CHAPTER 44
By the time I got home all the members of the quilt club had already arrived. Nancy was pouring M &M's into a bowl while Carrie set out coffee for everyone. Bernie sat with my grandmother looking over a new quilting book that had arrived that morning. Maggie and Susanne leaned over a vibrant quilt top Natalie had made.
"I still have to quilt it," she was saying, "and I just can't figure out the best design."
"Since it's strips, I would do circles," Susanne suggested. "You want to do something simple, so as not to interfere with the design of the top, but you also want to play against the strong rectangles the strips make."
I walked closer to see the quilt they were studying. When Natalie saw me, she held up the top she called a Bargello, and I was stunned. The quilt was made of two-inch strips of about forty fabrics that were then cross-cut into strips that varied in width from a half inch to three inches. Then these strips were sewn together to make a kind of wave effect. The quilt pattern was, according to Maggie, named after a needlepoint stitch and replicated the look. It looked like about the most complicated pattern I'd seen so far, but everyone loudly assured me it wasn't.
"The hardest thing for this quilt is choosing the right fabrics," Bernie told me.
"And putting them together in the right order," Susanne added.
"Still," I hesitated. "It looks like you have to be precise."
"That just comes from experience."
I walked over and took the quilt top in my hand. A red square caught my eye. In the first strip it was near the middle but its position moved up and down on each succeeding strip across the quilt. It was quite a beautiful effect until I got to the last three strips. There two red squares were next to each other.
"Is this on purpose?" I asked, as I pointed to the red squares.
Natalie grabbed the quilt. "Damn," she said. "I can't believe I missed that."
The other women circled around. "You can fix that easily," Maggie reassured her. "You just have to unsew the last bit."
"Unsew?" I asked.
"That's our way of saying rip up the part you got wrong and sew it back together," my grandmother told me. Natalie grunted at the thought.
"I thought if something didn't work, you threw it out," I said. "UFOs, you called them, right?"
"That's only if you don't like it," Carrie spoke up. "If you make something and realize that the design isn't working or the fabrics are wrong, something that can't be fixed."
"If you like it, if you just made a mistake, then you do whatever it takes to fix it," Natalie sighed. "No matter how depressing that is." She looked down at her quilt, fingering the mistake in her sewing that put the two red squares next to each other.
"But how do you know when to give up and when to repair?" I asked. "It seems like a lot of work when you could just move on to something else."
"It is a lot of work," Natalie said. Maggie put an arm around her.
"That's the tricky part," Bernie acknowledged. "When you put a lot of work into something and then realize that you've made a mistake, or something isn't working, you can get so frustrated that you want to throw it away. What I do is give myself some time."
"That's right," Nancy agreed. "I put it away for a little while, maybe a few days or a week, then I look at it with fresh eyes."
My grandmother shifted on her chair. "The thing is, Nell, if you decide that something isn't worth the effort, then you have to let it go. But if you decide that it is, then you have to do whatever is necessary to make it work."
I nodded. The metaphor wasn't lost on me.
An hour later, as the discussion turned to the quilt we were making for Tom, I left the room for the kitchen. My grandmother had asked me to put together gift bags of fat quarters of fabric as a thank-you for all the pies, cakes, casseroles, and brownies the quilt club had been bringing us.
"Well, hello there," Susanne said cheerily as she walked into the kitchen with an empty coffee mug.
"We're out of coffee," I said. "It will take a minute for me to make some more."
"How about tea?" I put the kettle on and Susanne leaned against the kitchen counter, watching me fill the bags. "How are things going at the shop?"
"Tom's doing a great job. He may be finished before you're done with the quilt."
"Not a chance." She held up several finished blocks. They were shades of purples, blues and reds. They looked pretty, but I couldn't figure out what they would look like once they were sewn together. "Natalie told me about what you said. About the baby. It's a big relief."
"I'm glad."
"And it means that Jesse can leave Natalie alone about this Marc thing."
"Yes, hopefully." I didn't want to say anything about a possible new motive, so instead I was a little out of line. "But Marc was still harassing Natalie. She still had a motive." I swallowed hard. "So did you."
Susanne smiled widely and warmly. "I certainly did. I would have happily killed that SOB if I'd had the courage."
I nodded. "Look, for what it's worth, I don't think Jesse would try to railroad Natalie into a murder charge just because she bailed on a friendship with his wife."
"Is that what he's telling you?"
"He isn't telling me anything."
"Well, then, you should ask him," she said.
"I find that he's better at listening than talking."
She laughed. "He is a man with many secrets," she said.
CHAPTER 45
I had talked with Ryan every night, but the conversations were short and, for the most part, perfunctory. Work was fine, he said. He was getting a cold. I was busy with the shop. Things were going well and my grandmother was healing nicely. Had we really gotten this dull?
I'd started dreading the calls, but after Jesse's and my grandmother's veiled advice, I needed to hear Ryan's voice, so as soon as the quilters left, I went upstairs. He sounded tired from a long day at work but otherwise the same. It was getting confusing-liking Ryan's familiarity, but also Jesse's new stories and way of looking at the world. Love in the fairy tales wasn't like this. You met, fell in love, and lived happily ever after. You didn't kiss the local bad boy or share chocolate cake with the soft-spoken widower. I wished I could just say all of this to Ryan, but I knew any attempt would be met with the same anger and pain that Ryan had encountered when he tried to talk to me the night he broke the engagement. Instead I chatted about the quilt and he talked about the office. We were on the phone for about ten minutes of dull, everyday talk when Ryan brought up the subject we'd been avoiding.
"We need to talk about the wedding," he said.
"What about it?"
"If we're going to keep the same date, then you have to send out the invitations."
"I can't remember where I packed them," I told him.
"Well, look."
"What's the rush?"
"Are you kidding me?" an exasperated Ryan practically shouted into the phone. "What is with you? You want to get married, don't you?"
I hesitated. "Yes," I said. I didn't know what I wanted. I just knew I didn't want to fight about it.
I could hear Ryan's voice soften. "I know things are hard for you right now, but I'm really proud of you for doing this," he said, changing the subject, "helping your grandmother this way."
"Thanks."
"It's hard for me too, you know."
"I know."
"I walked past the skating rink in Central Park yesterday. Do you remember?" I did remember. On our third date Ryan had taken me there and we spent an hour skating and falling before giving up and taking a hansom cab ride through the park.