Mornings On Main

While Jillian ate, the tiny woman circled the room, talking as if even one guest needed a floor show to go along with her meal. “I heard from Stella, one of the quilters at the shop yesterday, that you’re working in Miss Eugenia’s shop. It’s been there forever, and I’ve never known her to hire help.”

“I’m logging and photographing all the quilts for the county museum. Miss Eugenia is telling me the history of each one.”

“That’s a very brave and honorable thing you’re doing,” the little lady said as if Jillian had joined Special Forces. “Are you planning on staying with me while you’re in town?”

“I’d hoped to. The job will only last a few months, then I’ll be moving on.”

Mrs. Kelly rocked her head back and forth as if sloshing an idea around in her mind. Finally, she said, “If you don’t mind cleaning your own room, you can have the two rooms up there for a hundred a week, breakfast included. Those rooms are never rented in the winter anyway, and you could use the small one as a living area or study. It only has a half bed in it, so I’ll toss pillows along the wall side and make it look like a couch. There’s also a desk if you’re one of those ‘work into the night’ people.”

“That’s a very fair price.”

Mrs. K grinned. “Oh, I forget to add that I sometimes have to leave town for a night now and then. You would have to fend for yourself and watch over the house and the ghost while I’m gone.”

“I could manage that.” Jillian hoped Mrs. K’s wink meant that she was only kidding about keeping up with the ghost.

Jillian frowned, fearing this setup might be too good to be true. People usually weren’t so nice. Most folks only trusted family and longtime friends. Strangers they kept at arm’s length. She knew this because she was always the stranger. Even in grade school she was usually still being called the new girl when her father pulled her out to move. After a while she quit even trying to make friends. It hurt too much to leave them.

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. K. I’ll try to be quiet. The other guests won’t even know I’m upstairs.”

Mrs. Kelly laughed that fully rounded laugh that shook her whole body. “Oh, don’t be that, dear. I’ll enjoy the company. Being alone in this old place always makes me a little sad.”

Jillian looked up from her breakfast. Mrs. Kelly’s apron read I’m not short. I’m just compacted.

Jillian couldn’t hide her grin. Crazy and kind, she could live with. “You’ve got yourself a deal. A hundred a week. I clean my own rooms and house-sit when you need me. But when I’m the only guest for breakfast, we go light. Toast, one egg and coffee.”

Mrs. Kelly widened her stance as if preparing for a fight. “All right, with one exception. We add a muffin and sausage to the light breakfast. I feed that crow, who thinks he lives on my back fence, more than one egg and toast every morning.”

“Deal.” Jillian glanced out the window and was surprised to see a huge old crow propped on the dog-eared fence that had been painted red. He reminded her of the black ravens around the Tower of London. Rumor was, six ravens had to guard the tower at all times or the monarchy would fall. Maybe one crow was all that was needed to stand guard here.

Mrs. Kelly had disappeared when Jillian turned back to the table. She finished her grand meal, thinking this must be her lucky day. Maybe there was something to that crystal thing.

As she walked the block to the quilt shop, she planned. If she worked eight hours a day, five days a week, she’d bring in over seven hundred a week after taxes. A hundred a week for the room, maybe twenty for the car, fifty or sixty for meals on weekends and essentials. If she watched her money she could pocket five hundred a week easily. Two thousand a month. Even allowing for emergencies during the three months in Laurel Springs, she’d walk away with five thousand dollars.

Enough money to move to a big city, rent a nice apartment, find a real job. Disappear into the crowds.

Her good mood lasted until she opened the shop door and saw trouble perched on the old mahogany counter like a six-foot-tall buzzard.

4

A long slice of light shone into the dark shadows of the quilt shop. For a moment, Jillian thought she was in the wrong place. No soft ribbons of fluorescent bulbs twenty feet above. No laughter from the quilter’s corner. No smell of coffee drifting from the tiny kitchen.

Only a long-legged girl dressed in black, staring at her as if Jillian had just interrupted a demonic ritual.

