Threading The Needle Part 22

"You unraveled your sweater to embellish my quilt?"

"Just the sleeves. I'll turn the edges under and make it into a sh.e.l.l to go under jackets."

I laughed. How very like Madelyn to figure out a way to remake her old sweater even while she used it to embellish my quilt. "I can't believe you went to all this trouble for me."

"I was glad to, and anyway, I was going crazy sitting around here doing nothing." Her smile faded and she sank down into my easy chair. "Every time I turn on the radio I hear another 'Widow of Wall Street' story. It's been five days! When are they going to get tired of me and go pick on someone else?"

I wished I could answer her question. I'd driven by Beecher Cottage on my way home and the news vans were still parked out front.

Madelyn growled in frustration. "I shouldn't be hanging around your kitchen baking scones. I should be home sanding woodwork and painting walls, tiling floors and sewing curtains and arguing with contractors!"

I pressed my lips together, suppressing a smile and a secret. I was bursting to tell her, but I couldn't. I'd promised not to.

She closed her eyes for a moment, took in a deep breath, and blew it out slowly. "Don't mind me. It's just hard to have my plans delayed. I'm very grateful to you and Lee for letting me stay here."

"Oh," I said dismissively, "it's all right."

"No!" she said emphatically, slapping her hand on the arm of the chair. "It's not all right. It's much more than that, so let me just say this, okay?

"I'm an idiot. I've been angry for so long. But when I opened that bag and saw the quilt and the pictures, I remembered, for the first time in a long time, some of the good things I've had. And so, as hard as all this has been, a part of me is happy it happened this way. I don't think anything less than a crisis would have convinced me to talk to you again."

Her eyes teared again, but this time she made no move to wipe them. "And so I'm grateful to you and Lee. And to fate, or G.o.d, or whatever it was that brought me back here and forced me to see the truth. I'm grateful. Truly I am."

34.

Tessa Madelyn and I were sitting at the kitchen table going through stacks of old pictures and photo alb.u.ms when Lee came in from the barn. We had progressed from blubbering to sniffling, but our eyes were still red. Lee eyed us nervously as he filled a plate with salad and scones, then ladled soup into a bowl.

"Ahem . . . I'm just going to take this back out to the barn with me. I'm kind of in the middle of something."

Madelyn and I skipped salad and the soup and went straight to the scones, spreading them with a thick layer of b.u.t.ter and a slathering of honey. I took cocoa powder and sugar from the cupboard and made hot chocolate.

"This takes me back," Madelyn said. "Remember your mother's banana bread?"

"Best in the world," I said. "She always served it with about an inch of b.u.t.ter."

"And big cups of cocoa. Your mom was always so nice to me."

"She liked you."

"She felt sorry for me."

"Well, yeah. But she liked you too. Mom always said you had s.p.u.n.k."

Madelyn made a face. "I wasn't s.p.u.n.ky, I was a pain. I never knew when enough was enough and I never knew when to go home." She took a quick slurp of cocoa and shook her head.

"Actually, that's not quite true. I knew I was overstaying my welcome, but I couldn't help myself. The best times I ever had were with you and your family. Did you know that, in my head, I used to call you 'the regular family'?"

I laughed. "Why?"

"Because you were! You were all so regular! Your mom wore an ap.r.o.n and made banana bread and meat loaf, and helped you with your homework, and belonged to the PTA. Your folks never missed a parent-teacher conference. Your brother was an Eagle Scout and you took ballet. Your dad left for work every day at seven and came home every night at five. On Sat.u.r.day morning he mowed the lawn and sprayed down your driveway with a hose. And you all lived in that nice house with carpets on the floor and those plastic covers on the sofas. . . ."

"In the living room!" I gasped. "That's right. I'd almost forgotten about that. Mom didn't want the upholstery getting ruined. Do you remember how, in the summertime, we'd sit on the furniture with our shorts on and the plastic would sweat and stick to our legs?" I squashed my mouth into what Madelyn and I used to call "fish lips" and made a sucking sound. Madelyn cracked up.

"See what I mean?" Madelyn said. "When I was a kid, I thought everybody, except me, was living on the set of The d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e Show. Whenever I was at your house, I was sure of it. You were all so normal! And happy. You all seemed so happy."

