Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini Page B

wishes to be fulfilled, but the day passed without another glimpse of the quilt.
    On the following evening, Sarah found the quilt folded at the foot of her bed. She yanked the comforter to the floor, spread the quilt in its place, and slept beneath it for the remaining nights of her grandparents’ visit. Upon their departure, her mother returned the quilt to the box and stored it, out of Sarah’s reach, on the floor of the master bedroom closet.
    After that, Sarah was permitted to use the quilt only when her grandparents visited. They traveled to Pennsylvania less frequently as they aged, and often months passed without a glimpse of the pink-and-white patchwork. Now, with her grandparents long deceased and her mother’s house no longer her own, Sarah had not seen the quilt for years. For all she knew it remained wrapped in tissue paper in the box on the floor of her mother’s closet.
    On those rare occasions when a certain shade of pink or a Sawtooth Star block in a camper’s quilt reminded her of her grandma’s gift, Sarah was tempted to ask her mother for it. The quilt was rightfully hers, a precious memento of her grandma’s love. Knowing how devoted Sarah was to the art of quilting, her mother should have voluntarily returned the quilt to her long ago. Perhaps she had given the quilt away or had discarded it. Perhaps she hoped that Sarah had forgotten it, because returning the quilt to Sarah now would prompt a deluge of questions Carol would certainly rather not answer: Why had she kept the quilt from Sarah for so long? Why had she twisted Grandma’s generous gift into a test of Sarah’s loyalty? At the time, Sarah had assumed that she had hurt her mother’s feelings by admitting that she preferred the quilt, and that her mother had withheld the quilt as punishment. Now she knew that nothing between mothers and daughters was ever so simple. And what was her grandmother’s role in the drama? Was she the innocent, generous gift-giver Sarah had always assumed her to be, or had Sarah missed some darker undercurrent, some conflict between the two older women? Did Carol scorn her mother’s handiwork, or had she always longed for a quilt of her own only to be refused? Had Sarah received the gift Carol had been denied? Had Grandma worked on the Sawtooth Star quilt for months, or had she begun to sew it only after Carol told her about their successful shopping trip? What had prompted Carol to leave the quilt on Sarah’s bed the next day without a word of explanation—a rebuke from Grandma, or something else?
    The more Sarah mulled over those questions, the less certain she was that her mother had been solely in the wrong, and that was a difficult admission for her to make. She did not want to doubt her grandma, who had always showered her with kindness and affection, and she was reluctant to concede anything to Matt and Sylvia and others who were too quick to forgive her mother’s thoughtless malice. But her mother must have learned her coolly critical ways somewhere, from someone. Perhaps Sarah’s grandma had hidden a darker side from Sarah the way Carol hid hers from the Elm Creek Quilters.
    Sarah rested her hand on her abdomen and hoped that she would be different, that she would teach her children another way.
     
    Determined to enjoy the evening program, Sarah put aside her mother’s cautionary words as well as thoughts of the pink-and-white Sawtooth Star quilt and the uncomfortable questions it raised. The sun was just beginning to set when she joined the other Elm Creek Quilters in the ballroom to prepare for the scavenger hunt. Diane had insisted upon making a last-minute change to the list of items, so as they waited for her to return with new printouts, the Elm Creek Quilters entertained the campers with anecdotes about camp life behind the scenes. Gwen had cleverly implied that details in their stories would help the campers as they searched the estate—which very well could turn out to be true and