A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (15 page)

Anna smiled to herself as she stirred the fragrant soup and remembered the Christmas Eve when she was fifteen and tried to re-create the feast from Nonna’s childhood. The linguini in clam sauce, sea bass, and shrimp had turned out perfectly, but the calamari and octopus had been rubbery and tasteless, and she had not even attempted the eel and baccalà since she had been unable to find them in her neighborhood grocery. With culinary school and years of experience behind her, she knew she would enjoy a much different result if she ever attempted the meal again. She should, and soon, as a Christmas gift for her Nonna.

“Good morning, Anna,” Sarah suddenly greeted her from the doorway. “You’d better not be making breakfast! Sylvia strictly forbade it.”

Anna threw her a quick smile over her shoulder. “Don’t worry. This is for lunch. I’m only here early because the bus is running a limited holiday schedule, so Jeremy dropped me off on his way to Chicago.”

Sarah nodded. “Yes, I heard. He’s going to see Summer.”

Not even the first major winter storm of the season would have kept him away. Anna turned back to the stockpot and explained that since Summer couldn’t—or wouldn’t, although Anna kept that suspicion to herself—come to Jeremy, he was
going to her. He probably would have made the thousand-mile-plus round trip every weekend if his academic schedule and aging car would permit. Instead, he made do with Anna’s company, which Anna enjoyed, so she really shouldn’t complain. Why did she feel like complaining now, when the situation had never bothered her before?

Anna and Sarah had been chatting only a few moments when Anna felt her cell phone buzz in her back pocket. “Would you mind keeping an eye on this while you have breakfast?” she asked Sarah, gesturing to the stockpot with her spoon, knowing whom the caller must be. “I still have a few more seams to go on my quilt block for the cornucopia. This is my first day-after-Thanksgiving as an Elm Creek Quilter and I want to get it right.”

When Sarah agreed, Anna quickly untied her apron and hurried into the hallway to answer the phone before it went to voicemail.

“Dreidels,” said Jeremy, by way of a greeting. “I forgot to mention dreidels.”

Anna smothered a laugh as she picked up her bag of quilting supplies and went to the ballroom. She intended to finish her block just as she had told Sarah, or her excuse would be a lie. “You called me to talk about a Hanukkah game?”

“You know about it? I’m impressed.”

Anna nudged open the ballroom door with her hip, wishing his approval didn’t please her so much. “You should keep
both hands on the wheel in this weather—unless you’ve already slid off the road into a ditch so you’re not technically calling and driving?”

“Relax. I’m using the hands-free headset. I admit it’s worse out here than I thought it would be.”

Anna felt a pang of worry as she stepped into the nearest classroom, one of several created in the ballroom by tall, moveable partitions. “Maybe you should hang up and concentrate on the road.”

“I will, after I tell you about dreidels.”

“Okay. Dreidels.” Holding the phone to her ear with one hand and reaching into her tote bag with the other, she set the pieces of her Best Friend block, almost complete, upon the nearest table. “Those are those little squarish top thingies, right?”

“Well said.”

“Thanks.”

“Yes, dreidels are tops with four sides, each bearing a Hebrew letter—
nun, gimel, hey,
and
shin.
The letters represent the phrase
Ness Gadol Haya Sham,
which means ‘A great miracle took place there.’ “

Jeremy went on to explain that the letters also stood for the Yiddish words
nit, gantz, halb,
and
shtell,
which meant
nothing, all, half,
and
put,
respectively. To play the game, all players put a coin into the pot and took turns spinning the dreidel. If the dreidel landed on
nun,
nothing happened and
the next player took a turn. If it landed on
gimel,
the player won the whole pot. If
hei
came up, the player claimed half of the pot, and if
shin,
the player put one coin in. Whenever the pot was emptied, every player put in another coin. The game ended when one player claimed all of the coins.

“Sometimes we played with candies or poker chips instead of coins,” said Jeremy. “Especially when we were kids.”

“That sounds like fun,” said Anna, plugging in an iron.

“It was. Okay, your turn.”

“My turn for what?”

“To tell me a holiday story from your childhood. Please? I have a long drive ahead of me and I’m bored.”

