Wedding Ring (22 page)

“Help me with my writing?”

It was too late to change her mind. Tessa managed a nod. “If you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Why don’t you start by just saying what you thought about the book? Just list your thoughts about it and put them in some kind of order. Then we’ll talk about what you did.”

Cissy’s mobile face wrinkled into a frown. “I’d be embarrassed.”

“You don’t need to be. I’m a teacher. You wouldn’t believe the mistakes I’ve seen.” She hesitated. “Or the progress. And, Cissy, if you ever need to get a job, you know, after the baby’s born, then you’ll need good writing skills. You’re already a good reader. You can put your ideas into words. Writing them down won’t be as hard as you think.”

Cissy looked directly at Tessa. “You would do that for me?”

Even as she nodded, Tessa wondered if she understood all the reasons why she had offered. Who was she trying to help, Cissy or herself?

H
elen didn’t know what good school was to a girl if she didn’t learn to sew. Sure, she knew that most girls today bought their clothes, their bed linens and blankets. They ate out, too, or grabbed dinner through a window at some fast food place. But didn’t any girl need to know how to sew on a button or hem a dress, never mind cook a meal for her children? Delilah had taught her daughter to be proud of her skills; she’d called them the womanly arts. But what was womanly or artistic about grabbing a skirt off a rack or eating a hamburger out of wrapping paper?

“I take it poor Cissy doesn’t know how to sew?” Nancy joined her mother on the front porch before supper, easing herself down in the swing beside her.

Helen had been so engrossed in her thoughts, she hadn’t heard the screen door open and close. It took her a while to make room for her daughter. “What makes you think that?”

“I heard you lecturing her earlier. I wonder if she’ll come back? I had to sit through your lectures, you know, but that girl doesn’t.”

“I wasn’t lecturing!” Helen thought about it. “Well, she needed a lecture or two, didn’t she? Didn’t even know how to tie the knot in her thread. And you? You needed a lot more than I ever gave you. Never did see a girl less inclined to work than you.”

“I wasn’t lazy.” Nancy rested her head against the back of the swing. “You always thought I was. I was just different than you. I saw other possibilities for my life. Maybe I was more like my daddy.”

Helen wondered if it was true. She wasn’t sure anymore. Over the years, her memories of Fate had diminished.

“Do you think I’m like him?” Nancy prompted.

“It takes a lot of years to know a person, to find out what they’re all about inside. I knew Fate as a boy, but just enough to know I wanted him as a man. I knew the man for too short a time to say much about him.”

“Lord, that’s sad.”

“Don’t get all weepy about it.”

“I know. I know.” Nancy waved her hand in front of her. “I cried more than any girl in Shenandoah County. You don’t have to tell me again. At least you didn’t send poor Cissy into tears today. Or did you?”

“She’s got a spine, that girl. I can say that much for her.”

“And I didn’t.” It wasn’t a question.

Helen surprised herself. “You? You had the stiffest spine I ever did see. Maybe you cried buckets on the outside, but inside you had more determination and just plain guts than any girl I ever knew.”

Nancy was silent. After a moment, Helen ventured a glance. Her daughter looked like someone had just thrown ice down her shirt. “Well, don’t pretend you didn’t know,” Helen demanded.

“Now I might really cry. I think that’s the nicest thing, maybe the
only
nice thing, you’ve ever said to me.”

“Oh, go on.”

“Well, it’s true. I grew up thinking I was about the biggest disappointment in the state of Virginia.”

“Never the biggest. You do love to exaggerate.”

Nancy nudged her with an elbow. “And you do love to lecture.”

“What’s Gram lecturing about today?” Tessa came out on the porch with the wedding ring quilt folded under her arm. “Should I leave?”

“I thought you was making supper,” Helen said. “I’m about to starve to death.”

“I’ll do a stir-fry as soon as the brown rice is cooked. Everything’s all ready. Can you hold off another half hour or so?”

“If God wanted rice to be brown, that’s how he would have made it.”

“Exactly.” Tessa settled herself in the chair catty-corner to the swing. “Did things go well with Cissy?”