The backward lettering of A Stitch in Time circled across the front window. Right place. Jillian was in the quilt shop. Squaring her shoulders, she moved forward.

“Hi,” Jillian managed as she widened the opening of the door. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to see the invader better or simply wanted to enlarge her escape route.

The strange girl swung one leg so it bumped against the side of the counter in a heartbeat rhythm. Her hair was so light it appeared white, and hung straight past her shoulders. A dozen bracelets, all appearing to be made out of rusty bolts, clanked on her arms as she turned toward the back of the store.

“Dad!” the intruder yelled. “Someone’s drifted in.”

Rows of lights began to click on, starting from the back and finally reaching the front. All the beautiful colors of the store returned, but the escapee from the Addams Family remained. Her black peacoat, with batwing shoulder pads, was ripped in several places. Black eyeliner extended almost to her ears and charcoal, lace gloves covered her hands.

Jillian studied the girl carefully. On the bright side, the coat and leggings matched. Both black and ragged. She appeared to be wearing three blouses, the last one a lace nightgown. Silk, holey as if moth-eaten, and spotted with what looked like bloodstains. Her skirt, with several chains hanging off it, reminded Jillian of a midnight plaid kilt.

They both turned as footsteps stormed from the back. “Sorry,” Connor Larady shouted. “I usually have the place all opened up by this time.”

He didn’t seem to notice the girl still perched on the counter. “I’ll have a key made for you so you won’t have to wait for me if I’m running late.”

When Jillian turned her gaze to the girl, Connor finally acknowledged the goth in the room. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jillian, this is my daughter. Sunnie, this is the lady who is helping Gram organize the shop.”

Jillian offered her hand, hoping the strange girl wouldn’t try to suck her blood. She was so thin and pale she probably hadn’t eaten in days.

The girl reluctantly took Jillian’s offered hand, but her handshake was limp.

If there was a prize for someone born with the wrong name, Sunnie Larady would win. Stormy might be better. Or Scary.

She slid off the counter. Six feet of pure adolescent rebellion. “I need to get to school, Connor.” She said her father’s name louder than the rest of the sentence.

“Right.” Connor turned to Jillian. “Will you be all right here? Gram should be dropped off any minute.”

“I’m fine. I’ll watch for her.” Jillian smiled at Sunnie. “Nice to meet you.”

The girl shrugged and walked out.

“I’m sorry about that.” Connor sounded as if he’d said the same thing often lately. “She’s just going through a stage. The doctor says it’s normal for kids who lose a parent in their teens. He claims Sunnie is mad her mom died, and I’m the only one left to take it out on. Hating me keeps her mind off death.”

“When did your wife die?”

“Three years ago. Sunnie was thirteen.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his baggy pants and rounded his shoulders forward as if trying to seem smaller, or maybe hold his grief inside. “Sunnie wanted to meet you. I don’t think she’d ever admit it, but she’s protective of Gram. I told her she could maybe help out after school now and then. But don’t look for her until she’s at the door.”

Jillian thought of screaming No!, but she simply smiled and said, “I’d appreciate the help.”

He nodded, then hurried out.

Jillian stood by the front window, watching the town come alive. This street reminded her of a beehive. Everyone seemed to have their job and all were working frantically to get the day started. She almost wanted to tell them all that it didn’t matter how many flags or sandwich boards the shops put out—this one street would never draw much of a crowd.

The old warehouse buildings across the creek hung over the cute main street like death’s shadow. The stillness just across the water was a constant reminder that a few blocks away, half of the town had been abandoned. Jillian wondered if the people who lived here even saw the crumbling buildings anymore.

When the Autumn Acres bus pulled up, she went outside and waited for Gram to come down the steps.

The lady, still tall for her age even though her shoulders had rounded, was dressed in a very proper wool suit with lace on her white collar. Her shoes might be rounded and rubber, but she hadn’t forgotten her pearls.

“Hello, dear,” Gram shouted. “How nice of you to come help me again.”

“I had so much fun I just had to return. You don’t mind me hanging around?”

“Oh, no. I love the company and there is always plenty to do.”