I couldn't argue with her. We were a happy family, by and large. Certainly I'd had a happy childhood. And we were normal, or at least we fit the image of what somebody somewhere, Frank Capra or some other purveyor of American mythology, had decided a normal family should be.

"We had our issues too," I countered. "I often wonder if my parents didn't want more out of life. Mom made a great loaf of banana bread, but they don't hand out a lot of trophies for that, do they? And Dad . . ." I shook my head. "He was so smart. Do you know he rebuilt the engine of our Buick all by himself?"

Madelyn smiled as she dunked a piece of scone into her cup. "There were car parts laid out all over your front yard for days, and he spilled oil on the driveway."

"That's right," I said, tipping my head back and grinning as I remembered how many Sat.u.r.days he'd spent standing on the driveway, frowning and grumbling while he sprayed the oil stain with his hose. "He never was able to get it clean again."

"You had the nicest yard in town."

I picked up a black-and-white photo from the pile on the table, a picture taken on Easter Sunday, 1964. My family stood in front of the house, dressed in our best, posed in front of flower beds filled with daffodils.

"Dad made sure of that. He was a good man, a good father. I'm not sure he was happy, though. He could have done anything. Instead, he spent his life working at the plant, doing the same job day after day and year after year to pay the bills. All Mom and Dad had was that house, this town, the day in and day out of our so-called normal lives. They never flew to Paris, or rode in a hot air balloon, or entered the Iditarod."

"The Iditarod. With the sled dogs? Up in Alaska?" Madelyn drew her brows together and gave me a doubtful look.

"I'm just saying that they never took a risk, that's all. They never did anything out of character. They never took a chance, bet the farm on one crazy roll of the dice. And they taught me to be just the same."

"But you're not the same," Madelyn said. "You're a risk taker. If you weren't, you wouldn't be here, betting the farm on buying a farm, dumping a perfectly good corporate job so you could come back here and make hand lotion and lip balm and potpourri. . . ."

"That no one seems to want to buy." I sighed. "Maybe my dad was right after all. Maybe this was a mistake. Lee thinks so."

"Did he say that?"

I shrugged. "We've had a hard year. We've both been frustrated and discouraged, but Lee seems to express his frustration through anger and withdrawal. For a while we weren't even-" I stopped myself. Madelyn probably didn't need or want to hear all the intimate details of my life.

"Anyway, things are hard right now. We don't talk about it much, but I know what he's thinking. He thinks we should have stayed in Ma.s.sachusetts, let well enough alone."

"Is that what you think?"

I reached for a third scone and slowly spread it with b.u.t.ter as I considered the question.

"No," I said finally. "Unless something changes, drastically and soon, I'm going to have to close the shop, I realize that. Maybe my timing was off or maybe it was just never a good idea to begin with. But I'm not sorry I tried. I'm happy I took the chance."

"Well, there you have it. You're a risk taker. And you're happy. See? Your parents weren't such bad role models after all."

I raised my eyebrows. "I didn't learn that from my parents. I learned it from you."

"Sure you did," she scoffed.

I picked up another photograph from the pile, the picture of Madelyn and me sitting on the porch, the day after our midnight adventure with the pigs.

"Remember this?"

Madelyn put her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. "Sure. How could I forget?"

"Remember the article they ran about it in the paper? How the trooper they interviewed speculated that the crime might have been perpetrated by a ring of professional livestock rustlers?"

"Oh, if only he'd known!" Madelyn guffawed.

"If only he'd known," I echoed. "But why would he? He could never have imagined such a thing. Until I met you, neither could I. Before I met you, I was pretty short on imagination.

"Everybody I grew up with was just like me, such good little girls, so prudent and obedient and dull, keeping our hands folded in our laps-except you. I'd never met anybody like you!

"You didn't play by anybody else's rules and you didn't give a d.a.m.n what anybody else thought. You didn't wait an hour to go swimming after you ate. You saw the possibilities! You took trash and turned it into treasures. You ran your own show, refused to walk in lockstep with anybody else. You smoked cigarettes and stole s.e.x books from the library. . . ."

"I didn't steal them," Madelyn countered. "I just didn't check them out because I knew the librarians wouldn't let me. I snuck them back onto the shelves after I found out what I wanted to know."