“Well enough. She chose a pinwheel pattern, and I taught her how to cut and mark her fabric. Once she’s all done with that, she’s coming back.”

“If your grandmother didn’t scare her away,” Nancy said.

“That girl don’t scare.” Helen paused, then she added, “I think she likes being here.”

“She’s lonely,” Tessa agreed. “I don’t think there’s much for her to do over at the Claibornes’ right now.”

“There’ll be plenty when that baby’s born.”

“Has she said anything about the baby?” Nancy asked. “Is she going to keep it?”

To Helen, the answer seemed perfectly obvious. “She’s making a quilt, isn’t she? Seems likely she’s not planning to wrap that baby up tight and give it away.”

Nancy gave an extravagant sigh. “It would be better for the baby if she did. How’s she going to raise it? Between them, I’ll just bet she and that boy don’t have a plugged nickel.”

Helen had worried some about that herself, so she couldn’t fault her daughter for bringing it up. “You ever think about adopting?” She addressed her question to Tessa.

Tessa frowned. “No.”

“You and Mack are the kind of people the county goes looking for. Can you say it hasn’t crossed your mind you’d be better parents than Cissy and that Zeke could ever be?” Helen could feel her daughter’s elbow in her ribs, poking and poking some more, but she didn’t stop. “You know for sure you’re good parents. You’re experienced.”

“I don’t know anything for sure anymore.” Tessa’s lips were drawn in a tight line, and the words barely squeezed out. “Doesn’t every woman look at a girl like Cissy, a girl who’s still a child herself, and wonder if she could do a better job with her baby?”

Helen thought her granddaughter’s answer was as good as a “yes.” Tessa had imagined, even for just a moment, adopting the child. That struck Helen as progress.

“If Cissy wants to give up the baby, there will be five hundred well qualified couples standing on her doorstep the next day,” Nancy said. “There aren’t very many healthy babies out there for adoption, and fertility is declining. That means a lot of couples are childless who don’t want to be.”

“You read that in some women’s magazine?” Helen said.

“No. I learned it firsthand. I volunteer on the children’s ward of a hospital in Richmond. And I’ve talked to so many parents with sick children who tried and tried to give their child a brother or sister and never succeeded.”

“What kind of volunteer work?” Tessa’s frown had deepened. “I know you raise money for a lot of different groups, but this sounds personal.”

“I work in the children’s ward with an art therapist. I help the children express what they’re feeling with crayons or chalk or paint. Then I take their pictures and frame them so they can put them right on the wall of their rooms, then take them home. If they go home…”

“You never told me that,” Tessa said.

“You never asked. That’s where I go when I go back to Richmond. There’s a little gallery in Carytown that has its own framing studio in the back, and they sell me the supplies at cost. The owner taught me what to do. It’s nothing fancy, but it makes the kids feel special.”

“Carytown? When did you start?” Tessa asked.

Nancy hesitated. “A while ago.”

“Three years?”

Nancy nodded. “Just about.”

Tessa fell silent.

Helen felt the lapse in conversation like a weight dragging at them. She searched for a topic and found it right in front of her. Tessa was unfolding the quilt and refolding it. “What’re you doing?”

“I’m going to take out part of this arc.” Tessa tilted the folded quilt so Helen could see the section in question. “All these green fabrics have shredded, so there’s hardly anything left. I thought I’d get a start. I’m supposed to just snip away any quilting that’s holding it together.” She looked up at her mother. “Maybe you can be the one to put the new stitches in.”

“I’ll leave that to you.” Nancy leaned forward to look at the quilt, and the swing, which had been rocking gently, stopped. “Do you remember who gave you the green fabric or why?” she asked her mother.

Helen squinted. The green was so faded and torn that for a moment the memory evaded her. Then she remembered. “My Aunt Sally, bless her. It was left over from the first dress she made my cousin Minnie. Used to be a pretty soft green with tiny little polka dots.” She shook her head.

“Sounds like something I can find a match for,” Tessa said.

“Tessa, I think you should save scraps of each fabric you take out,” Nancy said. “We can make a little journal to go with the quilt, and your grandmother can explain who gave each piece to her and why. An ongoing history.”