They walked in with arms locked. Jillian wasn’t sure Eugenia remembered her name, but the Southern lady seemed to assume she knew everyone, and she treated all, old friends or strangers, the same.

“Let’s make a cup of tea first this morning,” Gram suggested. “That will start the day right. I do love tea in the spring.”

Jillian followed her back to a small kitchen, without mentioning it was still winter. They talked about the tea and the day as if they were old friends.

The morning passed like a peaceful river. Customers came in, mostly to talk. Jillian made note of the ones who had lived their entire lives in this town. A long-retired teacher named Joe Dunaway, most of the quilters she’d met yesterday, the mailman named Tap. As she settled in, she did what she often did in little towns: she’d ask if they knew a Jefferson James who might have lived around here thirty years ago. The answer was always no, a dead end. She’d found a few Jameses over the years, but none knew a Jefferson. Her father never allowed anyone to shorten his name.

Joe Dunaway said he thought the name might be familiar, but after forty years of teaching, all names sounded familiar.

While Joe watched the store, Gram took the time to show her around the tiny office after Jillian explained for the third time that she was there to make a record of all the quilts.

“Someday, your quilts will hang in a gallery at the county museum, and you’ll want all the facts to be right. I’ll compile that record for you, Gram.”

“Oh, of course you will,” Eugenia agreed as she sugared her tea for the second time.

When their cups were half-empty, they began to stroll through the colorful garden of quilts. Jillian kept her questions light. Never too many. Never too fast.

She noticed how Gram stroked each quilt she straightened as if it were precious. The kitchen and the office might be a cluttered mess, but all the quilts had to be in perfect order.

“You touch them as if they’re priceless. Like they’re your treasures, your babies,” Jillian said.

“Oh, they’re not mine. But in a way they are alive. Each one holds memories. I just put them together in the final step of quilting.” She pulled one from the shelf and spread it out on a wide table designed for cutting fabric. “This one belongs to Helen Harmon, who made it as a gift to give the man she loved on their wedding day. They’d known each other since grade school.” Gram pointed to one square. “See, that’s them as kids on the playground. He’s pulling her pigtail. I swear, Helen’s hair was stoplight red when she was little.”

Jillian saw thick red threads braided together and sewn onto the quilt.

Gram’s wrinkled fingers passed over another quilt square. A UT logo stood out in burnt orange. “That’s for their college days, and she made this one when he went into the army. When he came home a few years later and started work, his first job was in construction. Turned out he had a real knack for it.”

Jillian saw the square with tools crossing, almost like a crest.

“And here we have vacations they took camping, hiking, riding across the country on what Helen called hogs.” One square ran like a road map. “When they finally got engaged, both were thirty-four.” One square held nothing but sparkling material in the pattern of a diamond ring.

Jillian touched the square of a house. “When they bought their first house, right?”

Gram shook her head. “When he built what was to be their first house, she made that square. They both agreed neither would move in until after the wedding.”

“What happened?” Jillian realized she was holding her breath.

“I’d worked late into the night the evening before their rehearsal dinner. I wanted to have the quilt ready for her to give to him. She was not a natural seamstress, and was years away from being a skilled quilter. Each piece came hard for her. She’d laugh and say she really made ten quilts because she had to do each square over and over to get it just right.”

“What happened?” Jillian asked again.

“She didn’t come pick up the quilt the day of their rehearsal. When she woke that morning before her wedding, she found a note on his pillow. He’d had an offer for a new job up north and hadn’t known how to tell her. The note said he’d tried a hundred times to break off the engagement, but she was too busy planning the wedding to listen.”

“So he just left her?”

Gram nodded. “And she left this quilt. She told me I could sell it, but who buys another’s memories? She’d even embroidered the wedding date in the middle.”

Jillian looked at the quilt. June 19, 1971.

“You’ve kept this for almost fifty years?”

Gram nodded. “How do you throw away memories? It’s a beautiful quilt made with love. Helen eventually married a man named Green and moved to Houston, but she didn’t make anything for her next groom, and she never dropped by the shop to even look at this.”

