Lori Walks the Lines
For a second I did not think she would come
Lori Walks the Lines
For a second I did not think she would come. She stood by the barn with her arms crossed, and Stu stood beside her, and everybody in that yard was trying very hard not to look at her.
Then Stu put his hand on her back, just lightly, and she walked out.
She walked the lines slowly, the way the kids had. She passed the Lone Star and did not stop. She passed the Double Wedding Ring and did not stop.
At the very end of the first line, back by the barn, was the Nine Patch from 1995. The very first quilt. It was the plainest one Grandma ever made, just squares, set in plain cream muslin.
Most of the squares were small calico prints. Yellows and pinks and little blue checks, the kind of cotton nobody makes anymore.
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Lori stopped in front of it.
She put her hand flat on one yellow square, a yellow calico with tiny brown flowers, and she did not move.
I watched her face change. I do not know how to describe it except that she looked about eight years old.
Grandma leaned forward in her lawn chair.
“Mom,” Lori said, very quietly. ”
The First Quilt
Grandma did not answer right away. She got up out of her lawn chair, which she had not done all morning, and I went to help her, but she waved me off.
She walked across the grass to the end of the line, slow and careful, and stood next to Lori.
“I kept your dresses,” Grandma said. “All of them.
Every one I ever made you
Every one I ever made you, from the time you were a baby until you went off to high school. ”
“This is my first-day-of-school dress,” Lori said. Her voice cracked. “Kindergarten. Nineteen seventy-four. ”
“And this,” Lori said, touching a little pink check, “was my Easter dress the year I had the chicken pox. ”
“I washed it,” Grandma said. ”
Lori laughed, and it turned into something else, and she put her face in her hands.
” Lori asked, when she could talk again.
Grandma looked at the quilt, lifting a little in the wind.
“Nineteen ninety-five was the year you moved to Cedar Rapids for that job,” she said. “You were twenty-seven and you were so excited, and I was so proud of you. ”
“Your father said I needed something to do with my hands that winter,” Grandma said. “So I went up to the attic and got down the trunk. ”
“I put it on the guest bed,” Grandma said. “Under the others.
It was the first one I ever made, and it wasn’t very good. The corners don’t all meet. ”
Lori looked. Then she started to cry, really cry, in front of everybody, standing at the end of the clothesline with her hand still on her kindergarten dress.
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