"And shared that information with me," I said. "If not for you, I might still be laboring under the misconception that French kissing can make you pregnant. And that's my point. You taught me a lot of things, gave me a kind of . . . courage, I guess.

"But for a long time I forgot how good it felt to take a chance on myself. Do you know when I remembered? When I opened up an old box and found this."

I laid the picture down on the table and pushed it toward Madelyn.

"You're not the only one who's grateful, old friend. You've changed my life-a couple of times now. And all for the good."

It was after ten when Madelyn and I packed it in for the night and close to eleven before Lee came in from the barn.

"I didn't think you'd still be awake," he said as he pulled his sweater off over his head.

I yawned and closed the book I was reading. "In another five minutes I wouldn't have been. What were you up to out there?"

He slipped out of his jeans, tossed them over the back of a chair, and climbed into bed, scooting all the way over to my side. Lee likes to sleep close. So do I.

"I told Madelyn about how Charlie had offered me a good price for any microgreens I could grow for him in the winter, and she gave me a great idea: Take those old storm windows and use them to build cold frames. I built six big frames, enough to grow lettuces for the Grill on the Green plus a couple of other restaurants. Chefs will pay a good price for organic, out-of-season greens. And the frames didn't cost me a dime, just my labor and the materials I had on hand."

"Sounds like you had a good day."

"I did. You?"

I just looked at him. He frowned sympathetically and lifted his arm so I could lay my head on his shoulder.

"It'll get better," he said.

"Maybe. But maybe not."

"Well, we'll just cross that bridge when we come to it. Won't we? In the meantime, here's something that'll cheer you up: I was wrong. You were right."

I smiled. "Is this a blanket admission or do you have something specific in mind?"

"You were right about having Madelyn here-it was the right thing to do. Rich or poor, I guess everybody has their struggles. She's nicer than I thought she'd be and pretty handy to boot."

"She is," I agreed with a yawn, thinking of my beautiful new quilt and how I planned to hang it on the wall of the shop, right behind the register.

Lee stretched out his arm to turn off the light. We lay there in the darkness.

Just when I was on the edge of sleep, he said, "George called me today."

I stirred sleepily. "Oh? Did he have another job lead for you?"

Lee shook his head. "No, he wanted to know if I had one for him. They're closing the company, letting everybody go."

My eyes flew open. "What? Everybody? Why? Are they moving the headquarters? Was there a buyout?"

"Bankruptcy," he murmured. "n.o.body saw it coming, n.o.body in middle management anyway. The big guys knew. They were trying to find a buyer right up until the last minute, which is why they were keeping it all under wraps, at least that's their story. George showed up to work yesterday and they told everybody they could pack up their stuff and go back home. No severance, no nothing."

"You're kidding!" I gasped. "What's George going to do?"

"Collect unemployment, I guess. And try to find another job."

"Poor George," I murmured. "That's awful."

"He sounded pretty depressed. But it got me thinking. If I'd stayed at the company, I'd be in the same boat. I know things are still touch-and-go for us, but at least we have the farm. We can feed ourselves, which is a lot more than most people can say. And we're doing what we want, controlling our own destiny. I feel pretty good about that. Coming here was a good idea."

He rolled toward me in the darkness and kissed me. "No matter what happens, I'm glad we took the chance."

35.

Madelyn It was day six of my exile. I sat in Tessa's easy chair, st.i.tching closed the openings of some little sachets.

Remembering how much she'd liked making tiny quilts for the dollhouse when we were little, I'd suggested she sew some miniature quilt blocks and fill them with lavender to make drawer sachets. It's a good way to use up the sc.r.a.ps from her quilts and her extra lavender.

Tessa loves quilting, as much for the people it has brought into her life as the actual quilts-maybe more. She told me all about her friends from the quilt shop. Once the media scrum breaks up and I can come out of hiding, Tessa wants me to meet them, maybe take a quilting cla.s.s with her. It's a nice idea, but I told her I'd have to take a pa.s.s.

"This is me we're talking about. The Widow of Wall Street-remember? I don't think your friends would be all that excited to include me in their sewing circle. And even if they were, I've never been a joiner. Besides, I'm too busy to take up quilting."

And I am. Or I will be once those stupid reporters pack up their cameras and leave. How long can this go on? Isn't there some war or government scandal they could cover?