Jillian helped her fold it up and gently lay it back on the shelf. This would be the first quilt she logged.

The story had been fascinating, but Gram’s memory of the details surprised Jillian. A woman who couldn’t remember if she’d sugared her tea had told every detail of something that had happened nearly fifty years ago.

As soon as Connor picked up his gram for lunch, Jillian put the be-back-soon sign on the door and spread Helen Harmon’s quilt back out. With care she took pictures and wrote down details. Then, the last thing she did before folding it back into place was to stitch a two-inch blue square of fabric in one corner of the quilt’s back.

No. 1

Helen Harmon Green’s memory quilt. Made as a wedding gift to her future husband. Completed 1971. Never delivered.

* * *

As Jillian ate the apple she’d brought from the bed-and-breakfast, she walked around the shop. She’d have to do two or three handmade treasures a day to get them all logged. And she’d have to hear every story. Some might be short, but she’d bet they’d all be interesting. If only Gram’s memory would hold up just a little longer, she’d get them all down.

When Connor brought Gram back from lunch, Jillian showed him what she’d done and he approved of her system. “You know,” he added as an afterthought. “If you want to write up a few of the stories, they might make nice human interest pieces for the Laurel Springs online paper I put out. It’s mostly just a blog, a bulletin of what’s happening, but something like this might interest people.”

“I’ll give it a try after work. See what you think.”

He handed her a key to the shop. “If you want to work after hours when the shop is closed, that’s fine with me.”

“Thanks. I might do that.”

To her surprise, he smiled. “I’m not trying to run you off early or keep you longer than you want to stay. I get a feeling you have somewhere else to be.”

She thought of denying it. No matter what she said, she’d be giving away too much information, so she simply smiled back.

That evening, they walked home together, each talking about their day. When she turned into the gate at the bed-and-breakfast, he didn’t say goodbye. But this time he did smile as he waved.

She stood on the porch, watching him vanish. A paper man who would disappear from her mind as fast as a match fired. Maybe she’d describe him on her “Laurel Springs” journal page.

Yes, she could mention how normal it had felt to just walk and talk about nothing really. Her father had called it passing time like it was a waste of energy, but he was wrong. Invisible threads were binding people who took the time to talk, helping them to care about each other even in a small way, to know each other. Making them almost friends.

She’d seen it happen with doormen in big cities or clerks in stores she’d frequented in towns. Not friends exactly, but no longer strangers.

This was something rare for Jillian, but she realized Eugenia Larady had been doing it all her life. With Joe Dunaway, with customers, and with the quilters. Talking, caring, relating with everyone she met.

Invisible threads. Invisible bonds. Not strong enough to hold her down, but nice to feel.

5

Connor Larady’s world of routine shifted as the days passed. After a week, Jillian James had become part of his life as easily as if a piece had always been missing and she simply fit into the void.

He liked the easy way she greeted him every morning, not too formal, not too friendly. He looked forward to the few minutes they’d talk before the bus chauffeured his grandmother to the door of the quilt shop. He liked collecting little things he learned about Jillian, the pretty lady who never talked about herself.

Some mornings he’d studied the way Jillian dressed, casual yet professional, as if every detail about her mattered somehow. She might be tall, but she wasn’t too thin. Her eyes often caught his attention, stormy-day gray one moment and calm blue the next. She watched the clock, always aware of time, and she seemed to study people as if looking for something familiar in their faces. And she listened, really listened.

All the women he knew in town seemed shallow water, babbling brooks. But Jillian was deep current and he had a feeling it would take years to really know her. She never started a conversation, but if she disagreed with him she didn’t mind debating.

Who knew, maybe they’d become friends. But no more. The one thing Connor had figured out about himself a long time ago was that he was a watcher, not a participant, where women were concerned. If life were a banquet, he was the beggar outside the window looking in. He’d rather put up with the loneliness than take another chance.

He’d stepped out of his place once. He’d married Sunnie’s mother, Melissa, a few months after they slept together on their first date. He’d been home from school for the summer the year he turned twenty-one and she’d been nineteen. He’d used protection, but she’d told him it hadn’t worked.

