their pockets) and usually say just one word: Wow. It doesn’t matter if they like to sew or not, they just appreciate seeing a room so completely stocked, so richly reflective of a person’s passion. It’s similar to the way a lot of people love hardware stores. Whether you know what the things are or not, they’re all there.
On the flannel display board, a few vintage hankies were positioned en pointe, a suggestion for a quilt to be made from them. I’d been collecting these hankies for years. Such dainty imprints of social history were recorded there: florals from the twenties and thirties, Mr. and Mrs. hankies from the forties, whimsical patterns of floating toasters and Scottie dogs from the fifties. There were leaf designs for fall, reindeer and candy canes for Christmas, flocked velvet hearts for Valentine’s Day, white-on-white embroidery with wide lace trim for weddings. One dark-red hankie had Lipstick embroidered on one corner. An ancient pale-blue one with an embroidered nosegay of violets was my favorite—I doubted I’d ever do anything but look at it. All the hankies were worn to a powderlike softness from washing, ironing, folding, holding; from tears. Sometimes I put the old hatbox I kept them in on my lap and just slowly sifted though them, looking to feel memories.
I was anxious to begin that hankie quilt, but first I needed to finish the one I’d been commissioned to do. I’d get the borders on, sew a scattering of seed pearls across it, and back, bind, and machine-quilt it today. Tomorrow morning, on the way to pick up my mother at the airport, I would mail it in the usual way, wrapped in a silk-lined storage bag made out of scraps of fabric that were used in the quilt. Customers went crazy for those bags. Some, it was the reflexive pleasure of receiving an unexpected gift. But I thought maybe it was also because we’ve become so unused to people doing anything beyond what they’re paid to do.
The phone rang. I let it ring a few more times, thinking it was Pete calling to say he was sorry for having been so gruff, and wanting to punish him a little in this passive-aggressive way. But it was not Pete, it was Karen Benson, with whom I had made an appointment for today and about which I had forgotten completely. She was calling to say she was going to be about forty-five minutes late; was that okay? “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll just be here, working.” After I hung up, I looked at my calendar to see what kind of quilt she had called about. I found her name next to the time she was to arrive—ten minutes from now—and beneath that I saw a note for what she wanted done: a dog quilt. For a dog? I wondered. In honor of a dog? Using dog-motif fabrics? I needed to be more thorough about taking information when I made appointments. For one thing, I liked to lay out samples of materials before people arrived.
I got out my basket of flannels, pulled some green and brown plaids, and then went through the novelty prints in case she was a literal kind of customer. I had a cotton print that was nothing but goofy-looking cartoon dogs and one slightly more elegant one featuring hunting dogs. I was digging through my solids when I heard the back door open and Maggie calling my name.
“Down here!” I called back, and smiled at her when she came into the studio. “Hey.”
“Guess what I have.” She held out a bakery bag.
“Oh, God, Maggie, I just came back from the fair. And from a funeral, where you eat even more. Because . . . you know, you can.”
“I only got two. And they’re fat free!”
“Really?” I asked, looking in the bag.
“No. But I think if you tell yourself it is, your body processes it that way.”
“No, thanks, Maggie.”
She sat in my chair and started eating a Bismarck. “I just got in kind of a fight at the grocery store.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Okay. I’m looking for Bisquick Light, right? For this recipe I found for chicken and dumplings? And I ask the stock guy do they have it. He’s not sure. And then he says, in this really snotty tone of voice, ‘I don’t need that stuff to make pancakes.’ I say, ‘Well, I don’t either.’ He says, ‘So why do you want it?’
“I’m thinking, What is this? and I say, ‘That