Fool's Puzzle Earlene Fowler (microsoft ebook reader TXT) 📖

He shrugged and stuck the money in the cash register.

Okay, Aunt Garnet, I thought grimly, pulling the Chevy onto the now moonbright highway. Your granddaughter dragged me into this, so you’d better have some sewing money put aside. You just may need it to bail me out of jail.

8

I SPENT PART of Thanksgiving at Elvia’s parents’ house, holding babies and listening to her brothers debate with noisy passion the merits and liabilities of the Rams’ new defensive coach. Señora Aragon fussed around me like a small brown poodle, filling my plate before everyone else’s with her special wine-basted turkey and cilantro dressing. The brothers sent up a chauvinistic whine of protest. She scolded them in Spanish until, with sheepish faces, they quit complaining. I knew my situation was being discussed, but as long as I didn’t have to do anything but sit there, I didn’t care. Elvia was right, as she often is in my case. It was just what I needed, a family, but not my own.

When I got up to leave for the museum to finish hanging the quilts, another protest went up. This time from Elvia and her mother.

“No, no,” Señora Aragon said, shaking her small finger at me. “Too much danger.”

“Those quilts have to get hung,” I argued.

A compromise was reached, and Miguel, his Walkman and his pistol went along for protection. When I saw how deserted the neighborhood around the museum was, I was glad for Miguel’s presence. He stretched out on the floor in the lobby and listened to a football game while I finished Eric’s work. Eric’s tools were still spread out in the main hall, so at least I didn’t have to venture back into the studios. Even with Miguel there, I didn’t know if I could handle that.

I quickly became engrossed in the physical work of hanging the quilts. The co-op’s quitters had already basted strips of Velcro to the backs of the quilts so it was just a matter of hanging the frames and attaching the quilts to them.

I silently called off the names as I hung them: Jacob’s Ladder, Young Man’s Fancy, Texas Tears, Wild Goose Chase. I traced the tiny stitches with my finger, and wondered about the women who had sewn them. The histories I’d gathered revealed small pieces of their lives, answering my general questions about when they made the quilt and why. Some just gave short, terse replies. Others gave stories that were heartbreaking. I picked up one of the framed histories, the one for the stunning Jacob’s Ladder quilt. Muriel Phillips was the quilter. Born 1909. Quilt made in 1943. “I made the quilt when my three sons were called to war,” she’d written. “The real war. The Big One. They was all over the world—Alaska, the South Pacific, Italy. I pieced this quilt, a little bit every night, listening to the radio, using scraps from their old shirts. They surely loved blue, my boys did. That’s why there’s so much blue in the quilt. My youngest, Tommy Lee, the one who was sent to Italy—he never came back. I gave this quilt to his wife, Nona, and when she was dying of cancer in 1954, she gave it back to me. My husband and I slept under it for 38 years until he died last year of his heart.” I hung the history next to the quilt, peering closely at the picture of Muriel Phillips. The perky smile under her crown of white curls disguised all the sadness in her life.

I saved Grandmother Harper’s Double Wedding Ring quilt for last. I studied the intricate stitches and wondered who of Jack’s ancestors made love under this quilt, who was conceived, who died. The interlocking circles were made up of tiny scraps of material in the odd shades and patterns of blues, pinks, flowers and plaids popular seventy-five or eighty years ago. The ivory muslin background was faded yellow in spots; in the center of one ring a pale brown drop of blood stained the lightness.

When I was nineteen and newly married, Mom Harper started telling me I was to have this quilt. The Lone Star, honoring their Texas heritage, was to go to Wade’s wife, and I, as Jack’s wife, would receive the Wedding Ring quilt to pass down to future Harpers. As time went by and Jack and I never had children, Mom Harper stopped mentioning it. Now that I was no longer her daughter-in-law, I took it for granted Sandra would inherit them both. I told myself it didn’t matter, that it really had nothing to do with what I had with Jack. Not really.

After it was hung, I sat cross-legged in front of it and enjoyed the serenity of the whole pattern, wondering which of Wade and Sandra’s children would inherit it, picturing it going on down through the Harper family, further and further away from me.

Maybe we should have had those tests. We just kept putting it off, thinking—a baby will come in its own good time. Maybe it was fear—which of us would it be? We’d owned cows who’d taken a while to conceive. Wade always allowed them the standard two tries, then wanted to sell them, but Jack would take a shine to three or four every year and convince his brother to give them another chance. He’d sneak them treats of alfalfa cakes and croon to them in a low, gentle voice as he fed them, a voice I knew as well as my own sigh.

When it wasn’t the cows but me that needed his special attentions, Jack made the most wonderful hot chocolate—the kind made from scratch with real cocoa. He’d pour a thick white mugful, top it with whipped cream and bring it to me on a pink glass plate with roses etched on the bottom that once belonged to his grandmother. He’d drink his straight from the pan, feet propped up on the coffee table,