Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,72

made it so.”

I blinked. It was true. Living in the cottage with Granly’s furniture and her photo albums, and even her egg cups, had gotten a little easier.

“But not to the point where you can go through Granly’s stuff,” I pointed out.

“It’s funny. I was just pondering that on my walk,” Mom said. “I was thinking that maybe I am ready, and I think it’s because I’m getting to the end of my quilt.”

“It’s going to be really pretty,” I said. “The quilt.”

Mom nodded absentmindedly.

“You know,” she said, “I was doing some pattern research online, and I found this article about mourning quilts.”

“Morning quilts?” I said. “Like for cold mornings?”

“No, the other kind of mourning,” my mom said. “An Appalachian woman, when she suffered a loss, would make a quilt. All that piecing and batting and hand-stitching—it’s so absorbing. It doesn’t make your pain go away, but it gets you through it. Making the quilt both distracts you and makes you focus on the person you lost. The work carries you through the days. It is true, you know, that cliché about time. It does heal all wounds.

“The funny thing about the mourning quilt is, once it was finished, it was just another quilt to throw on the bed,” Mom went on. “It wasn’t made into a shrine to hang on the wall or put in a chest. They didn’t have that luxury. And besides, the mourning quilt was about the process, not the product.”

“Has it been that way for you?” I asked.

“I think so,” Mom said, nodding thoughtfully. “I think I’ve been mourning more than just Granly. I’ve been sewing up these baby clothes, and sometimes I just can’t believe you ever wore them. You’re all so grown-up. And Hannah’s leaving—”

Mom’s voice caught, and she shook her head apologetically while I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed.

“I’m not graduating for ages,” I reminded her. “I can’t even drive yet! You’ve got me trapped.”

Mom laughed and squeezed me back.

“You know that’s not what I want,” she said

I nodded. I did know. And if it was hard to feel exactly lucky right then, what with my phone still silent in my pocket, I did feel grateful.

“Mom?”

My mom and I turned to see Abbie hesitating at the back door. She was holding a big storage bin—the plastic kind with the locking lid. And she had a funny look on her face.

“I found this in the back of Granly’s closet,” she said as Mom and I stood up and walked over to her. “I thought it was gonna be clothes, but look . . .”

Mom and I peered into the bin. Inside there was a neat stack of cardboard boxes. They were closed loosely, without tape, and on each one Granly had written a name.

Our names.

My mom inhaled sharply, then shook her head.

“She told me about those boxes,” she whispered. “Such a long time ago. I’d forgotten.”

“What are they?” I asked as my mom took the bin from Abbie and carried it to the kitchen table.

“Adam?” my mom called down the hall. “Hannah? Can you come in here?”

Then she turned to me to answer my question.

“These are the things Granly wanted each of us to have after she died,” Mom said bluntly. “During one of our visits here, just before she was taking that trip to Scandinavia, she sat me down and told me where the key to her safe deposit box was and where all her passwords were and things like that. And she told me about this box of things she’d set aside for us. I didn’t pay much attention because she was so young. I told her she’d be around for forever.”

Mom’s voice wobbled but she pressed on.

“When she died,” Mom said, “I did remember about the bank vault and the passwords, but somehow I forgot about this.”

My dad came into the kitchen, with Hannah right behind him.

“What are those?” Hannah asked, peeking into the bin.

My mom pulled out the box with Hannah’s name on it.

“Presents!” Mom said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was smiling through them.

Granly hadn’t written my name on my box in careful calligraphy or anything precious like that. It was just a quick scrawl with a Sharpie. But it still brought me to tears to see her handwriting.

As each of my family members opened their boxes and silently read the notes Granly had written to them, the whole kitchen filled with sniffles. Even my dad’s eyes brimmed as he held up a