A Quilt as Gaudy as Sunshine

Written by Carrie Knowles

(Twitter: @CarrieJKnowles

Instagram: @carriejknowles

Website: cjanework.com)

Angie watched as the clock on the wall in her husband’s hospital room got stuck on ten past ten while the second hand struggled to move forward one tick at a time, then fall back to struggle some more, never moving the minute hand forward.

Tick Tock.

The doctors noticed it too, each in their turn, checking their own watches against the one on the wall when they came into her husband’s room to give their reports and order more tests.

By three o’clock on the afternoon of the day the clock got stuck, a new doctor came in to offer his opinion as to why her husband had fallen onto the floor two nights ago in a dead faint in the middle of dinner at a local restaurant with barely a pulse.

He mentioned something about ordering one last test because they weren’t sure what, if anything, had gone wrong with his heart. Perhaps it was something he ate.

As the doctor talked around the question of why they should do another test, he watched the second hand of the clock struggle to move forward. Unable to ignore what was happening, he walked across the room in mid-sentence, took the clock from the wall and tried to advance the time by twisting the knob on the back.

Angie waited for a second or two before she told him she didn’t think changing the time was going to make any difference: the clock was obviously broken.

The doctor continued to try. Failed. Then left the clock on the shelf by the sink.

There it was, she thought. The truth. If this doctor and his next test couldn’t find the reason her husband’s heart wasn’t working correctly, he would be sent home: broken.

The next morning, before she left home for the hospital, Angie walked across the street to look through the offerings of her neighbor’s yard sale.

While Angie browsed, her neighbor asked why she and her husband hadn’t been around the last couple of days. Angie told the neighbor that her husband had fainted at Lorenzo’s Italian Restaurant on Thursday evening: tumbling to the floor without a warning.

There had been a doctor at the next table and a cardiac surgical nurse at a table across from them, and before Angie could call out for help, the doctor and the nurse were crouched over her husband’s body, the doctor doing chest compressions while the nurse called out: “No pulse, no pulse, weak pulse, erratic heartbeat…”

“Angels,” her neighbor said.

“What are the chances?” Angie replied.

“I’ve got this quilt,” her neighbor said. “I thought about putting it into the yard sale this morning but didn’t because it’s too good for just anyone to come by and pick it up for a couple bucks. It’s been in my linen closet for close to ten years doing no one any good. I won it in a raffle. Paid a dollar for that ticket. When I claimed my prize, the woman who made the quilt told me things had gotten complicated in her life and she didn’t have the time to do the last bit of hand finishing on the binding before she put it in the raffle.”

“I used to sew,” Angie said.

“I never have and don’t really think I’m interested in learning. Besides, the quilt was never mine to keep. I’ll go in and get it.”

Angie waited in the driveway just in case someone came by to browse through the long row of card tables laden with unmatched coffee cups, baking dishes, old clothes, children’s toys, and souvenirs from her neighbor’s honeymoon in the Grand Canyon when she was married to her ex. No one came.

When her neighbor returned, she unfolded the quilt and showed Angie where it needed to be stitched.

“If you promise that you’ll do the hand finishing work around the binding, the quilt is yours. I always felt a little awkward about the fact that I didn’t know how to finish it, which is why it really wasn’t mine to keep.”

The quilt was backed with a cotton fabric the color of an orange popsicle. The front was a slightly unsettling, but neatly, patched pattern of equally bright colored squares of cotton material. Some of the quilt blocks were flowered calico prints while others were bold batik squares: all in all, an odd collection of orange, cream, green and lavender bits floating on the edge of a sunny summer day.

The quilt seemed to have no discernable pattern. It was nothing like something Angie had ever wanted. She believed in white sheets and towels. There was nothing too colorful or particularly bold in their home.

“Are you sure you want to give the quilt away?” Angie asked.

“Like I said, if you finish the sewing on it, it’s yours. You’re the one who should have it.”

Her neighbor wouldn’t accept any money for the quilt. While Angie was thinking about whether she should accept the gift, she picked up a chipped serving bowl bedecked in spring flowers that looked to be the perfect size for a can of green beans. She thought about buying it but doubted she would ever use it: her husband didn’t care that much for canned vegetables.

Angie put the bowl back on the table and took the quilt from her neighbor’s hands.

“Can I at least pay you back for your raffle ticket?” Angie asked, digging in her purse looking for a dollar.

“No, that wouldn’t be the right way to give someone something they might

need more than you do.”

***

That evening, when visiting hours at the hospital were over, Angie drove home, found her sewing box in the back of the closet, picked out a spool of beige thread that should blend nicely with the flowered orange backing, threaded a needle and started to work.

It had been years since she had done any hand sewing, but the rhythm of drawing the needle and thread through the fabric, one small stitch at a time, came easily to the memory of her hands. As she sewed, she could feel the tightness in her chest relax and her mind calm of its troubles.

“Sometimes you just don’t know what you need until someone hands it to you,” Angie said out loud.

She worked late into the evening, determined to finish the last bit of stitching on the quilt.

She had promised her neighbor that she would fix the binding and knew the quilt wouldn’t be hers to keep until it was done.

The next day, when the last test results didn’t give any more answers than the other tests had, her husband was discharged and came home with her. When he saw the quilt, he asked Angie why she bought it. Angie told him their neighbor gave it to her as long as she would finish sewing the binding.

He ran his fingers over her small stitches and admired her needle work but said the quilt didn’t look like anything she might want or need, and for sure wasn’t like anything else they owned. He said he thought she liked things to be uncluttered and simple: clean and white. Then he questioned the quilter’s odd color choice of lavender and orange. He said it was gaudy as sunshine and quite unexpected.

Later, when she kept the quilt folded at the foot of their bed, he kept asking her why their neighbor had given her such a gaudy looking thing.

She ignored his question and said nothing.

But she knew that the answer was Angels.

That was the only explanation she had for why her neighbor had kept the quilt for ten years just waiting for Angie to need it, and why finishing the work another woman had started would allow Angie to claim the power of the quilt as her own.

By the time she finished the last stitch, had knotted, and cut the thread, she knew beyond any doubt that she would need the comfort of its gaudy colors to survive, whenever the clock stopped again.

About the Author:

Carrie Knowles is a prolific award-winning author and arts advocate.

Along with her nine books, she has published short stories, newspaper, and magazine articles, and received numerous awards for her writing.

She was named the North Carolina Piedmont Laureate for Short Fiction in 2014. Carrie has published five novels: Lillian’s Garden, Ashoan’s Rug, A Garden Wall in Provence, The Inevitable Past, and A Musical Affair, as well Black Tie Optional, a collection of 17 of her short stories.

Her memoir: The Last Childhood: A Family Story of Alzheimer's, has been described as a “must read” for family members caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

During her time as the 2014 Piedmont Laureate, conducting writing workshops across five counties in North Carolina, she wrote a writing workbook aimed at providing the basic tools a new writer would need to get started: A Self-Guided Workbook and Gentle Tour on Learning How to Write Stories from Start to Finish. She writes a personal perspectives column for Psychology Today, Shifting Forward, and has recently published a collection of the first 50 stories from her column titled: Shifting Forward: Fifty Reflections on Everyday Life.

To learn more about Carrie, go to her website: cjanework.com.