Anna rummaged through her tote bag for the small plastic box of pins she was sure she had packed. “What’s the matter, have you already heard all of Summer’s stories, or didn’t she answer her phone?”

“I haven’t called her.”

“And you don’t think that’s odd?”

“What’s odd?”

That Jeremy called Anna and not Summer when he wanted company on a long drive. That Anna hadn’t wanted Sarah to know Jeremy was calling her, even though a friend ought to be able to call another friend any time without provoking curiosity in a third friend. That none of this bothered her much until recently.

“Nothing,” she said.

“So do I get my holiday story? With or without Santa Claus, I’m fine either way. Or do you not feel like talking at the moment?”

She always felt like talking to Jeremy. Conversation came so easily with him, so effortlessly. He made her laugh, when he wasn’t talking all starry-eyed about Summer, and she made him laugh, too. “My Nonna used to tell me the story of La Befana.”

“Nonna is your dad’s mother, right?”

“Right.” Anna sat down in a folding chair beside the ironing board and closed her eyes, remembering her grandmother’s voice, her comforting smell of rosewater and face powder and basil. “In my grandmother’s village back in Italy, the children weren’t visited by Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Instead, if they were very good, an old woman called La Befana brought them gifts on January sixth, the Feast of the Epiphany. Children would hang up stockings the night before, and in the morning they would be filled with oranges, chestnuts, coins, candy, or small toys—or coal, if the child was naughty, like you, and talked on the phone when they should have been paying attention to the icy roads.”

“The driving age must be pretty low in Italy,” Jeremy remarked. “I’ve never heard of La Befana.”

“I read somewhere once that La Befana means the Christmas Witch, although she wasn’t a witch in the stories Nonna told me and the other grandkids. Legend tells that long ago,
La Befana was busy with her housework when the three Wise Men knocked on her door and explained they were searching for the newborn child who would become the King of Kings. They asked for her help and invited her to join them on their journey, but she was skeptical and sent them on their way, declaring that she had floors to sweep and dishes to wash.”

“Talk about a missed opportunity.”

“Yes, she eventually figured that out. Later, maybe after folding laundry and dusting lost their charm, she had second thoughts. She tried to catch up to the Wise Men and help them find baby Jesus, but they were long gone. So instead she gave gifts to all the children she could find, hoping that one of them was the child Jesus. Every year she resumes her search, leaving gifts for little Italian boys and girls along the way.”

“So instead of a fat man in a red suit, you have a confused old woman who thinks the baby Jesus was born in Italy. Didn’t the Wise Men mention that they were heading for Jerusalem?”

“You’re ruining my Nonna’s story for me, you know.”

She could tell he was grinning when he said, “I didn’t mean to.”

“Sure.” Suddenly Anna heard noises on the other side of the partition, the sounds of furniture being moved across the parquet dance floor. “Listen, I have to go. Drive safely, okay?”

“If you insist. Talk to you later.”

“Okay.” She hung up the phone and left the classroom to see who had joined her in the ballroom, only to find Matt and
Joe moving tables from one of the classrooms closer to the fireplace, setting up for the quilting bee. She offered to help, but they assured her they had everything under control, so she returned to the classroom to finish her quilt block for the cornucopia, wondering what she would do with it after the ceremony. Traditional piecework wasn’t really her thing, so she doubted her Best Friend block was the first of enough to make a full quilt.

She had just finished pressing the completed block when her cell phone vibrated, buzzing loudly on the folding chair where she had left it. Jeremy had sent her a text: “Maybe one of these years, Santa could bring La Befana a good map.”

He was the only person she knew who texted with perfect grammar and spelling. “Don’t text and drive!” she fired back, smiling as she returned the phone to her back pocket. She put away her sewing things and returned to the kitchen, where Sarah, Gretchen, and Sarah’s mother, Carol, were busily preparing their dishes for the potluck feast. Anna thanked Sarah for keeping an eye on her ginger pumpkin bisque, which had simmered to perfection in her absence.

Sometimes it was okay to let things simmer untended. Some flavors took time to develop and rushing a dish to completion would ruin it. The best chefs, like the best quilters, cultivated creativity and patience—even when they didn’t want to.

