Jillian followed her back to a small kitchen, without mentioning it was still winter. They talked about the tea and the day as if they were old friends.
The morning passed like a peaceful river. Customers came in, mostly to talk. Jillian made note of the ones who had lived their entire lives in this town. A long-retired teacher named Joe Dunaway, most of the quilters she’d met yesterday, the mailman named Tap. As she settled in, she did what she often did in little towns: she’d ask if they knew a Jefferson James who might have lived around here thirty years ago. The answer was always no, a dead end. She’d found a few Jameses over the years, but none knew a Jefferson. Her father never allowed anyone to shorten his name.
Joe Dunaway said he thought the name might be familiar, but after forty years of teaching, all names sounded familiar.
While Joe watched the store, Gram took the time to show her around the tiny office after Jillian explained for the third time that she was there to make a record of all the quilts.
“Someday, your quilts will hang in a gallery at the county museum, and you’ll want all the facts to be right. I’ll compile that record for you, Gram.”
“Oh, of course you will,” Eugenia agreed as she sugared her tea for the second time.
When their cups were half-empty, they began to stroll through the colorful garden of quilts. Jillian kept her questions light. Never too many. Never too fast.
She noticed how Gram stroked each quilt she straightened as if it were precious. The kitchen and the office might be a cluttered mess, but all the quilts had to be in perfect order.
“You touch them as if they’re priceless. Like they’re your treasures, your babies,” Jillian said.
“Oh, they’re not mine. But in a way they are alive. Each one holds memories. I just put them together in the final step of quilting.” She pulled one from the shelf and spread it out on a wide table designed for cutting fabric. “This one belongs to Helen Harmon, who made it as a gift to give the man she loved on their wedding day. They’d known each other since grade school.” Gram pointed to one square. “See, that’s them as kids on the playground. He’s pulling her pigtail. I swear, Helen’s hair was stoplight red when she was little.”
Jillian saw thick red threads braided together and sewn onto the quilt.
Gram’s wrinkled fingers passed over another quilt square. A UT logo stood out in burnt orange. “That’s for their college days, and she made this one when he went into the army. When he came home a few years later and started work, his first job was in construction. Turned out he had a real knack for it.”
Jillian saw the square with tools crossing, almost like a crest.
“And here we have vacations they took camping, hiking, riding across the country on what Helen called hogs.” One square ran like a road map. “When they finally got engaged, both were thirty-four.” One square held nothing but sparkling material in the pattern of a diamond ring.
Jillian touched the square of a house. “When they bought their first house, right?”
Gram shook her head. “When he built what was to be their first house, she made that square. They both agreed neither would move in until after the wedding.”
“What happened?” Jillian realized she was holding her breath.
“I’d worked late into the night the evening before their rehearsal dinner. I wanted to have the quilt ready for her to give to him. She was not a natural seamstress, and was years away from being a skilled quilter. Each piece came hard for her. She’d laugh and say she really made ten quilts because she had to do each square over and over to get it just right.”
“What happened?” Jillian asked again.
“She didn’t come pick up the quilt the day of their rehearsal. When she woke that morning before her wedding, she found a note on his pillow. He’d had an offer for a new job up north and hadn’t known how to tell her. The note said he’d tried a hundred times to break off the engagement, but she was too busy planning the wedding to listen.”
“So he just left her?”
Gram nodded. “And she left this quilt. She told me I could sell it, but who buys another’s memories? She’d even embroidered the wedding date in the middle.”
Jillian looked at the quilt. June 19, 1971.
“You’ve kept this for almost fifty years?”
Gram nodded. “How do you throw away memories? It’s a beautiful quilt made with love. Helen eventually married a man named Green and moved to Houston, but she didn’t make anything for her next groom, and she never dropped by the shop to even look at this.”
Jillian helped her fold it up and gently lay it back on the shelf. This would be the first quilt she logged.
The story had been fascinating, but Gram’s memory of the details surprised Jillian. A woman who couldn’t remember if she’d sugared her tea had told every detail of something that had happened nearly fifty years ago.
As soon as Connor picked up his gram for lunch, Jillian put the be-back-soon sign on the door and spread Helen Harmon’s quilt back out. With care she took pictures and wrote down details. Then, the last thing she did before folding it back into place was to stitch a two-inch blue square of fabric in one corner of the quilt’s back.
No. 1
Helen Harmon Green’s memory quilt. Made as a wedding gift to her future husband. Completed 1971. Never delivered.
* * *
As Jillian ate the apple she’d brought from the bed-and-breakfast, she walked around the shop. She’d have to do two or three handmade treasures a day to get them all logged. And she’d have to hear every story. Some might be short, but she’d bet they’d all be interesting. If only Gram’s memory would hold up just a little longer, she’d get them all down.
When Connor brought Gram back from lunch, Jillian showed him what she’d done and he approved of her system. “You know,” he added as an afterthought. “If you want to write up a few of the stories, they might make nice human interest pieces for the Laurel Springs online paper I put out. It’s mostly just a blog, a bulletin of what’s happening, but something like this might interest people.”
“I’ll give it a try after work. See what you think.”
He handed her a key to the shop. “If you want to work after hours when the shop is closed, that’s fine with me.”
“Thanks. I might do that.”
To her surprise, he smiled. “I’m not trying to run you off early or keep you longer than you want to stay. I get a feeling you have somewhere else to be.”
She thought of denying it. No matter what she said, she’d be giving away too much information, so she simply smiled back.
That evening, they walked home together, each talking about their day. When she turned into the gate at the bed-and-breakfast, he didn’t say goodbye. But this time he did smile as he waved.
She stood on the porch, watching him vanish. A paper man who would disappear from her mind as fast as a match fired. Maybe she’d describe him on her “Laurel Springs” journal page.
Yes, she could mention how normal it had felt to just walk and talk about nothing really. Her father had called it passing time like it was a waste of energy, but he was wrong. Invisible threads were binding people who took the time to talk, helping them to care about each other even in a small way, to know each other. Making them almost friends.
She’d seen it happen with doormen in big cities or clerks in stores she’d frequented in towns. Not friends exactly, but no longer strangers.
This was