“I’ve figured out our system,” April said. “This is a king-size quilt, so there’s thirty rows going up and down”—she waved her left arm back and forth—“and twenty-four going across.”
“And that means?” Flynn picked up the needle and was a lot more careful this time.
“It means that we each stitch around each of ten squares every morning,” April explained. “One long five-inch section will be done, then we move on to the next one.”
“And we’ll be done in twenty-four days.” Nessa hummed as she worked.
“Do we work seven days a week?” Flynn asked.
“We should talk about that and also agree on whether we get to leave when we finish our ten squares for the day,” April said.
“We can’t very well work ahead because of wrinkling.” Nessa frowned.
“I vote that we get to leave when our portion is done,” Flynn said.
“But only if your stitching is as good as ours,” Nessa told him. “The quilting club will never let it pass inspection if your stitches are an inch long.”
Flynn checked the work on both sides of him, and his work was every bit as nice as theirs. “The club won’t find a bit of a problem with what I’m doing, and when I get my ten squares done, I’m gone.”
“Guess that decides that, then.” April didn’t even look up from her work. “But don’t pout when we get done before you do.”
“Oh, honey.” Flynn cut his chocolate-brown eyes toward her. “It will be you two who are still working when I leave this shed.”
“The race is on.” Nessa giggled. “Only it’s between you two, not me. I love this work, so I intend to take my time and enjoy it.”
“Well, would you look at this?” Flynn was amazed at the fabric square he had started to sew around.
“What? Did the poor baby poke his finger again?” April asked.
“Nope, but I did figure out part of the reason why this crazy-looking quilt is so important, and why there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the pattern. Like Nessa noticed earlier, Nanny Lucy’s quilts were all so intricate, but this one is not. So do you wanna know?” Flynn grinned.
“Of course we do!” Nessa said, and then she sucked in air. “I know what you’re talking about. I see it now.”
“Well, clue me in,” April said.
“Pay real close attention to your ten squares,” Nessa told her. “What does that piece you are sewing around right now remind you of?”
April frowned and studied the square for a moment, then smiled. “Well, how about that? This is a piece from the dress Nanny Lucy made for me to wear on the first day of kindergarten. I wouldn’t even remember it, but she showed me a picture of me wearing it once when I was a little girl.”
“And this”—Flynn pointed to the portion he was working on—“is scraps from the shirt she made for me when I was about that same age. She used to sew a few shirts for me every summer while I was here, and Mama would make me save my new ones for the first days of school.”
Nessa touched the piece she was sewing. “Yep, and I’m looking at the scrap from a dress she made for me about that same time, and if you look across the whole quilt, I betcha every square is cut from a remnant of something she made for us. This isn’t just a haphazard thing she threw together, it’s a memory quilt. I’m amazed that she has kept scraps all these years. Do you think she made out her will and then this quilt because she knew she was going to die?”
“Who knows about Nanny Lucy,” April said. “She only talked to me when she was mad, and that seemed to be most of the time.”
“Do any of us really want it bad enough to get married?” Flynn’s memories of the time he’d had with his mother and the weeks he’d spent with Nanny Lucy in the summers were good. But over there on the other side, after he had gone to live with his father, were some painful times that he’d just as soon keep locked away in the back of his mind until he figured out how to deal with them.
“Remember the summer”—April kept stitching as she talked—“that I pulled my first baby tooth? Y’all were here, and Flynn was so mad because I was the youngest one of us and lost the first tooth.”
“I was jealous, too,” Nessa admitted. “The tooth fairy left you two quarters that night.”
“Nanny Lucy made me put one of them in my piggy bank for my college fund,” April said. “But I got to keep the other one. I bought a snow cone with it after y’all left.”
“You had a college fund at six years old?” Flynn hadn’t had a college fund when he graduated from high school. He’d had to work forty hours a week and take night courses to get his degree. “What happened to you, April?”
She shrugged. “Nanny Lucy said she would match my savings, dime for dime, until I graduated. The deal was if I had enough to pay for most of my first semester and I passed all my courses, then she would pay for the rest of the years until I got my degree. If I took the money and didn’t go to school, she wouldn’t pay a single penny on my education or help me out of any binds I might get into. But I couldn’t stay here anymore. The rest is history. You already know most of it.”
“Not the details.” Flynn glanced down the row to see that she was at least two squares behind him on the morning job.
“Those aren’t important.” April’s voice was as haunted as the look Flynn had seen in her eyes when she first arrived.
Flynn wondered if his tone was like that or if his eyes took on that same look when he talked about the past. Did the pain come through as plainly as it did with April? He had no doubt that she’d returned to Blossom to find closure for all the things that had made her the way she was. He’d come back to find peace, but was there really peace in this place, or was he chasing an illusion?
Nessa nudged his shoulder. “You sure got quiet.”
“Just thinking,” he said as he put in the last stitch on his section, “and now I’m going into the house to finish up that wiring. I’ll have to turn off the power for a little while.” He wished he could turn off his thoughts as easily as opening a breaker box and throwing a few levers. He stood up and stretched the kinks out of his neck and back and, with a wave, left his two cousins behind to do their sections.
Nessa was still working on her daily portion of the quilt when April finished hers a few minutes later. “I’m going to water the flowers while you finish up,” she said, and she was gone before Nessa could say anything.
She kept sewing, but the shed felt empty now, and more than a little gloomy. The dark clouds kept rolling in from the southwest, and that edgy feeling she always felt when a storm—either natural or mental—was approaching washed over her. She hated the heavy feeling in her chest, but not even the breathing exercises the school counselor had given her for anxiety when she was a kid were working today.
She’d just finished the last stitch and was threading her needle for the next day when her phone rang. The noise startled her so badly that she jabbed herself in the thumb, and a bubble of blood appeared immediately.
She hurried to the back of the shed, wrapped a tissue around it, and fished her phone from her hip pocket. “Hello, Mama,” she said.