Marriage had seemed the only answer. She went back to school with him. He took a part-time job and rented a bigger apartment. He’d known the marriage was a mistake before Christmas that year, but Connor wasn’t a quitter. He carried on.

Funny, he thought, he’d been caught in her net like a blind fish, but he hadn’t minded. It was just the way of life, and Sunnie made it all bearable.

Melissa loved that he was from one of the oldest families in East Texas. Almost royalty, she used to say. He was educated, a path she had no interest in following. His family might be cash poor at times, but they were land rich, she claimed, though none of them seemed inclined to sell even one of their properties.

Sunnie was eight months old when his parents were killed in a wreck. Afterward, Connor, Melissa and Sunnie had moved back to his childhood home, where he finished his degrees online. The house was roomy, but Melissa hated it from the day they moved in. She went back to her high school friends for entertainment, and he spent most of his days learning to handle the family business and his nights in his study with Sunnie’s bassinet by his desk.

He wanted to write children’s stories, blending Greek myths with today’s world. Though he rarely left Laurel Springs, his character, a Roman soldier, traveled through time visiting battlefields that changed the world. In his novels, Connor’s hero collected knowledge in hopes of ending all conflict.

But in reality, Connor simply fought to survive. To keep going when there never seemed enough time for his little dream; reality’s voice was always outshouting creativity’s whisper.

When Sunnie started school, he moved his stories to the newspaper office and set up a writing desk. As the newspaper dwindled to a one-man job, he set up a business desk across from his editor’s desk to handle his rental properties in town and his leasing property outside the city limits. Next came the mayor’s desk, with all the city business stacked high. Of all the desks in his office, the writing desk was the most neglected.

It had been that way from the beginning of his marriage. There was always too much to do. Too little time for dreams of writing.

Even when Melissa had started needing her nights out after Sunnie was born, he never thought to complain. But after they moved back to Laurel Springs, the nights turned into long weekends. She needed to feel alive, she’d say. She needed to get away.

About the time Sunnie started school, the weekends grew into weeks at a time.

When Melissa would return, she’d bring gifts for Sunnie, and her only daughter would forgive her for not calling. They’d go back to being best friends, not mother and daughter, and Connor would prepare for the next time she’d leave with only a note on the counter.

Even before she could read, Sunnie would see the note and cry before he read it.

He learned to cook. Kept track of Sunnie’s schedule. He was there for the everyday of her life. Melissa was there for the party.

Until three years ago, when she didn’t come back at all. A private plane crash outside of Reno. Both passengers died. Connor hadn’t even known the man she’d been with.

That day, he became a full-time widower, not just a weekend one. No great change. But Sunnie’s world had shifted on its axis. That one day, she changed.

Connor lost himself in the order of his repetitive days. He ran the paper his grandfather had started, even if it was little more than a blog, except on holidays. He looked after his daughter and his grandmother. Ruled over the monthly meetings of the city council. Paid the bills. Showed up.

And, now and then, late at night, he wrote his stories. The dream of being a writer slipped further and further away on a tide of daily to-do lists.

He told himself that hiring Jillian hadn’t changed anything. She was simply someone passing through, no more. Gram’s time in the shop would soon be ending, and somehow he had to preserve an ounce of what she’d meant to the town.

The short articles about the quilts Jillian penned were smart and well written, and they were drawing attention. The number of hits was up at the free Laurel Springs Daily, and more people were dropping in to see the quilts she’d described so beautifully.

Which slowed her cataloging work for the museum, leaving him with hope that she’d stay longer. He hadn’t thought about how much it meant, talking to an intelligent woman his age for the first time. Now, he was spending time trying to say something, anything, interesting on their walks home. All at once he didn’t have to just show up in his life; he had to talk, as well.

Tonight he’d ask Jillian all about the tiny houses quilt she had logged. She’d said a lady quilted a two-inch square of a house every day for a year, then put them all together. Every one unique. The discipline would be something to talk about.