Helen was amazed at the fuss. “All that for an old quilt?”

Nancy began to rock the swing again. “Not just any quilt. You know, I’m curious. You’ve told us a lot about the years when you were piecing it, but you haven’t said why you never quilted it.”

“I guess I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Helen tried on her responses and none of them fit.

“I just couldn’t, that’s all,” she said at last.

“Wasn’t it finished when you got married?”

“That was a long time ago,” Helen said. “You’re asking me to remember a long ways.”

Nancy twisted so she was looking at her mother. The swing stopped again. “You’ve never told me anything about the day you married my dad. Why don’t you tell us now? The rice has to cook anyway.”

“I’d like to hear, too, Gram,” Tessa said, before Helen could refuse.

Helen wondered which was sadder, the fact that she had never told her own daughter and granddaughter about her wedding day, or the fact that she was so afraid to relive it that she didn’t want to talk about it now.

She decided to tell the briefest version. “I told you Fate and I decided we’d wait to get married until after he joined the Navy and finished training. That way I could stay and take care of Mama until she didn’t need taking care of no more. He joined up, just like he said he was going to. And while he was finishing off at boot camp at the Great Lakes Training Station over in Illinois, Mama took real sick.”

She fell silent, remembering.

“Is that when she died?” Nancy asked.

“No, but we knew it was just a matter of weeks before we’d lose her. So I wrote Fate and told him we had to get married the very minute he got leave, so Mama could be there. I knew it would mean everything to her. Turned out though, that even though he was supposed to get twenty-one days off after his training, by the time he finished up, the government was saying there was a national emergency and he was going to have to ship right out.”

“So your mother wasn’t with you for the wedding?” Nancy asked.

Helen felt Nancy’s hand patting hers, and the welcome weight of it made telling the story easier. “Let me tell it my way.”

A morning finally came when Delilah just couldn’t get out of bed. When Helen took her mother breakfast, Delilah could only pick at it, too weak to eat.

Downstairs again, Helen found Tom, who was lacing up his work boots to go and trim the apple trees in their substantial orchard. A winter of harsh winds and heavy snowstorms had brought down branches and left even more hanging. Tom would be out there for most of a week, sawing and hauling wood.

“Mama’s feeling worse,” she told him.

Cuddy had already been gone for an hour, and Obed and Dorothy, married the previous month, were staying with Dorothy’s family during the week, because there was an old cabin on the property where they could be alone. Tom and Helen were in charge.

“Do you want me to get the doctor?” he asked.

The local doctor had already told them to prepare for the worst. He might come again, but Helen knew there was no real point in calling him. Not unless he could give Delilah a brand-new heart.

She shook her head even as she said, “But maybe you can come back for dinner? I was going to pack you something so you wouldn’t have to bother, but it’d be nice knowing someone was coming back to check on things.”

He smiled briefly. Too briefly. Tom had always been a serious boy. Now he was a serious young man, tall and thin like his father, with the same square face an ancestor had bequeathed Helen. If he’d ever had dreams or aspirations beyond their land and family, the Depression and Delilah’s illness had extinguished them. He was even too busy for a serious sweetheart, although half a dozen local girls had their eyes on him.

“Course I’ll come,” he said. “You ring the bell about noon, and I’ll come down. Or you ring it any time if you need me.”

The bell, from an old schoolhouse, had seemed like a bit of foolishness on Cuddy’s part when he’d lugged it home from town one day last fall and installed it near the house. But now Helen understood why it was there. Even then, her father had known that one day soon they would need a way to signal each other.

The house seemed too quiet after Tom left. She did the indoor chores, having risen before dawn to do the others while her father and brother were there to care for her mother. Since it was a Monday, she had planned to wash, hoping that Delilah would be well enough to sit at the quilting frame, where Helen could keep an eye on her through the window as she hung clothes on the line. It was a brisk March day, but the sun was shining, beckoning her to begin on the mound of laundry.

She decided to bake, instead. Delilah liked corn bread with milk poured over it, and Helen set out to make some for her mother’s dinner. As she stirred the cornmeal and hot water, and heated the cast-iron skillet, she thought about the letter she had received the night before.