What Lori Said
Lori turned around and looked at the whole yard
What Lori Said
Lori turned around and looked at the whole yard. All of us. The cousins and the uncles and the kids with their quilts folded in their arms.
“I was going to sell this,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “Twenty dollars. I put it in a feed sack with the rest of them and I didn’t even look. I didn’t even take it out and look.”
Nobody said anything.
“I want to tell you why,” Lori said, “and I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you. I’ve been out here every weekend for a month. By myself. Sorting sixty years of Mom and Dad’s things. The jars and the tools and the dishes. Every box, I had to decide.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“And nobody came,” she said. “Doreen was hurt, and I understand that. The boys are far away. Beth has the kids and school. I understand all of it. But nobody came, and I got so tired, and I got so mad. And I thought, if nobody cares enough to help, then nobody cares about any of it. Not the jars and not the quilts either.”
My Part
I want to say here what I said then, because it is the part of this story that does not make me look good.
I walked up to my aunt at the end of that line, and I said, “Lori, I knew you were out here alone. I knew it, and I didn’t come. I’m sorry.”
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She looked at me.
“I had all kinds of reasons,” I said. “School and the kids and harvest. But they were just reasons. ”
Lori shook her head. ”
“Maybe. ”
My mother had come up behind us on her cane. She put her free arm around Lori’s shoulders, and Lori let her.
“We’re all coming next Saturday,” Mom said. “Every one of us who can lift a box. And the Saturday after that, if we need it. ”
I watched my uncles nod. My cousins nodded. One of the teenagers, the tall boy who had read the mill name on the feed sack quilt, said, “I can carry stuff,” and his mother laughed.
Grandma’s Question
Grandma had been standing there the whole time with her hand on the Nine Patch. Now she took it off the line herself, unpinning her own wooden clothespins one at a time, and folded it over her arm.
“Lori,” she said. ”
“Yes,” Lori said. ”
“Nobody else could,” Grandma said. “It’s yours. ”
“There’s one more thing,” Grandma said. “I started one more this spring, after the others. The top is done, and the quilting is done, but my hands got too bad to do the binding. ”
“Mom, I don’t know how to bind a quilt. ”
“I remember,” Grandma said. ”
Everybody laughed. Lori laughed hardest.
” Lori asked her. “I’d like to learn. ”
Grandma put her hand on Lori’s cheek, right there in front of everybody, the way she used to do with all of us when we were small.
“I’d like that more than anything,” she said.
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