flowed together like a glorious mural; up close, it was hard not to fixate on the complex geometry of the stitching. I could look at these quilts a hundred times, a thousand times, and see something different.
I wanted to buy them all. A quilt under glass at the Smithsonian Craft Show last spring wasn’t even close to this level of artistry. Price tag on that one: $10,000. But it seemed greedy, almost offensive, to strip all this beauty off the line.
“Incredible.” I waved my arm to encompass all of them. “Your wife?”
“No, no. My wife died last year. Breast cancer. Me. My work. Always, my work.”
He bent over and violently ripped a large milkweed out of the ground.
“I’m so sorry.” I turned back to the quilts immediately, because that’s what I’d want someone to do for me.
“The sewing passes my time. I sell the quilts every Saturday at the flea market.” He shrugged. “But those people do not want to pay. They want everything for one dollar, two dollar. I make more on my old bottles and rocks.”
I think about how my connections in the art world could change the life of this grizzled man. But maybe he didn’t want change. Maybe he wanted to be permanently fixed to this land, near things his wife had touched in life, where her spirit had settled.
I chose one, the smallest, which was strewn with a flock of colorful birds that I’d never seen in nature. For the baby’s room. Maybe it would inspire me to abandon superstition and set it up. I’d sold off one piece of superstition already: the brand-new crib we’d bought three years and several miscarriages ago.
“I’ll take this one. How much?”
“One hundred.” I could tell by his expression that he was up for bargaining. He turned away to free the quilt from the clothespins. Brown, wrinkled hands folded the quilt. His nails were as clean and well manicured as a surgeon’s.
I opened my purse and pulled out a $20, my only cash aside from the emergency $100 bill in the back flap of my wallet that I had always carried to appease would-be muggers in the city. I tugged it out and gave Rafael that, too. I knew that it wasn’t nearly enough, but his warm smile said that it was plenty.
“It is lucky,” he said. “You pick well.”
“What do you mean?”
“For your son to sleep under birds. Mucho suerte.”
A burst of euphoria coursed through my ragged nerves. How did he know I was having a boy? That the quilt was for my son? The cross around his neck glinted in the sun. The heat spread through my veins like warm tequila. The air smelled like dirt and honeysuckle. I had just been blessed by a misplaced priest with a chipped front tooth.
“Muchas gracias.” I held out my arms, thinking I’d sleep under this quilt every night until the baby was born. But Rafael wasn’t ready to hand it over.
“There.” He pointed to a tiny black cross stitched to the bottom edge of the quilt. “That is my signature. Dios es infinidad.” Infinity. God is forever.
Before I left, he said, “Sure, it’s OK, take a few pictures with your phone.” I shot the quilts from every angle. It wouldn’t hurt to email them to a few people. Spirits have been known to travel.
After I tucked my purchase into the backseat, I stood on the tidy, well-swept porch of the yellow house across the street. The very pretty Mexican girl who answered the door clutched an SAT study guide under her arm. Maria wasn’t home, she said. A toddler clung to her legs, hiding her head under the older girl’s skirt.
I told this young woman the same lie I’d told Rafael, only slightly more elaborate. That I was looking for a babysitter. That Maria was recommended to me. That I would pay very well. I overdramatically wiped sweat off my brow. I asked for a drink. She opened the screen door somewhat reluctantly and let me into a tiny cave of a living room. The rumble of an aging window air conditioner blended with the sizzle of something frying in the kitchen. Whatever it was made my mouth water.
“I’m Rosie,” she said. “Maria is my sister. This is Violet. My daughter.” Rosie couldn’t be more than seventeen. Violet, no more than two. Rosie took the child with her into the kitchen while I flopped down on a small couch covered by a cheap fleece blanket that instantly made my legs sweat, perspiration working through my jeans. There were two small end tables, one with a tiled image of the Virgin Mary. Three straight-back dining room chairs. A heavy wrought-iron cross that looked like it might bring down the wall where it was hanging. Maria needed her job.