“I’m running a little short of human companionship myself these days. Blixen has many fine qualities, but she’s not the world’s best conversationalist. Maybe we can be our own support group?”
I didn’t know what to say. Yes, she seemed nice, a caring, insightful, and possibly quite wise woman who liked to help, but how did I know? Denials aside, Nan could have been crazy. And if she wasn’t, maybe Monica was. The signs certainly pointed in that direction.
“Gee . . .” I said slowly. “That’s nice of you. But—”
“I have peach turnovers,” Nan said. “And homemade vanilla ice cream.”
Monica’s hand shot up. “Yes, please.” She turned to me. “You in?”
I knew I should say no. Even if they weren’t crazy, they were definitely weird, not like anybody I knew back home. But I wasn’t back home. I didn’t have any friends in Portland, not one.
“The turnovers are homemade too,” Nan said, adding an extra incentive. “Fresh-baked this morning.”
My stomach growled, making up my mind for me, as it so often does.
“Is it far? I don’t know my way around very well yet.”
“Even if you did, you’d never find it,” Nan laughed. “But you can follow me. I’ll drive slow.”
And I did. I got in my car and followed Nan home, which is so unlike me. But that night I forgot to be cautious, sensible, or shy. And it saved me.
I mean it. It saved me. They saved me.
Who could have imagined? Not me. Not then.
But the thing is, sometimes you don’t know you’re going down for the third time until somebody pulls you into the boat.
Chapter 2
Grace
When I was seven, my grammy taught me to sew. She’d grown up on a farm and never liked to waste anything, so every winter she’d gather up the family’s worn-out clothes to make quilts. Every fall, she’d enter a quilt in the country fair and win a prize.
My mother, who wouldn’t shop the sale rack because she didn’t want to buy something that everybody else had passed over, made fun of Grammy’s quilts, saying it was just one more way for her mother to be cheap. “As if making me wear a dress handed down through three sisters wasn’t enough, now she expects me to sleep under it too.”
I thought Grammy’s quilts were wonderful. Always “the quiet one” and often overlooked in a family of boisterous brothers, I reveled in the attention and praise she lavished upon me during our sewing sessions.
I also loved the stories she’d tell about each block, “Now this pale blue was from the shirt your grampy wore when he came over to my house to propose. My dad knew why Ted was there. He stood on the porch and said I wasn’t home, but I hollered from upstairs, ‘Oh, yes, I am!’ then ran downstairs, took the bouquet Ted brought for me, and said I’d marry him. That’s why I picked the Lily corner block for this one, because that’s the kind of flowers he brought me.”
When I was nine, Grammy helped me make a log cabin quilt. I entered it in the fair and won ten dollars and a ribbon, the only prize I’d ever won in my life. Grammy died the following year, but the things she taught me stuck with me. I was always making something—doll clothes, pincushions, crocheted potholders. My mother never thought much of my crafty inclinations, or my tendency to hide inside of books; making things made me feel like there was at least one thing I knew how to do that other people couldn’t.
In high school I started sewing my own clothes—dark, shapeless outfits that were designed to make me blend into the background, because nothing in the juniors department fit me. Even after I lost weight, I still had plenty of curves, so I continued to make my own “fit-and-flare” fashions, dresses with fitted waists and full skirts, partly because they flattered my figure, but mostly because it finally gave me a chance to indulge my love of color. Most every dress I sewed was made from material I found on the discount rack of the fabric store—the brighter the better.
My twirly skirts, Jamie called them, because the minute I put one on, I couldn’t help but spin around in a circle, making the hem flutter around my thighs, feeling pretty, and feminine, and incandescently happy.
I haven’t been doing a lot of twirling recently.
Portland’s housing market is tight. If you find something you can afford in the location you want, you have to be ready to go. We put our stuff in storage and rented a tiny studio for three months before we finally closed on the condo, purchased after looking at pictures the Realtor e-mailed to us. A year and a half later, the place still looked a lot like it did when we moved in, with boxes of books shoved in the corner and unhung paintings piled against the wall. It wasn’t important. By then I had bigger problems to worry about than decorating. But I wished I’d paid more attention to closet space before buying; there was only one.
Initially, I hung up Jamie’s clothes along with my own. I considered it an act of faith. But after a few months, I accepted reality—Jamie was not ever going to live here. I boxed up his things to make space for my work clothes and stacked them with the books. They sat there for weeks. After tripping over one and breaking a toe during a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom, I realized I had to do something.
I started sorting through Jamie’s things and cutting up the special items to make into quilt blocks, sewing them by hand. It’s slow work, but it keeps me busy and gave me a chance to think or, depending on the day, not to think.
The longer I was at Hewlett and Hanson, where I worked as an administrative assistant for