• • •

BEFORE LONG GWEN
arrived, and her cheerful announcement that the storm might worsen so much that they would all have to spend the night in the manor did nothing to lessen Anna’s fears about what Jeremy might face on the turnpike. Soon Sylvia, Diane, and Agnes joined them, and Anna tried to put visions of car accidents out of her mind as the Elm Creek Quilters settled down in the ballroom to spend the rest of the morning quilting. She had finished half of the six-pointed stars she planned for Jeremy’s gift when her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again. “Brrr!!!!” Jeremy had texted.

Fortunately, she was at the ironing board with her back to her friends, so she could discreetly slip out of their conversation and text him a reply: “I told you not to text and drive!”

“I’m not driving,” he promptly texted back. “I stopped for gas and a cup of coffee. It’s brutal out here.”

She felt a pang of worry, but she breezily replied, “I warned you but you went anyway. Don’t complain to me. Tell it to Summer if you want some sympathy.”

She didn’t know why she wrote it and she regretted it the moment she pushed Send. But it was too late. The message had been sent. She waited an anxious few minutes for his reply, and when it came, her heart thudded in her chest.

“I’d rather tell it to you,” he had written.

After a moment’s pause, she sent back a single question mark, their code for a request for further explanation. When twenty minutes passed without a reply, she decided he had
left the gas station and was on the road again, for once taking her advice and keeping his hands on the wheel instead of his phone.

All through the morning and potluck lunch, Anna wondered what Jeremy had meant by his last, cryptic text. Why would he rather write to Anna than to Summer? Did he mean that he preferred Anna on this specific occasion because she could always tease him out of a bad mood? Or did he mean that Anna was the more sympathetic of the two, since she was just a friend and not as demanding as a girlfriend might be?

Or did he mean that she was the person he preferred to talk to just as a general rule?

Could that be it?

Had he, too, finally realized what had slowly dawned upon her in recent days, that even though they had never talked about it, they had become very close, closer than mere friends, and that the day hadn’t begun until they greeted each other with a text across the hallway that separated their two apartments, that the day didn’t feel properly concluded until that last, late-night goodnight phone call? Had he finally noticed that he spent more of his time and attention upon the friend who happened to be a girl than his girlfriend, and had he begun to ask himself what that meant? Was he really so unaware of what Anna felt when they sat at her kitchen table sampling a new dessert she had created, when they rode side by side in his car cracking jokes about corrupt politicians and
so-bad-they-were-good movies? Had he not figured out that she repeatedly turned down Sylvia’s invitations to move into a comfortable suite in the manor, with no rent to pay and easy access to the kitchen of her dreams, because she would miss him if he weren’t living right across the hall? Did he not suspect, as she did, that he had begun describing them as “good friends” so often and so emphatically because he was afraid that he had begun to feel more for her than that?

She didn’t know. At that moment he was on his way to see Summer despite the storm, and that said a lot. But, as he himself had admitted, he would rather talk to her.

He was concerned about hurting Summer. So was Anna. She didn’t like to think of herself as someone who would steal a friend’s boyfriend, but Summer had been pulling away from Jeremy for months, beginning with the day last spring when she had moved out of his apartment and into the manor. Moving to Chicago and discouraging him from visiting too often seemed, to Anna at least, another way to distance herself. But Jeremy was determined to make it work, even though he surely had feelings for Anna, feelings that she only now could admit that she shared.

Didn’t he?

Maybe he did, Anna thought as she sat at the sewing machine feeding blue and gold pieces of fabric beneath the blur of the needle, trying unsuccessfully to drown out the voices in
her head with its industrious clatter. Maybe he did have feelings for her, but his feelings for Summer were stronger. Maybe he did, but he doubted Anna felt the same. Maybe he did, but he cherished their friendship so much that he wouldn’t jeopardize it for anything, even the chance for something more, something deeper.

Anna would never know unless they talked about it, and Jeremy was probably halfway to Chicago and his girlfriend, as inconveniently out of reach as he could possibly be. A heartto-heart talk would have to wait for his return.